Side Plank Pose for Scoliosis Challenge: Conclusions

by Nina

 In the fall, I read some compelling about Dr. Loren Fishman’s study on using Side Plank Pose (Vasithasana) to improve scoliosis (see Side Plank Pose (Vastithasana) Could Reduce Spinal Curves in People with Scoliosis!) . Because I myself have mild scoliosis, I decided to experiment by doing the practice myself and I issued the Side Plank Pose for Scoliosis Challenge on November 17, 2014. I said that I was going to be doing the pose as Baxter recommended: twice on my convex side (the left side for me) and once on my concave side (the right side for me). I asked you to join me and report back on the results of your experiments.

On December 11, I wrote an update on my experiment so far Honestly? Progress Report on the Side Plank Pose Challenge. At that time I said that because the pose was causing me wrist and hand pain and that I had come to dread practicing the pose every day that decided I would no longer practice it six or seven days a week. I said that because I knew that practicing a strength building pose three or four times a week is often enough to build strength, I decided to go for a more modest strategy of practicing only every other day, which felt much safer to me. And when I told Baxter about the modifications I was making, he wrote me:

“I agree that doing the same pose every day is going to produce some problems for students in the wrist, elbow or shoulder on the weight bearing side, although Loren denies that was a problem in their study.”

Are you wondering what ever happened to me since then? Unfortunately, things got worse for me. Before I go into it, I want to say that I learned that the type of scoliosis I have, low lumbar scoliosis, is very rare (only about 5 percent of all types of scoliosis) so I have a feeling that the people in Loren Fishman’s study did not have the same type of scoliosis that I do. And the feedback I’ve gotten so far from our readers showed that none of them developed the problems that I did. But the truth of what happened to me—despite my hopes and best efforts—is that this practice did not work for me.

Basically what happened was my low back pain got worse. And the last time I did Side Plank pose, I felt a terrible twinge just as I was going into it. So I used common sense and stopped practicing the pose entirely. Then I went to see my favorite MD/yoga teacher for an assessment to see if he thought I was having any serious back problems. After running me through the usual medical tests, checking for disc problems, etc., Baxter (yeah, it was him—I’m lucky, right?) concluded I had no serious problems. But he recommended that I should give up the Side Plank pose experiment permanently as it did not seem to be helping me.

Since then I’ve gone back to practicing Side Plank pose the way I used to do it, about once a week, once on each side, for upper body strength building. And it now feels fine. 

Of course, I’m a bit disappointed I didn’t find an easy yoga solution for my scoliosis, but I’m also realistic to know that everyone has a unique body, and that works well for one person might not work for another. 

How about you? Are you still practicing? If so, how are you doing? And, if not, why did you give it up?

By the way, if you'd like to listen to Loren Fishman and Ellen Saltonstall discuss the original study, Yoga U Online now has a free download of there discussion here. And since we now have good photos of all four versions of Side Plank pose, I thought I'd include them all in this post. For information on practicing them, see Featured Pose: Side Plank Pose (Vasithasana).

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Honestly? Progress Report on the Side Plank Pose Challenge

by Nina

Truth Rescued by Time, Witnessed by history by Francisco Goya

How’s the Side Plank Pose for Scoliosis Challenge working for you? I’m still practicing the pose as promised, but to be honest the experiment is not turning out the way I’d hoped.

I started out practicing the pose every single day, two times on my convex side and one time on my concave side. After several days, I started feeling wrist and hand pain in the pose. So I decided to start practicing the low version of the pose on my forearm on alternate days, just to give my hands and wrists a break. I also started doing wrist flossing on the days when I practiced the full version of the pose as a prevention strategy to try to ward off wrist problems. 

But even with all these modifications, I started feeling like this pose wasn’t agreeing with my body. I’d been having some lower back pain and stiffness before I started practicing Side Plank Pose every day, and it felt to me like the pose wasn’t helping that in any way. In fact, I began to develop a kind of dread about doing the pose. In my home practice, I really try to listen to my body and not just power through things because they are supposedly good for me. So finally I took a few days off from practicing the pose.

The next time I returned to practicing the pose, it felt a lot better to me. And I made a decision that I would no longer practice it six or seven days a week. Because I knew that practicing a strength building pose three or four times a week is often enough to build strength, I decided to go for a more modest strategy. Maybe this way of practicing would take me longer to improve my curve (if that happens—I learned that the type of low lumbar scoliosis I have is very rare) but it felt a lot safer. And I have continued as well to do my wrist flossing after doing Side Plank Pose. I’m happy to say that while I still don’t know what’s happening with my curve (I will be checked soon), my body is feeling better and my dread of doing the pose is over.

When I told Baxter about the modifications I was making, he wrote me the following:

“I agree that doing the same pose every day is going to produce some problems for students in the wrist, elbow or shoulder on the weight bearing side, although Loren denies that was a problem in their study.”

So how’s it going for you? Please let me know in the comments. Are you still practicing the pose? How does it feel to you? And how does your back feel? Did you decide to change anything about how and when you are practicing the pose? If you want to add wrist flossing to your practice as a preventative measure, we have a post on it Featured Sequence: Wrist Flossing.
 
For those of you who are not taking the challenge, do you follow your intuition in your home practice?

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More on Side Plank Pose and Scoliosis: Double Curves, Explanations, Cautions

by Baxter

Standing Female Nude Seen from the Back by Vincent van Gogh

Since I wrote about the new study on using Side Plank pose (Vasishtansana) to improve scoliosis in my post Friday Q&A: How to Practice Side Plank Pose for Scoliosis, Nina has launched the Side Plank Pose Challenge, encouraging those with simple, one-sided scoliosis to join her in doing Side Plank pose every day, twice on the convex side of the curve (for example, if the scoliosis bows out to the right side, convex is to the right) and once on the concave side (left side, in this example). I’d remind folks that in the study just completed, the variation of the pose done on the convex side includes bowing the convex side of the body up towards the ceiling, away from the floor. Here is what I recommended last Friday:

1. First, do the convex side of Side Plank pose with the hip/side-body arch used in the study.
2. Do the pose on other side, but without the lift, focusing on keeping the two sides of your chest as parallel as possible.
3. Repeat the first side again, with the lift variation used in the study.

Let’s go into a little more detail today to help clear up any confusion you might have on how to approach this at home. The muscles on this convex side of the ribs and waist are lengthened and typically weaker then the concave side, so you will be employing concentric or isotonic muscle contraction to get into the pose. This means that the muscles that are located on the convex side of the torso and abdomen grossly shorten and tighten while you move into the pose, the idea being to strengthen these muscle while affecting the amount of the curve in your spine. Once you are in the pose and holding it for as long as you can (the average in the study was around 1.5 minutes), those muscles are then maintaining your position via muscle contraction known as isometric contraction, meaning the muscle is still actively contracting, but not grossly changing length. This can also contribute to strengthening those weaker, longer muscles on that convex side.

When you are doing the concave side, those side body muscles are already stronger and somewhat shortened compared with the convex side muscles. So we don’t want to encourage them to shorten any more with full concentric contraction as you did on the first side. I suggested above that you come into the more classic alignment of keeping the sides of your torso and waist parallel, which is really mimicking where you would like to see the spinal alignment end up over time. Going even further, I suppose one could argue that allowing the left side of the torso and waist to slightly bow toward the floor, then engaging the left side body muscles in isometric contraction to maintain that position might further the goal of gradually changing the curves of the scoliotic spine. I’d caution those that try this last idea out to make sure to keep the concave-side shoulder and shoulder blade areas strong and avoid sagging around the shoulder area.

If scoliosis—or life itself—were only so simple! As it turns out, some people with scoliosis will have a “double curve,” pictured as the variation on the far right of the illustration Nina shared last week (although the lower curve to the left is kind of subtle). 

In this situation, there will be a primary curve (typically on the right), and a secondary curve, often below the primary curve (typically on the left). Sometimes (could not find data on how often) this second curve is considered “compensatory,” meaning it is the spine and brain’s way of trying to balance out the top curve through the entire length of the spine. The obvious question arises, and several readers asked this: how should I approach the Side Plank pose practice if I have a double curve?

First off, since this condition has not been studied using Side Plank, anything I say about applying this particular pose to double curves is merely conjecture on my part. So keep that in mind! And it would be helpful for you to be evaluated or re-evaluated by your doctor or health care provider to document where your curvature is at the start of any experimentation you might undertake (even those of you joining Nina for her Side Plank Pose Challenge!). (When her chiropractor reviewed her old X-rays this week, Nina learned that what she thought was a right-sided curve was actually a low lumbar, left-sided curve!) And then you could return to have the angle of curve rechecked after some reasonable amount of time practicing Side Plank Pose.

Here are two possible ways to address the double curve:

• Since the secondary, lower curve may be compensatory, focusing on the primary, larger curve could positively affect both curves, bringing the double curve closer to vertical alignment. So you might just do what those with single curve to one side are doing.
• It could also be argued that when doing the Side Plank Pose on the convex side of the primary upper curve, you would accentuate the lift in the mid-ribcage area, and when doing it on the convex side of the lower curve, you would bow at the side-waist area.

Obviously, since no one has yet studied the double curve scientifically, you are on your own here. So go slow, make sure that you get good guidance on doing the pose correctly as to your arm and wrist positions, your bottom shoulder joint activity and the positioning of your feet. From there, make sure that if your double curve was causing pain prior to starting the Side Plank pose practice, that your practicing of the pose does not increase your baseline pain levels. That is an obvious indication to re-evaluate the safety of the pose for your unique scoliosis.

One of our readers and a student of mine, a graduate of the Piedmont Yoga Teacher Training, went so far as to email the author of the scoliosis study, Dr. Fishman, and received quite helpful information back. He acknowledged to her that double curves are more complicated to apply the Side Plank pose prescription to. And he actually offered to send her a yoga Rx if she ever has another spinal X-ray done and can send it to him. Wonderfully generous!

If those of you out there with a double curve decide to give this pose a try to see if it improves the curve of your scoliosis, please report your findings back to us—who knows, you might end up planting the seed for a new study on yoga for scoliosis!

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Take the Side Plank Pose for Scoliosis Challenge!

by Nina

After reading Baxter’s post on Friday (see Friday Q&A: How to Practice Side Plank Pose for Scoliosis?) and talking with my chiropractor, who is also a yoga teacher, I decided to practice Side Plank pose (Vasithasana) every day for six or more weeks. My chiropractor strongly agreed with Baxter that for the long term, practicing Side Plank pose on just one side was not a good idea and said that to maintain the benefits, a person would need to practice indefinitely. So I’ll be doing it exactly as Baxter suggested in his post, twice on my convex side (the left side for me) and once on my concave side (my right side). And I’m hoping that some of you will join me in taking this challenge, and will report back.

Because I was assessed by my chiropractor on Friday, she’ll be able to see what happens to my curve (and the rest of my spine) when I go back in a month, and in the visits that following after that (if I decide to continue the practice). I’ll report back to you with her observations as well as my own. If you want to join me in the challenge and don’t have someone assessing your curve, you could simply report in on any reduction in pain you are experiencing or any other differences you are noticing—or not—on a week-by-week basis.

Obviously since I’m writing this, I have scoliosis. I briefly mentioned it in my post Late-Onset Scoliosis is Common in Older Adults because I had myself had developed late-onset scoliosis. But I didn’t say much more than that. (By the way, if you haven’t read that post and are having back problems—or even hip or leg problems—and have never been tested for scoliosis, please do read it because there is a possibility you might have the condition.) So I’d like to take a few moments to tell you more about it, so you’ll understand why I’m motivated to take on this challenge, and also why I see a chiropractor regularly.

Although my scoliosis is fairly mild and doesn’t cause me back pain (it is a levoscoliosis, in my lumbar spine, rotating to the left), it does cause my right hip to be higher than my left and also causes that hip to rotate in more than the left hip. The result is my legs are imbalanced, with one leg being shorter than the other. If left untreated, I develop leg pain, outer knee pain, and eventually a limp. I have also developed mild arthritis in my right hip as a result of imbalance, which has limited my mobility in my right hip joint (see Goodbye, Lotus Pose).

Although I cannot reverse the scoliosis or my arthritis, I do work on strategies for maintaining my physical health. I keep exercising all my joints through their range of motion to keep them as healthy as possible (I’d like to delay as long as possible the need for a hip replacement). Yoga has been an immense help to me in this because it is so multi-dimensional in the way you are able to move your body in the asanas (see Range of Motion: Yoga's Got it Covered!). I also get regular chiropractic adjustments from a chiropractor who is also a yoga teacher. After an adjustment, my legs are the same length, my leg pain is gone, and I can walk well. The adjustment is only temporary, as the scoliosis is still there and my hip returns to its original imbalanced position over time, but regular adjustments keep me walking well and pain free.

So it was in this context that my chiropractor and I decided together that it would be a great idea for me to practice Side Plank pose, twice on the convex side and one on the concave side, to see what would happen. We’re so curious and excited! Will this practice help reduce my curve and keep my leg and hip in a healthier alignment? And it’s wonderful for me to be able to do this experiment with a health professional I trust—and who also knows a lot about yoga—assessing me through the process, Dr. Claire-Marie Holman. 

So who wants to join me? If you’re interested, please leave a comment on this post stating your intention to practice. Or, you can leave a comment over on our Facebook page  on the post there that links to this one. See Friday Q&A: How to Practice Side Plank Pose for Scoliosis? for details about how to practice the pose. Although I won’t post weekly on the blog about my experiment, I will post and update in another four weeks after my first assessment. However, I will post weekly on Facebook to report in that I have practiced, so if you join me on Facebook, you can report in there weekly as well, and we can all chat in the comments about how the experiment is going. (And, of course, if you do start practicing regularly and Side Plank Pose causes you pain or any bad side effects, please do stop.)

I look forward to hearing from you!

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