Easy Peasy Way to Keep Your Back Happy and Healthy

by Nina

The last few days I've been staying with a friend (a man in his sixties) who doesn’t do yoga, but who is very physically active (hiking, tennis, cycling, etc.) and who also sits at a desk. While we were hiking together  we talked about his back, and what he could do to keep it healthy. I said, I do have one simple suggestion, and I told him about the passive backbend that Timothy recommended in his post Cultivating Healthy Posture with a Simple Restorative Pose. When he asked about buying a prop, I said that I was sure I could find some things in the house we could use. And as soon as we got home, he brought out a rolled up blanket to support his chest and I got a towel from the bathroom to put under his head, and I set him up in the pose for 5 minutes. He loved it! So now he’s going to try to do it on a regular basis, especially on days when he spends a lot of time in front of the computer (he works mostly from home these days). And I asked him to keep me updated on his practice ad the results he sees from it. In the meantime, for all of you out there who may not have read Timothy’s original post (see Cultivating Healthy Posture with a Simple Restorative Pose)  and our post with four different versions of passive backbend (see Featured Pose: Supported Backbend), I thought today I’d remind you about this very simple, very pleasant way of maintaining back health and/or finding relief from mild low back pain. I myself practice it about five days a week, cause, yeah, I’m a writer.

Happy practicing, Bob!

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Friday Practical Pointers: Your Posture Affects Your Breathing!

by Nina

Supported Backbend is
Excellent for Improving Posture

Did you know that your ability to take a deep, full breath is influenced by your posture? Because when you inhale, your rib cage expands to its maximum to make room for your lungs to expand. And if the muscles that allow your rib cage to expand are tight—due to habitual slouching or other postural problems—your lungs won’t be able to expand to their maximum because there just won’t be as much room within your chest cavity for them. If you have long-time poor posture, you might not notice this problem when you’re sitting at your desk. However, in physically demanding situations, you will likely notice that your breath is restricted. 

And if some of your chest or back muscles are weak, your endurance will be affected. That’s because if the muscles that allow the rib cage to expand are weak and therefore tire easily, you’ll run out of steam when you are in a physically demanding situation that requires rapid or deep breathing. 

To maintain good posture for optimum respiration, cultivating both the flexibility and strength of your torso muscles is vital. In general, a well-rounded asana practice that includes standing poses, backbends, twists, forward bends, and side bends, will help you maintain the flexibility and strength you need. 

However, you can also use asanas to target specific problem areas. For example, if you are developing more rounding of your thoracic spine, adding more back bending poses to your practice will help reverse this trend. If the sides of your chest are tight, you can lengthen them with full side stretches, such as Crescent Moon pose, and partial side stretches, such as Triangle pose. And if your back muscles are tight, forward bends, such as Standing Forward Bend and Child’s Pose, will help release them those muscles.

You can also use asanas to strengthen weak muscles around your lungs. To strengthen chest muscles, practices poses where you lift your chest away from gravity, such as Plank pose and Downward-Facing Dog. To strengthen the sides of torso, practice poses where you keep one side lifted away from gravity, such as Side Plank pose variations and Triangle pose. And to strengthen back muscles, practice active backbends, such as Warrior 1, Cobra pose, or Upward-Facing Dog.

Medical conditions that influence posture, including kyphosis and scoliosis, also restrict your breathing capacity by limiting space in the chest wall . So for these conditions, it is especially important to maintain both the flexibility and strength of your torso by doing poses appropriate for your condition. For scoliosis, there is even early evidence that certain yoga poses can help reduce the curve of your spine (see Side Plank Pose (Vastithasana) Could Reduce Spinal Curves in People with Scoliosis!). Work with a yoga therapist or teacher who is an expert in your condition to find the poses that are right for you.

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Friday Q&A: Text Neck and Head Forward Syndrome

Q: What can we do about "text neck" forward head syndrome that we can incorporate into our lives and practices?  

I’m going to take a crack at this one not because I’m an expert at such things but because I have a bit of head forward syndrome myself, probably from spending a lot of hours per day in front of the computer writing. And I also happen to know that Timothy McCall addressed a similar years ago in his post Cultivating Healthy Posture with a Simple Restorative Pose. 

In that post, he recommended practicing a restorative backbend pose to counteract poor posture (head forward syndrome qualifies as one form of that). He says that when we have a long-term habit of slouching, it may not just be as simple as to start sitting or standing up straight. Long-term slouching leads to shortening of muscles in the front of the upper body, as well as of the fascia, the connective tissue that surrounds and interpenetrates the muscles, and which can limit movement. And this is going to be true for head forward syndrome as well. 

And because longer holds of poses are necessary to help lengthen the fascia, he believes staying in a pose for a few minutes may be ideal. Since that’s hard to do in most regular asana, particularly the backbends, which open up the back, he recommends a simple supported, passive backbend. I, myself, have been including these in my practice for about 15 years, after my yoga teacher recommended them for me in particular for my posture.

I also have some suggestions for how to strengthen your upper back and neck muscles, and to work mindfully on the alignment of your head and neck over your torso. 

Stretching Your Front Body

Practice a simple passive backbend several times a week, for 3 minutes or more at a time. Because Baxter and I have included a simple passive backbend as one of our essential yoga poses, Melina shot some photos of Baxter doing the pose. So you can choose any of these three version that seems best to you. Make sure the one you choose is comfortable, so you can stay for three or more minutes without pain or discomfort. 

One version shown here actually has the head higher than the torso and that probably won’t stretch your neck, but I remember that my father had head forward syndrome so severe that he couldn’t even lie with his head flat on the floor. So for some of you (or your students) it may be necessary to start with your head supported in these poses and gradually lower the support until you reach a point where you can be comfortable with your head even with and eventually lower than your torso. 

If you can comfortably bend your neck back, this version would be a good one.

If you can't bend your neck back but you can lay it flat, you could do this version (or add more blankets to the first version)

If you can't even lay your head flat, you may need to prop your head up (though you can do that with more blankets in version 1 or 2).

See Cultivating Healthy Posture with a Simple Restorative Pose for Timothy’s instructions on how to practice the pose (his suggested propping is a bit different) 

Strengthening Your Back Body I would also add that strengthening your upper back and neck muscles would be beneficial because those can become weak from slouching. Regularly practicing Locust pose (Salabasana) would easily do the trick. Just be sure that when you lift your head in this pose not to cause strain by bending your neck back too far (this is especially true if you have head forward syndrome). Baxter's neck looks good to me in this pose.

Mindfulness About Alignment

Practicing Mountain pose (Tadasana) is a good way to cultivate awareness of your habitual posture and to move into a healthier alignment, where your head and neck are in line with your spine. Because your habit is going to feel more comfortable than a new alignment, have a partner or a teacher help adjust your head and neck in the pose. 

So practice this pose in the yoga room and then, when you’re out in the real world, take the new awareness you have to change your habitual posture while you’re working, standing around, or, yes, even texting. (Just because almost everyone texts by bending their necks to look down at the phone doesn’t mean you have to do it that way, too. See if you can find a way to prop it up on something higher.)

I hope this helps, and would love to hear what you think after you've experimented with these ideas or if you have some other ideas.

—Nina



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Friday Q&A: Jackknifed Posture

Q: I have a question that may relate to the sitting theme. For those people who cannot straighten up, walking with flexed hips, what are the first actions/muscles to both strengthen and lengthen? It seems I see many older people with this jackknifed posture and would like to help address it. Thank you!

A: I see these people, too, in the neighborhood near Piedmont Yoga Studio in Oakland. There are several high-rise retirement buildings in the area, and a lot of the residents are out and about on busy Piedmont Ave during the day, doing errands and getting some activity in. I am amazed by some of the postural changes I observe in some of these men and women. Not only do they seem to be flexed at the hip joint, but there usually there is also a pretty noticeable increase in the normal curve of the upper back area, which is referred to as “kyphosis.” This kyphosis of the thoracic spine can cause a corresponding collapse of the front chest. (See Friday Q&A: Kyphosis for information on kyphosis and dowager’s hump.) One of the main things I worry about for these folks is the limitation in their ability to stand up straight enough to see around their environment well, as their posture tends to leave them looking down at the ground and not very far in front of the themselves. 

If you happen to be dealing with such changes in your body, on a small or large scale, or if you work with older students in your classes, here are a few things to consider:

1. Working on improving mobility at the hip joint is likely going to be easier and safer to address before the upper chest (more on that in a bit). A good starting place is to try some reclining hip movements, such as our Dynamic Reclined Hip Stretches series. If getting down on the floor is not possible, you can even do these while lying in bed.

More specifically, the muscles at the front of the hip joint are certainly going to be tight and shortened, so gradually doing poses to lengthen these muscles, such as part of the quadriceps group as well as the psoas and iliacus, are a good starting place. Working on High and Low Lunge Pose (see Lunge Pose) addresses these areas nicely, and if your flexibility makes it hard to get into these poses as an able bodied student might, you can start with doing variations while sitting on a chair. 

High Lunge

High Lunge with Chair

Low Lunge

And, in all likelihood, the muscles at the backs of hips and legs are going to be tight as well, so doing Reclined Leg Stretch pose to work on lengthening the hamstrings, gluteal muscles, and calves should help as well.

2. The increased curve of the upper thoracic spine and collapse of the front chest may take more finesse and time to address. This is partly due to the fact that if you have any history of osteoporosis (see Healthy Bones for Men and Women Alike), the kyphosis could be due to the presence of wedge fractures in the thoracic vertebrae (chest spinal bones). Although that may limit how much straightening can happen with yoga practice, you may still be able to slowly work in improved mobility in this part of the spine. If you are in this camp, do check with your doctor to get the OK to do yoga. 

One easy, passive way to work with this condition is to do Savasana variations to open the chest. At first, that may mean simply lying on your back, probably with a folded blanket under your head, which often cannot normally rest on the floor due to the extreme curve of the upper back. Five to ten minutes in the pose, adding in some breath awareness practice to keep you centered, should be a good starting time.

You can add in dynamic arm movements to help to take the upper back into some gentle back bending, which is what you want to work towards. Take one arm up and overhead as you inhale, and bring it back to your side on the exhale. Alternate your arms for a five to six rounds. As your upper back starts to change shape, you may be able to add in a Supported Reclined Backbend with a small blanket roll, cross-wise at the level of the lower tips of your shoulder blades, under your chest. Again, staying for 5-10 minutes is a reasonable goal.

3. To open the entire length of your body, you can work on Mountain pose while standing with your back to wall. Stand with your heels about six inches from the wall and the backs of the buttocks on the wall. Press down into your feet as you lengthen upward toward the crown of your head. With regular practice of a few minutes a day, you might eventually find that you can straighten your legs more and maybe even get your shoulder blades to rest more evenly on the wall.

Whether you are doing these kinds of practices for yourself or your students, please be patient. It took many, many years for a body to get into this state, so it may take a while to affect some good changes! 

—Baxter

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Learning to Sit in a Chair

by Nina

If you were to see me sitting at my desk right now as I write this you might think I look a bit strange. Because while I’m writing, I have a yoga strap wrapped around my thighs and my feet are resting on a yoga block. Why am I doing this?

Well, Baxter’s recent post on sitting (see Learning to Sit on the Floor, Part 2) talked about how to use props to sit help you sit comfortably on the floor, and that reminded me that for someone like me who spends many more hours a day sitting in a chair than on the floor, using yoga props at my desk can help me sit more comfortably in my chair! And lately my right hip and leg has been bothering me (I have mild arthritis in my right hip—see Goodbye, Lotus Pose), so I’ve been looking at what I can do both in my yoga practice and in my daily life to reduce my discomfort. And one thing I’ve been noticing is that I tend to sit with my legs crossed, even though I can feel it is hurting my hip—such a strong habit. So I realized that if I wrapped a strap around my legs, I’d be unable to cross my legs—yes, that feels better.

As it happens, using a strap like this can be helpful for most of us. Baxter recommended using a strap around the thighs in his post Friday Q&A: Sleeping on an Airplane to keep your legs symmetrical while you sleep. So if you sit at your desk with crossed legs and want to break yourself of the habit (hours of sitting in an asymmetrical position could be stressful to your body), try tying your legs together. Have it be loose enough so your knees are in line with your hip joints (not touching) but tight enough so the strap supports your thighs in place.

In his post about sleeping on an airplane, Baxter also recommended using a small pillow, folded blanket, or even a piece of rolled-up clothing for lumbar support. I’m sure many of you would find this helpful for maintaining the natural curves of your spine as you sit. Here are his instructions:

First, scoot your butt as far back into the seat as you can. Tip forward from your hips a bit, then place your lumbar support in the small of your back and lean back into it. Feel free to tinker with it so it feels just right for you. 

While I was noticing how my sitting position improved with the addition of the strap, I observed once again that because I’m on the short side, my feet don’t fully rest on the ground when I’m sitting on a chair, especially if I’m sitting with my butt against the back of the chair. So I decided to add the block under my feet—yes, that feels better, too. 

I thought I’d share all this in case you’ve never thought about using props to improve your seated posture while you’re in a chair. People who are on the shorter side like me will often benefit from a footrest, either official or unofficial. People who are tall on the other hand will benefit from raising the seat of the chair so that as Shari mentioned in her post Learning to Sit on the Floor, Part 1 their knees are lower than their hips. Some people have adjustable office chairs, but if you don’t, you could add a firm folded blanket or a firm cushion to your chair seat to raise the seat up. This will make it easier for you maintain the natural curve of your lumbar spine—important for the health of your back—as you sit in your chair.

If you tend to slump and feel like going to extremes, you could even use a yoga strap to prevent your back from rounding. 

How about you? Do you ever use yoga props at your desk? And if so, what do you use? I’d love to hear your recommendations!

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Cultivating Healthy Posture with a Simple Restorative Pose

by Timothy

Poor posture is a common problem that people of any age can have but it is one that tends to worsen over time. Particularly common is the rounding of the upper back into a C-shaped curve, aka Slumpasana. People often hold their heads several inches forward of the body’s plumb line, which can lead to neck and upper back discomfort, among other problems. I’m just back from teaching workshops on therapeutic yoga at Kripalu and the Himalayan Institute and several of the people I worked with—some despite years of yoga practice—still had this postural habit. So I thought today I’d share with you a simple technique that in a number of cases has proved helpful for improving posture.

You might not think poor posture would be a factor is serious health problems, and we certainly weren’t taught much about it in medical school. But if you read medical textbooks and search out relevant studies, you will see that poor posture can contribute such problems as carpal tunnel syndrome, osteoporotic fractures, and even heart disease and depression. From a yogic perspective, this combination of slumping posture and the less-than-ideal breathing that accompanies it is also believed to contribute to anxiety, insomnia, digestive difficulties, etc.

When your back rounds, your lower ribs compress the top of the abdomen so it’s not possible to fully move your diaphragm, the major muscle of breathing, and take a full breath. As a result, people take shallow breaths, primarily bringing air into the upper parts of the lungs. Such a breathing pattern is not as efficient in bringing oxygen into the body, and more importantly for many health concerns, is agitating to the nervous system. I won’t go into the physiology here, but suffice it to say that I have repeatedly seen that improving your posture in a way that allows you to take slower, deeper breaths can lead to an improvement in overall health and well-being.

When you’ve had a long-term habit of slouching, however, it may not just be as simple as remembering to sit up straight or to pull you shoulders back when standing. Long-term slouching leads to shortening of muscles in the front of the upper body, as well as of the fascia, the connective tissue that surrounds and interpenetrates the muscles, and which can limit movement. It’s said that longer holds of poses are necessary to help lengthen the fascia, and while people differ on what the ideal holding time is, I believe staying in a pose for a few minutes may be ideal. That’s hard to do in most regular asana, particularly the backbends, which open up the back. The pose described below is a supported backbend, which like a regular backbend helps correct the postural problem, but because it’s restorative, it’s easy to stay long enough to have the desired effect on the fascia.

To do the pose, you’ll need one blanket and something to place under your head. Take a standard folded yoga blanket and unfold it once, so that you’ve got a long rectangle. Roll the blanket from the longer edge into a thin cylinder. Place the cylinder sideways on your mat a couple of feet from the head of the mat, sit in front of the blanket, and lie back so that rounded edge comes to your mid-thoracic spine.

Thoracic Spine, the portion of your spine to which your ribs attach—
between your cervical spine (neck) and lumbar spine

You can play with the placement, maybe a little higher or lower to get the region of your upper back that seems the most stubborn. Most people, particularly those who tend to slouch, need a pillow or folded blanket under the back of their heads, so that the chin can be more or less at the level of the forehead or slightly lower.

Once you’ve got your props in place, come to a supine Mountain pose with your back on the blanket roll, your head on the head support, and the tops of your shoulders on floor between the head support and the blanket roll. Now, take your arms out to your sides in a T-position, externally rotating your upper arms so your palms face the ceiling, which will help counteract the tendency of most slouchers to internally rotate them. Engage your leg muscles and lightly flex your feet. After  you’ve established your alignment, let go of all effort and lie back into this restorative backbend and let the blanket do all the work. Your only job is to remain mindful, trying to breathe slowly and deeply for the next several minutes. Titrate the time you stay to your comfort levels and schedule. For most people, I’d recommend starting with a minute or so then working up to 5-15 minutes a day. The longer you hold it (as long as you remain comfortable), and the more regularly you do it, the better the results!

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