Yoga anyone?

smarauder68 · Yoga anyone?

I took up yoga(Ashtanga) this winter and have enjoyed the increased flexibility and and core strength...Anyone else into yoga? I wish I had started 15 or 20 years ago.

thunderthighs

go to .. www.pason.com.. she does yoga..and a pornstar too....

ciao

last km

TT why am I not suprised.......

bianchigirl

used to go to mother & baby yoga - nothing particularly full on but was amazed at what my body became capable of doing quite quickly after starting. Keep meaning to go again as I loved it but never seem to have the time anymore

Bro Deal

Whenever I think about yoga I think about this exchange in King of the Hill.

Hank Hill :
[Hank is at the doctor's office, having injured his lower back]
Doctor: I'm sorry, Mr. Hill, I understand it's painful, but soft tissue injury just doesn't show up on film.
Hank: Hunh. So how do you fix it?
Doctor: Well, there's really nothing *I* can do. What your back needs is rest. Just have your office send over the Worker's Compensation forms and I'll sign off on 'em.
Hank: Worker's Comp? Do I look like a hobo to you? No, sir, I'm *not* going on welfare. It's Indian summer!
Doctor: Well, if you insist on working, I'll write you a prescription for pain medicine.
Hank: Whoa there, Dr. Feelgood. I work at a propane dealership, not Woodstock.
Doctor: Then I'm sorry, but all Western medicine can really offer you are drugs... *and nothing.* But some people have had good luck with yoga. I hear there's a studio over in McMainerberry.
Hank: Yoga? Isn't that a cult?
Doctor: The group that rented the space before them was a cult. That's probably what you're thinking of.

CapeRoadie

Hope people don't actually believe that, BroDeal. I'm afraid many watching that show might actually believe it. Here's an explanation of low back pain I just wrote off the top of my head. Any feedback would be appreciated, as everyone at justcycling is such a good critic. This is the first draft:

Low back pain is muscular in the vast majority of cases (excluding the drug-seekers showing up at the local ER every day for drugs they can sell on the street). From my experience, low back pain is mostly a strain (muscular microtearing) of the lumbar multifidi. That muscle originates on the lumbar vertebare and inserts into the surface of the sacrum. There are multidus fibers covering the sacrum, and the problm is often misdiagnosed by chiropractors, medical doctors and physiotherapists as "sacroiliac strain". But that's really a misnomer, since the "sacroiliac" joint is made of of ligament, and to tear (i.e. "sprain", with a "p") that, you've got to have trauma on the order of getting hit by a truck or skiing into a tree at a high rate of speed. Bending over for the newspaper isn't going to tear any ligament. But it can easily tear or strain a muscle.

Bending forward is what we do; our eyes are in front of our heads, after all. If our eyes were in the back of our heads, we'd be hearing complaints of chronic lower abdominal muscle pain, not low back pain. Because we bend forward, the tiny multifidi muscles (part of the erector spinae group of muscles) stretch out or elongate, and as they stretch, they become increasingly loaded by our upper body (i.e., the weight of our torso, arms, neck and head). If we add more load by lifting weight with our outstretched arms, for example, we put even more load on the stretched multifidi, and put ourselves at even greater risk of strain.

That type of muscle contraction by the multifidi is called an eccentric contraction, or eccentric load: the muscle is elongating at the same time it is doing work (as opposed to a concentric load or contraction, where a muscle shortens as it does work--think about a biceps curl and you've got it). Eccentric contrcations are the riskiest for muscle and cause more injury than other types of contractions. So, essentially, because we have eyes in front of our heads, humans are low back pain-making machines. Low back pain is the second most common complaint to walk into any doctor's office (behind cold/flu).

What to do about it? LBP afflicts 85% of the human population. So, if you haven't had a bout of LBP, you're either going to, or you're in that lucky 15% of the population, although the 85% figure is thought to be on the low end of the actual figure. In any case, prevention of the common form of LBP, muscular strain, is possible. Because recurrence of LBP is high after just the first bout (12 times more likely according to several sources), LBP prevention is something everybody should be doing. In the United States, LBP is a $100 billion/year problem. I often ask my patients if their teeth hurt. They most often answer "no" with a questioning look. I then ask them if they do anything about their teeth to prevent problems on a daily basis. Again, the quizzical look. They answer, "Of course, yes, I brush and floss every day". They almost immediately understand my point: chronic back pain sufferers take better care of their teeth than their low backs, yet have far more back pain than toothache pain.

Part of the reason for that is likely that the solution to the majority of LBP is exercise. Not only do people not want to exercise to fix their backs, they're also not sure what exercises to do or if those exercises are doing anything to help. And until recently, there has been little consensus on which exercises work and which ones do. Another part of the problem is that many studies have grouped LBP of many different types into one study without differentiating between discogenic causes, osteoarthritic causes or muscular causes of LBP, for example. Further, among the muscular causes of LBP, no attempt has been made to distinguish between the several different muscles that are causing the LBP. So attempts to give the right exercises for so many different problems has had little results. Without very specific diagnosis, a good research study is not possible.

And that remains a problem in medicine. The average physician has little to no training in musculoskeletal medicine, and this is information coming from studies performed in the medical community. But physiotherapists and chiropractic physicians are trained in musculoskeletal medicine and will likely take the time for an accurate diagnosis, actually performing muscle testing that is orthopaedic in nature and can pinpoint the exact muscle or muscles that are the problem. This can be performed by, for want of a better term, "functional testing". That is, the clinician performs tests that require a very specific muscle or group of muscles to function. Tests include flexibility, strength and endurance. Research in the past 10-20 years has focused on "stability", which is a different type of strength than most of us are accustomed to practicing in gyms and health clubs across the country.

Stability can be described as "coordination", sometimes as "balance", but is probably better described neurologically, at least in terms of muscles. The ability of muscles to "stabilize" the lumbar spine (i.e., "low back") is their ability to coordinate very small and subtle contractions to keep the lumbar spine still, or stable. And that requires great nervous system input. That ability to keep the spine "still", or "not moving", even when other body parts are moving, is lumbar spinal stability. It requires endurance.

What we know from research is that most people with low back pain, especially chronic LBP, is that they lack both stability and endurance in the supportive muscles of the lumbar spine. We also know that realistically, it takes about 6-12 months of training and exercises of those muscles to have any hope of fixing chronic LBP. For people who are not chronic, exercise is still the long-term answer to prevention. So, that's the bad news: it takes time to "cure" chronic low back pain, and for any LBP, exercise appears to be the answer. After all, while you can make the muscles you have noticeably stronger in days to a few weeks (neurological effect), it takes 3 full months to grow new muscle fiber.

But there is good news. The exercises aren't too hard, and you don't need a gym or health club to do them. They're free.

In the next installment, I will describe some of the exercises. But depending on your diagnosis of LBP, they may be exactly what you don't want to do. This is one of the reasons I treat yoga practitioners including yoga instructors: yoga isn't always the right thing to do for your LBP. But talking anatomy and exercise for the low back is probably a useful venture. So, until next post...

kathy

I used to do Yoga some time ago - it was great. Like BG I ran out of time and stopped doing it.