Tag Archives: yoga and pain relief

5 essential exercises you need

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Daily habits can be powerful. Routine anchors us and builds resilience and health. Adding a routine or mini-structure to your day so that fewer decisions need to be made is one way to succeed. When it comes to your health, preventing injuries in any activity you enjoy is crucial. Here are five injury-preventing exercises to put on your habit list that don’t take up too much time. Whether you are a seasoned athlete, or simply just enjoy being active but don’t want to get hurt, incorporate these moves into your day.

Activate the core: Heel on toe crunch

A demonstration of the heel-on-toe crunch. Photo courtesy of Connie Aronson

The core muscles help stabilize the spine and support movement. The following two core exercises have minimal movement, and are far more effective than a standard sit-up. The heel-on-toe crunch spares the back, while building muscular fitness. You begin the crunch by stiffening the abdominal muscles and slightly raising the head and shoulders off the ground. Count to 10, then lower back down to the starting position. To a viewer it might not look like you’re doing much of anything, says Stuart McGill, but with proper technique, you should feel like you’re working.

  • Begin with your legs straight, left heel on top of right foot.
  • Bring your left hand behind your head for support, and lift your right arm straight up from your shoulder.
  • Curl up, raising your head, neck and shoulder blades off mat, tightening your abdominals.
  • Slowly return to the start position. 10 reps. Switch sides.

Side lying hip lift


A demonstration of the side-lying hip lift. Photo courtesy of Connie Aronson

  • Lying on your right side with your knees bent (or straight for advanced variation), place your right elbow under your right shoulder. Push your shoulder away from your ear to engage the shoulder girdle.
  • Avoid letting your rib cage slump toward floor; maintain natural curve of spine.
  • Exhale and lift your right hip off floor. Hold for 10 counts.
  • Slowly lower to start. 6-8 reps. Switch sides.

Stretch tight hamstrings


A demonstration of a hamstring stretch using a yoga strap.

Tightness in the back of your legs may be a sign of instability in your core, causing the leg muscles to overwork and shorten. As well, hamstrings are an important muscle to stretch if you have back pain, as they attach to the pelvis, which attaches to the back. An excellent stretch to ease the tension in the back of your legs is the hamstring stretch using a strap.

  • Lie on your back and place a yoga strap or rope under one foot, with the other leg straight, on the floor, heel flexed.
  • Slowly extend the leg toward straight.
  • If it is too difficult to completely straighten the leg, bend the opposite leg.

Foam roller alignment

Screenshot

Lying lengthwise on a foam roller not only feels good but encourages good spinal length. We’re all guilty of bending forward while scrolling on our phones, resulting in a “forward head.” For every inch that your head is forward there’s 10 more pounds of pressure on the neck. Reset your alignment every day by lying on a foam roller. Lengthening the lumbar erector spinal muscles helps encourage neutral alignment and good posture.

  • With your knees bent, lie on a roller, head supported and neck in a neutral position.
  • Tighten the abdominals.
  • Gently roll side to side for 20-30 seconds.

The sock test

A demonstration of the one-legged sock test.Photo courtesy of Connie Aronson

Losing your balance as you get older is no joke. Research has shown that the ability to stand on one foot drastically decreases after the age of 60, along with a rapid increase of falls and injury. The ability to stand on one leg is imperative for gait and function.

The sock test takes the exercise a step further. Practicing it is a fun challenge to build strength capacity and balance.

  • Holding a sock, stand on one leg, knee slightly bent.
  • Bring your right leg up toward you as you put your sock on
  • Lower the leg to the floor and repeat with your left foot.

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Fitness Guru: Stretch your hips like a pro

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Warrior 1 involves leg strength and mobility.

By CONNIE ARONSON

Skiing, snowshoeing, yoga or walking requires strength and mobility. Consider the yoga pose Warrior 1, where you stand in a lunge position with your arms stretched straight up overhead, neck extended with the head back and eyes looking up. Doing this pose involves leg strength as you stretch your leg and hip muscles. Your spine extends, the chest opens, and the arms, shoulders, upper back and neck stretch! All in all, Warrior 1 strengthens and stretches you.

You need flexibility as much as cardio, as it enhances optimal movement and just plain old feels good.

If you feel stiff and tight lately, you might want to work on your flexibility for the health of your body. However, if you’re not quite ready for Warrior 1, let’s start with an essential hip flexor stretch.

Hips don’t lie

The hip flexors are a muscle group that can get chronically shortened from prolonged sitting at a computer.

If your hips are stiff and tight, it can lead to poor hip mobility and is associated with poor core and hip stability.

Tight hips also affect the health of the whole back, as they cause the pelvis to anteriorly tilt. If you picture your pelvis being a bowel of water, the water would spill out the front. When you stand in perfect alignment, the pelvis is naturally rotated about 10 degrees, meaning that the front of the pelvis is slightly lower than the back of the pelvis.

A & B: Tennis ball and hip flexor stretch

While it may sound technical, the technique referred to as self-myofascial release is easy to do, and is like self-massage. Self-myofascial release techniques are used to release and rejuvenate tight muscles and other soft tissues to prepare for later stretching and strengthening exercises.

There are 2 parts to this stretch:

Tennis ball roll on the hip flexor

Tennis ball roll on the hip flexor

Lie facedown, and place a tennis ball beside your belly button. This targets the psoas major muscle, which lies under the abdominals. Turn your foot in slightly, and scoot your body to move the ball to any sore spot all the way down to the top of the hip.

Try to relax on any tight areas for 20-30 seconds, for a total of 2-3 minutes on both sides.

Right after rolling, go into the hip flexor stretch as follows:

Kneeling hip flexor stretch.

Kneel down on one knee, and tuck the pelvis under using the glutes and abdominals. Raise your arm over your head on the same side as the kneeling leg, and reach over your head, toward the opposite side of the body.

Hold the stretch for 15-20 seconds, and repeat 2-3 cycles on each side once a day.

Kneeling hip flexor stretch with arm reach

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Easing Pain with Yoga

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Erich Schiffman Moving Into Stillness 2009

There are many reasons to practice yoga although it is essentially a practice intended to make us wiser, calmer, and better able to understand things. If you breathe, you can do yoga. If you are willing to pay attention to your thoughts and feelings, you can do yoga. And if you suffer from chronic pain, yoga can be a powerful compliment to physical therapy, medical treatment or surgery. The key to understanding chronic pain , pain lasting longer than 3 months, is exactly what modern science and yoga teaches: a mind-body connection that doesn’t differentiate physical pain, such as chronic neck pain, and emotional pain, such as depression. Practicing healing breathing and meditations, done anywhere, and at any time, can diminish this kind of suffering.

Calming the Nervous System
Our brain does a fine job of alerting us to incoming threat signals for our safety, but with chronic pain, the body and the nervous system becomes hyper alert, out of proportion with the actual physical pain. Stanford University professor  Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D. ,in her book Yoga For Pain Relief, explains how you can thank our nervous system and its ability to learn in response to experience, called neuroplasticity,  for that. When you balance on one leg, she writes, the nervous system  becomes  more sensitive  to signs that you are in danger of falling. It also becomes more skilled at using that information to trigger a physical response to keep you in balance. The same holds true for pain, in that the nervous system “gets better” at being in pain, detecting threat and producing the protective pain response. It turns out this also leads to increased sensitivity in areas of the brain that detect any other kinds of conflict. Neuroplasticity can also be a solution, she writes. You have to teach your mind and body something new. The Yoga Sutra , the classic  text on yoga , describes  conflicts and false perceptions, such as” I am never going to get rid of this pain”, as Avidya. Avidya literally means “incorrect comprehension.”It clouds of perception of things.
3 Minute –Meditation

Teach yourself something new by redirecting your mind to your breath, the life force in all of us. Practice this simple meditation to reprogram the biology of any pain you have, and allow your body to heal and thrive. (Adapted from Emotional Freedom by Judith Oroloff M.D.)
•    Find a comfortable quiet place where you won’t be interrupted. Settle into a  relaxed position, or prop yourself  on your bed, with pillows supporting you, so you won’t fall asleep.
•    Focus on your breath to quiet your thoughts. Eyes closed, gently place your awareness on your breath. Be conscious of only breathing in and out. Notice your thoughts, but don’t attach any judgment to them. Just let them float away & gently return to focusing on your breath. Relax a little more.
•    Breathe in calm, breathe out stress. Let yourself feel the sensuality of inhaling as you first fill your chest and then fill the abdomen, and exhale as you release the abdomen and then finally empty the top of the lungs. This stretches your spine and straightens your back. With each slow, deep breath, feel yourself  inhaling calm, sweet as the summer jasmine, then exhale frustration. All negativity is released. Your body unwinds, lulling your biology. You’re cocooned by the safety of stillness. Keep refocusing on your breath and the calm. Only the calm.
There are many ways to describe the meaning of yoga beside the classic definition of one with the divine. No matter what name we use for the divine, anytime we feel in harmony with a higher power, that  too, is yoga. One of the most influential yoga teachers of our time, Sri T. Krishnamacharya,  spent  most of his life helping people with all sorts of illness. For one person, it might have been a more physical practice, for another, prayer and meditation might have been more appropriate. What ever you choose, practice it if only for a few minutes each day, as simple as breathing .

Connie Aronson is an ACSM Health & Fitness Specialist located at the  YMCA in Ketchum, Idaho. She is currently at her annual yoga retreat, with big Montana skies.