Tag Archives: yoga and pain relief

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

https://www.mtexpress.com/wood_river_journal/features/fitness-guru-stretch-your-hip-flexors-like-a-pro/article_674f0d2e-7f28-11ec-9b9d-639bf6f49d52.html

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.