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in reply to: painful lower back #6728
Thanks for your advice – I’ll have a go.
Namaste,
in reply to: painful lower back #6695Thank you, I appreciate your time. I did forget to mention the styles of yoga I have studied – the preferred forms of yoga classes I go to tend to be combination vinyasa or power vinyasa with some restorative yoga / pranayama incorporated into them. I have also studied yin yoga and tend to prefer that in the afternoons or evenings. For my own practice I tend to do a series of Surya Namaskara A and B with a few standing poses and some seated ones, with abdominal strengthening and some remedial deep muscle- usually I only have about 15-30mins in the mornings as I am currently studying in a physical theatre course. I come from a warm country and heat and humidity are not a problem for me in general.
in reply to: painful lower back #6693Thank you for your reply. I have been practising yoga for a number of years and am generally careful with the range of extension of my lower back and very careful with alignment. I do not have problems with the asanas you mention, especially as I engage my bandhas and use the appropriate breathing patterns. It is basically agreed by most practitioners that the spondylo I have I was born with – it has not moved for over 20 years and has caused me problems only when it was diagnosed, and once or twice since, mainly if I wasn’t using my stomach muscles when performing particular activities, once in yoga (and that was a stupidly fast paschimottanasana move), and once when not. I generally do not overextend my back, and find that if my feet are in parallel as required here then it’s better hip width apart (which I didn’t do the first time I did the sequence). I have done ballet and contemporary dance in the past and that did not give me this pain. As mentioned in my original question, by the time we moved into the balancing poses (the one legged head to knee pose) the pain was already there. I have given much more thought to this, and tend to think that maybe the extremes of spinal bends – side, side, back, forward at the beginning of the whole sequence is not a good thing for my spine (I do bend my knees for the initial uttanasana) – even though I resisted tilting backwards I still had the pain afterwards, and the ache is still there two days on now. I can’t think of anything else and I originally thought it would be ok with just that one modification!!
In other forms of yoga I tend to make sure I don’t crunch the lower back, for instance urdhva dhanurasana I extend the upper body (which should be done anyway!), I prop my lower spine up for vajrasana etc.I will not do a handstand walkover because I instinctively know it wouldn’t be good for me. I don’t modify my life other than ensure I engage my lower abdominals for any activity and don’t sit for extended periods (ie longer than a couple of hours) at a time.
Thank you for your speedy reply.
Namaste -
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