Back Pain

Have you ever had a really tough Yoga or Pilates class and woke up with back pain the next day?

Back pain isn’t inherently bad; the type of back pain determines if it’s good or bad.

When we do exercises that work our back muscles, often we cheat and use other muscles instead. So when we’re forced to actually work those back muscles, they’re sore the next day, just like lifting weights can make you sore.

A typical “cheat” is in Bhujangasana (Cobra pose). We are lay on our belly, legs extended straight back behind us and hip width apart, hands our under our shoulders, we draw the shoulderheads back, shoulderblades sliding down our back, and peel our chest up off the floor, coming into a mini-backbend, the navel pulling towards the spine (rather than pushing into the floor) to support the lower back. Often we use our arms to push ourselves up into the pose. This wrong on two fronts. The first is that it defeats the purpose of working the back muscles. And the second I’ll talk about in a moment. So next time you do Easy Cobra, try lifting your hands off the floor and see how far you body dips back down to the mat. If you don’t dip down at all, you’re using your back muscles to achieve the backbend, which strengthens the back muscles, the spinal stabilizers, and yes you may be a little sore in your upper back the next day if you’ve done a lot of them.

The second reason why this cheat is bad is that by using the arms, we can force much more of backbend than our body is able to safely handle. When we force a backbend, the lumbar spine (lower spine) is what takes the most amount of pressure and we pay for it the next day with a sharp pain in the lower back.

Other misalignments that can cause bad back pain when doing backbends are:
• Allowing the legs to splay. This crunches the sacroiliac joint (SI Joint) and causes lower back pain.
• Not pulling the shoulderheads back and the shoulderblades down the back. This reduces the amount of bend in the thoracic (upper) spine making the lumbar (lower) spine take all the pressure. Again this causes lower back pain.
• Throwing the head back and jutting the chin. This crunches the cervical spine (back of the neck) and causes neck and shoulder pain.
• Not engaging the abdominal muscles. Even through we’re doing a backbend and the front of the body is stretching while the back of the body is working, we shouldn’t let our belly go slack. By gently pulling the navel in towards our spine, we support our lower back and reduce the likelihood of pain the following day.

Backbends should be graceful arcs…think of a drawn bow. At no point should they have a jagged point like one might see in an arrow.

And anytime you’re doing backbends, you should bring your body back into balance with forward bends to counteract the stresses placed on the body. And if the backbends were deep backbends, do a transitional pose/exercise between it and the forward bend. Twists are great for neutralizing the body. Think of it as the ginger that refreshes the palate before eating your next bite of sushi.

In general, if the pain you feel is superficial (close to the surface) and you feel a good stretch as you move, it’s likely sore muscle pain. If the pain you feel is deep and sharp with any movement or when not moving, it’s likely due to improper stresses placed on the body.

In Yoga one of the Yamas (precepts of social discipline) is the concept of Ahimsa (non-violence). I ask my students to practice this principle during their exercise. Discover the difference between the pain caused by exertion versus the pain caused by doing harm to the body.

Listen to your body. If something doesn’t feel right when you’re doing it, it likely isn’t right.


Namaste.