How to Prevent Yoga Injuries?

The more we move, the more we are capable of moving – from Pete Egoscue book “Pain Free”.

A common question I often hear as a posture alignment specialist  is why cannot one do yoga, or Pilates, or Zumba, or weight training, etc, to improve one’s posture? Why special posture fitness is needed?

Exercising is essential for our health. I am a huge fan of yoga – I’ve been practicing it personally for more than 15 years (my favorite type being Kundalini yoga with Ana Brett and Ravi Singh). I am totally convinced everybody should be doing some yoga practice daily - not only for physical health but for peace of mind, mood improvement, and spiritual enlightenment.

However, I hate to admit that I could not achieve the same postural alignment results with yoga as with a posture fitness program called the Egoscue method. More so, after practicing the Egoscue method, I can now do many of the yoga postures easier and better and I enjoy doing yoga more than ever before.

So why could not I see the same results by just doing my daily yoga practice? The reason is I started doing yoga when my posture was seriously compromised. Even though my posture has initially improved with yoga, I still had a number of postural deviations that affected my ability to do yoga postures correctly and I did not even know that I was misaligned!

Many people heard of the New York Times article How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body.
It points out that yoga is not always the magic cure for all physical and mental ailments, but can and quite often does cause physical harm in the way of injuries to both novice and experienced yogis. While I don’t like the article scaring many people away from yoga, there is something that I agree with. Yoga is extremely beneficial for people in good postural balance and might hurt a person with a compromised posture.

That is why the phrase “Straighten Before You Strengthen” has a mantra quality for every Egoscue method practitioner. If your posture is out of alignment, many activities you do will strengthen your imbalances and may cause more harm than good in a long run. It is never an activity itself (whether it’s yoga, running, weight training, skiing, basketball, etc.) that causes the damage but the misaligned posture that allows damage to occur. For that matter, yoga in the title of the above mentioned article could have been replaced with any other activity.

When yoga practice started thousands of years ago, people lived in very different environment and motion was never scarce. Nobody spent hours in front of the computers and nobody was driving cars instead of walking and running. Today, there are simply too many people who just don’t get enough movement. When the body stops moving, and more importantly, moving properly, muscles quickly deteriorate, joints get misaligned, posture suffers, and the musculoskeletal pain will follow.

When humans are faced with new challenges, they find new solutions. When Pete Egoscue (who was seriously injured during the Vietnam War) tried yoga for his pain issues, he could not figure out why his yoga postures looked so different from the postures of other people and did not bring any relief. After a lot of studies and by trial and error, he figured out that his postural alignment was the culprit and he needed to find a way to fix his posture first. He succeeded, and eventually the Egoscue method was born.

Even though many yogis will dismiss the notion that there might be some other type of exercise that will help with yoga practice, I believe that passing this information along might prevent some people from yoga related injuries. Don’t wait, take an action! One thing that yoga taught me was the flexibility of mind – we have to be open to new knowledge that comes our way. 

If you are at all curious what Egoscue method is all about, find an Egoscue practitioner in your area. Or at least, pick up the Pete Egoscue Pain Free book and do exercises he recommends. If nothing else, it will give you a very different perspective on the importance of proper movement and good posture. Egoscue method might change your life as it changed mine.

Like sharks that constantly swim to breathe, we move to build and retain muscular and skeletal functions – from Pete Egoscue book “Pain Free at Your PC”.

Realign. Move. Breathe. Enjoy your injury free yoga.

To learn more, please visit my website: www.uprightposturefitness.com.

Posture Fitness of the Egoscue method®

When people ask me what exactly the Egoscue method® is, I have to come up with a short description that a person without any knowledge of anatomy can easily understand and relate to.

Saying that it is a postural alignment therapy immediately triggers a very natural response – people are trying to straighten up. What they don’t realize is that a conscious attempt to keep the body straight does not always result in a straight posture. And even if it did, nobody can be constantly aware of their posture throughout the day

Posture is NOT something we can control consciously. More so, we often perceive a compromised posture as a correct one. We all know that hunching over is bad and keeping the abdomen in is good (not exactly true from the Egoscue perspective), but there are many other things that people are not aware of. 

 

Try the following posture test: 

1.      Stand with your back against the wall, feet shoulder-with apart pointing straight forward. Your heels, hips, upper back and head should be touching the wall. If it is hard for you to keep the head on the wall, place your head in a relaxed position; do not force it to touch the wall.

2.      Relax your stomach and your arms and allow your body to stay in this posture position for 2 minutes. Don’t forget to breathe and keep your stomach muscles relaxed.

This position (similar to Tadasana, yoga Mountain Pose) imitates a proper postural alignment with a wall used as a map. As simple as it is, it can be quite difficult for many people.

You should not experience any strain while touching the wall with your heels, hips, upper back and head. You should have a small space underneath your waist where your low back naturally curves in. Notice how staying in this posture transfers your weight to the balls of your feet.

If you cannot get your head against the wall without straining, it is an indicator of a thoracic (middle) back problem. If you feel pigeon-toed, it is a sign of your feet being habitually pointing outwards (everted). If your waist is completely on the wall, it means your low back lost its arch into a slumping posture and your pelvis is out of its neutral position. If your hips start hurting after a minute or two, they are misaligned. Experiencing any of these signifies a compromised posture (see my previous blog: Posture As Reflection of Musculoskeletal Health).

What you just did was an Egoscue exercise called Standing at Wall. This exercise promotes proper posture by positioning of all load joints against a wall as a map. For many of the clients, this is the beginning of the posture recovery process. The Egoscue method® allows the body to be in the proper alignment in a way that a person does not have to make a conscious effort to hold a straight posture.

It is achieved by re-training the weakened and incorrectly used muscles with individually selected and specifically targeted Egoscue method® exercises, many of them as simple as Standing at Wall. Each of them provides stimulation to specific muscle groups, joints, and functions that are not being used adequately or that are being abused by skeletal misalignment - from Pete Egoscue book “Pain Free at Your PC”.

A postural alignment specialist (PAS) trained in the Egoscue method® works with each client to select the exercises that will correct his/her specific postural deviations.  A client plays just as an important role in the process of posture recovery as a PAS selecting exercises for them. A client has to do these exercises and communicate changes, improvements, or pains so necessary adjustments can be made.

Please visit my Upright Posture Fitness website: www.uprightposturefitness.com for more information.

Posture as Reflection of Musculoskeletal Health

A few years ago, when I was working in the computer field sitting in front of the computer long hours and experiencing a chronic shoulder, neck, and back pains.
I was sure back problems were a normal course of life and I thought visits to a chiropractor were my path to salvation. Besides, we are all born with different bodies and genetically programmed to have different postures, right?

Boy, oh boy was I wrong - as well as millions of people living with chronic pain and blaming their back problems on age or heredity.  It must be arthritis, you are not getting any younger, or you need a knee (or hip) replacement – you heard this before, right? I still think that chiropractors are doing wonderful job helping people in pain crisis but do they provide a permanent solution for back problems?

I always thought about posture as something that contributes mostly to good appearance, more of a vanity factor than health. And, until I started practicing something called an Egoscue method, I never realized that our posture is one of the most effective but neglected methods of diagnosing one’s musculoskeletal health. It is the most accurate reflection of how our joints, spine, and pelvis are aligned in relation to one another and shows, without expensive equipment or invasive tests, what muscles are not doing their assigned jobs and what bones are out of alignment.

Let’s talk about a good posture and a compromised posture: a good one is shown on the left and a poor one on the right. 

Look at the lines connecting the four pairs of load bearing joints: shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles. Each pair is created equal and supposed to carry an equal load on each side. If they are equally loaded, there is a parallel horizontal and vertical 90 degree angle alignment. From the side view we should see a proper spinal S-curve. In this case muscles on each side of the body and muscles on the front and back respond equally to physical demands. A good posture allows us to stand, walk, sit and lie in positions where the least strain is placed on supporting muscles and ligaments during movement or weight-bearing activities.

That is, unless we live a motion deprived life. Then our body shuts down the unused muscles as a survival adaptation mechanism - use it or lose it. But once in awhile even the most sedentary people need to get up from that office chair and perform tasks involving the unused muscles – pick up a heavy object, move furniture, or climb the stairs. Since the assigned muscle is shut down and not capable of performing this task, the body borrows another muscle to do the job. With repetitive misuse, the compensating muscle moves bones from their proper positions and posture becomes compromised. When skeletal structures are misaligned, muscles are forced to continually compensate for the postural deviations changing their length and tension and pulling bones out of alignment even more. It becomes a vicious cycle.

The good news is our postures can be fixed and with proper posture fitness program muscles can be re-trained and lost functions restored at any age. A person trained in the Egoscue method® can evaluate posture deviations and back problems of each individual and solve these problems through a series of simple but very effective individually selected strengthening, stretching, or positioning exercises. You can find out more at: www.uprightposturefitness.com.

Stay active. Live pain free.