Assessing the safety of back bending.

Assessing the safety of back bending.

I came up with a simple test (no I didn't have to mention that I came up with this but as you will notice in this blog, I sometime lack humility. That comes from the residue of insecurities that this old guy still totes around) Back to the important stuff. What I have experienced and continue to see in practitioners of yoga and gymnastics is over extension of the spine in back bends. You might say that everyone who does a back bend especially a deep bend is over extending but that is not true. It really depends on a bodies particular anatomy which is very different even if subtle in each individual. One person does a back bend and the bend is distributed relatively evenly throughout the spine. Another does a back bend that may not even be as deep (looking) as the first I just mentioned and suffers from over extending in one general area or one specific area. This is not new info, so what is the big deal. If the person could find out before serious damage or degeneration to the spine was done, they could modify the back bend to avoid injury down the line. This type of injury from long time practice is very difficult to heal in its’ latter stages. This is the big deal! I know from experience! What I have seen that is most common and the biggest threat from over extending in one area are not only degeneration of the vertebrae and disc but the destabilization of that unit. This causes anterior movement of the vertebrae which is serious. There are nutritional components to the problem but this is not the time to write on that. Many practitioners do not have symptoms early on when noticing this problem would be the most helpful (after the damage is done it is way too late in my NSHO). So the test that I use is this.

 Test anterior muscles of the pelvis and the spine. Does the rectus femoris, psoas, abdominals work. If they don’t we go a different direction with yoga therapy. For this purpose we find that they work.

Now do a back bend, hold for 5 breaths. Then.

Lie on your back and have the three main muscles mentioned re-checked. If they no longer work, there is a problem with either the muscle, as in adhesions or scar tissue. (There are anatomists that no far more than I that might mention other factors but this is the basics for our purpose here. Look at that, humility, wow). Or, there is a nerve pinching, impingement that is affecting the anterior muscles. This affect could be to posterior muscles also so you could check for instance the gluteus maximus in the same way. Let’s keep it simple or simpler for now. How do we know whether it is the muscle that is causing the problem or the nerve from the unstable vertebrae? We don’t really but we can take an educated guess and choose the yoga therapy or other therapeutic approach that makes sense to repair the condition by finding out how long the rectus femoris, psoas, or abdominals take to turn back on. If the strength comes back in second or minutes it is probably the muscle that is the area of concern. If it take much longer it is most likely the instability and hyper extension of a specific area and resulting nerve pinching causing inflammation etc. that is causing the problem.

While waiting do some simple breathing in standing or lying on your mat. 

Then re-test until finding out how long it will take for the muscles to turn back on. It may take several times testing to find out how long if they actually turn back on during the practice or session. They may not.

Treatment or repair of either of the problems is another blog, probably a class would be more like it. Oh yeah, we need to learn how to do the tests.

Next blog if I see enough interest if not, get a book on simple muscle testing.

Blessings

Anthony