Who hasn’t had back ache at one time or another, because sometimes it’s just part of a cacophony of symptoms, when you’re suffering with flu or a viral infection.
But standalone back aches and pains are quite a different matter, and getting completely free of it seems nigh on impossible when you’re lying prostrate on the ground unable to bring yourself into the vertical, due to the pain.
This Happened To Me
In the spring of 2001 I experienced a back injury. I had been enjoying a Tai Chi evening class at a local college, when the company I worked at started offering Yoga classes one night a week. I took to it like a duck-to water, absolutely loved it, and felt about it the way I had about dancing back-in-the-day, couldn’t get enough.
It transpired that I was very flexible and could make all manner of shapes, which was very satisfying to my ego, but then it happened. One day as I was warming up in the gym, I had the idea of using my new found yoga success by doing a Down Face Dog pose. A classical error of course, and within a few minutes I was coiled up on the mat, having ice packs rushed to the scene. And that was the start of my bad back story and my allergy to gyms funnily enough.
According to the charity Backcare 80% of the entire population will have suffered with back-pain at some time in their life.
Does Being Flexible Lead To Injury?
According to the Physiotherapist, who tested my mobility with a range of finger/thumb bending exercises, people who are hyper-flexible are more prone to injuries during exercise because they don’t have the same sensory messages from the brain advising that they’re overdoing it. She also said it takes the injured area longer to recover.
As mentioned that was in 2001, but it happened again in 2003, and it too had what I assumed was another association with yoga although I wasn’t doing a yoga pose at the time my back pinged (a technical term haha).
I’d attended a yoga retreat weekend and they’d worked us, where again my love of moving myself into postures. And in all innocence it felt beneficial (of course it wasn’t the yoga, the issue sat in overdoing it). A week or so later, I was kneeling on the garden patio just reaching for something when it happened, only this time it meant business.
In hindsight I wasn’t listening to my body:mind:brain the first time around, regardless of the humiliation I’d undergone, i.e. needing an orthopedic chair at work, and walking as though I’d got an ironing-board glued to my spine. But the memory soon forgets, or does it?
My conscious memory certainly had, and of course the body adapts.
The original discomfort went and my yoga resumed, where it took a little while to resume normal service and of course my practice was deepening simultaneously, so you never have the same experience twice anyway.
Why Does The Pain Continue To Come And Go
Now I understand it from a completely different perspective. Firstly I finally found myself a much kinder form of yoga, that came from the Jenny Beeken school of yoga, that is far more mindful than the Iyengar model I’d been using, and I found some amazing teachers in my locality.
I went to a really good McTimoney Chiropractor as well, which helped my back become more malleable again. But the back continued to ping off and on for many years, with less frequency, but never the less.
Then one day META-Health stepped into my life, which I mentioned recently here, and that’s when a far greater understanding of what had been going on came about and I was able to address the actual cause that would let the back pain be gone for good.
Read more about what creates back pain here, so that you can finally get free of it..
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