Can Iyengar Yoga Help with Upper Back Pain?
A truly alarming number of people experience some form of back pain throughout their lives. Those who have struggled with tightness, stiffness or pain in your upper back, neck and shoulders, know just how debilitating the experience can be.
You might have found this blog while experiencing your own bout of pain in your upper back or neck. If that is the case, it’s unfortunate. But we are eager to let you know that you can make steps toward addressing the underlying causes of that pain today.
In this article, we want to explore how yoga, and specifically Iyengar yoga, can be incorporated into your lifestyle to address the presence of upper back and neck pain. A great number of yogis get their start when they begin exploring yoga as a way of addressing specific aches and discomfort. Maybe this is your start!
Understanding the underlying causes of neck and upper back pain
Don’t worry, this isn’t an article written to reprimand you for looking at your phone too much, or not practising picture perfect posture every minute of the day. But it is still important to remind ourselves that our daily habits and how we hold ourselves are important.
The way we move is often entirely unconscious. We aren’t actively choosing to bunch up and hold ourselves in tight little balls. But what that means is that we have to put quite a bit of effort into retraining ourselves to break habits that we’ve held onto for years and even decades. It’s not a quick process – but believe us when we say that it’s worth it.
How Iyengar yoga can help
The sustainable path to a pain-free upper back might be a little longer than any of us might like it to be – but regular practitioners of Iyengar yoga will tell you that patience and consistency work wonders. As a style, Iyengar yoga is characteristically slow and deliberate. Practitioners both new and experienced are encouraged to explore poses at depth, and in a way that encourages an appreciation of our bodies and the structures they are made up of.
These defining features of Iyengar yoga make the style uniquely well suited to helping those seeking to re-train their bodies into healthier patterns of movement and posture. To see how this takes shape in a class, we encourage you to check out this Iyengar sequence for the neck and upper back. There you’ll see that the use of props, and the detailed attention paid to posture, all make for a practice that encourages a redress of the patterns that cause pain and discomfort in the upper back, neck and shoulders.
Get started with Yoga Vastu today!
Back pain can result from any number of troubles, but a great number of them can be addressed with regular structured practice of Iyengar yoga. Fortunately, you don’t have to find a studio to practice in, or wait until lockdowns are over to get started. You can try out Iyengar yoga for yourself today.
Yoga Vastu is an online yoga studio that puts world-class instruction in Iyengar yoga right at your fingertips. To give new practitioners a way to explore our classes before making a commitment, we have a 14 day free trial available for new sign ups.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!
Share
