The Most Common Yoga Injury

Transcript

my name is dr. Maura Rosenberg and today I'm going to talk to you about the most common yoga injury actually I should call it the most common yoga injury that I see in my office I'm a chiropractor I've been doing yoga karate and Taichi for 40 years I've been a chiropractor 30 years I need less to say because I'm so involved in the arts I get a lot of people who come to me for help you know they'd be doing yoga for a while and they get injured and they get a little discouraged and they want to know what's going on the word yoga the practice of yoga postures are called asana and ah sanskrit such fantastic language ah in sanskrit means without sama means to sit so asana means to sit without pain because in ancient times when the Yogi's would teach their students postures the purpose of which was to get them to be able to be more comfortable in their body so they could sit and learn other things not just doing the yoga and then in those times they were learning mathematics they were learning you know cosmology they were learning all types of healing arts etc you needed to sit for long hours and it was important that you were comfortable in your body so asana means to sit without pain now it's uh it feels great when you do yoga feels great when you stretch the body and the most common injury that I see is that people do a lot of back bends but they don't do enough or an equal amount of forward flexion now it's hard to show that with this particular plastic spine but I'm gonna give you a little bit of a rundown here in the center of forget that tube that's supposed to be the spinal cord in the center of each vertebra here is a disc in the center of the disc is something called a nucleus per pulsus it's a little bit harder than the rest of the disc the disc itself which fills up this space is a gelatinous and the center is a little bit firmer and what happens is when you bend backwards do a backwards extension like the the bone the Cobra the wheel what you're doing is you're moving to disc the center of the disc slightly forward or anterior and when you bend forward you're moving the center of the disc slightly posterior or rearward goal is to remove muscle tensions and to make sure that the disk is centered so if somebody does a one-hour yoga class in 45 minutes is spent doing a lot of time doing back bends okay you could shift the disk forward and in doing so that will close up the space in the rear where the nerves exit the spun so then they come to me the chiropractor they say you know gee dr. mark my back hurts I want to quit yoga and the answer is not to quit yoga it was a wonderful thing the answer is to add the exercises that have everything go the opposite way okay so it's all a balance and I've always been a proponent balance if you've watched my videos I always say whatever you're doing one leg you do in the other but also from to back is very important I find in Jenna I mean after 30 years I see a lot of people people enjoy doing the back bends and the Cobras it feels good to open up the front of the body because we spent so much time in tension and rightly so I mean when people tense up they don't like this they actually curved down this way somebody's very upset it's bent this way so the Cobra and the opening the wheels open it through the opposite so from a musculus stamp when it's great to stretch those muscles from an emotional standpoint it's great to move that energy that stuck that's really tight because you're upset or stressed or sitting at a traffic all day long that's all well and good but we have to keep in mind underneath it all we have a structure that we have to cherish and take care of and if we spend too much time doing back bends we're gonna move that a central part of the disk forward or anterior and it's gonna result in pain and all my gears of treating people I've never had anybody rupture herniated discs from yoga but they've certainly hurt themselves enough where they found themselves on my table and I had a desire to stop practicing and I talked them out of it you know I work on them I fix them and I tell them what they should do and by and large we don't see the problem again so remember everything in moderation and if you're gonna spend you know 15 minutes 20 minutes of your practice doing Cobras do 20 minutes for reflections you know downward dogs things that move the body the other okay that's today's little video on the most common yoga injury that I see in my office and this and other topics are in my book if you look at your health and in a way the link is below this video and if you have any questions post them up to YouTube I'd be happy to answer you