Yoga Teaching & Learning Newsletter
May 2024

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Hello Reader

I hope your yoga teaching is going well and that you find a nugget of something useful or interesting in this newsletter to support your teaching.
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This newsletter turned out to be quite long! The topic of back pain is an important one and I'm thinking of offering a 2-hour practical workshop on Zoom on the topic of dealing with back pain in class, where you can share experiences, and look at useful and safe practices and helpful guidance for students. Do reply to this email if that appeals to you so I can gauge interest.
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Scroll down for:

• Working with students with back pain - seven important things to remember when teaching students with back pain. 🔙
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• The dates for the next 3 Q&A Zoom sessions for your diary. Do come along and join our always interesting conversations, if you've not been before. 🤗
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The new community hub for yoga teachers to connect is imminent. Not quite ready to give you more information yet, but keep an eye on your inbox! 🥳
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Working with students with back pain

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Fix your back pain with this one exercise!

Have you ever seen headings like this in social media? There is much 'click bait' like this around.

Clearly this is not realistic. There is no one panacea for back pain as it has a wide variety of causes, and many back pain experiences are complex situations with various factors involved.

When there is pain, it’s all we can think about. We just want it go away. So the idea that one exercise can fix it is an appealing one.

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That ‘one exercise’ may possibly fix the pain of course. Just as in buying a lottery ticket you may happen to select the winning number. But in almost all cases, a comprehensive approach to managing the pain, while exploring advice information from experts, is the best road to a long-term solution.

As yoga teachers, we’re not therapists, and neither should we try to be unless we are working one-to-one and are qualified as a therapist. But in a yoga class situation, we can work to enhance the therapeutic aspects of yoga for our students.

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Alongside encouraging students to seek advice from a healthcare professional, we can keep students safe in their yoga practice, and teach them how to use yoga effectively. This will help students on their healing journey to being pain-free.

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Here are seven important things to remember when working with people who experience back pain to maximise the healing potential of yoga:

1) Slow down

In class, we can teach our yoga students to work slowly and encourage them to take this more mindful approach into everyday life. This is particularly important for personalities who tend to rush. The best way to speed up recovery from back pain is to slow down and go slowly.

Many people do tend to slow their movements when there is pain, which is often accompanied by frustration. Emphasising the value of moving slowly can legitimise a 'slower mindset'. This can help turn frustration into understanding that slowing down is a constructive practical step towards healing and health maintenance.
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2) Keep moving daily

As uncomfortable as it is, it’s important to move daily with back pain. Only exercising at the weekends, or once a week at a yoga class, is not the best approach and this can actually exacerbate the back pain. Regular practice at home is something to be encouraged.

Resting and relaxing with as much comfort as possible is important for healing of course. But the body also needs to move regularly to recover.

The best approach for back pain is – do less, more often.

We can teach students small simple dynamic poses that they can use at home, such as small pelvic tilts or tiny cat stretches. Or little stretches that they can do while waiting for the kettle to boil, for example. Micro-movements with the breath may seem counterintuitive (and boring!) to usually active busy people. But these can have a powerful impact.​
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3) Warm up

Warming up at the beginning of a yoga practice is essential, as we all know.

With back pain it is more important than ever to start each practice with gentle stretching and mobilising movements.

Warm ups prepare the body for the coming practice, but they also give yoga practitioners a chance to check out their body’s parameters on that day. As teachers, it's helpful to draw their attention to this.

These limbering movements can then be repeated or developed (or avoided) later in the lesson with the experiential knowledge from having explored them at the start of class.

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4) Variation

Gentle yoga is an ideal way to heal from back pain as it offers a variety of different body movements alongside a mindful practice.

Any mild to moderate yoga pose that doesn’t increase the pain is good. For beginners to yoga, sticking with familiar body movements initially is useful when there is back pain, rather than being too exploratory to start with.

Big stretches of the back can feel good, and in some situations may provide temporary relief to back pain, depending on the cause. But these can do more harm than good in some cases. It’s very individual, so using a staged approach to break down and work up towards a stronger pose, gives students the opportunity to test out their body and to only go as far as is appropriate along that journey on that day.
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5) Adapt

One of the great things about yoga is its adaptability.

Paying attention to the body and breath enables us to monitor our body's responses to practices and to adjust as necessary.

Being mindful of the body can be particularly challenging with back pain as there is often a desire to dissociate and move away from the pain.

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​Giving students a focus for the mind while resting can be useful, and especially if it links in with the teaching points given to the rest of the class so they still feel part of the group. Some useful cues could be to focus on slow deep breathing, or to find the weight of your body, or to soften the body parts that are in contact with ground, or to be aware of the space around you, or to relax your skin, or visualisations such as being bathed in light.

Pain exists for a reason. It’s the brain waving a big red flag to tell us that there is something here to be addressed. Going to a yoga class is a positive step in that direction and shows an intention to take practical steps to address the problem.

When a yoga practice causes increased pain, it is important to stop and rest. But also to learn from the experience. As yoga teachers we can guide students how to adapt a practice and help them to select a less demanding alternative.
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6) Grounding

Pain in the back is often caused by muscles tensing up or going into spasm in response to the detection of instability in the body.

We can use the support of the ground to develop stability in asana. Sometimes it’s necessary to stay still and practice grounding, before introducing movement.

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​I once had a student who was in such pain that she could lie in semi-supine, but any movement of limbs increased the pain in her lower back. So I encouraged her to lie still and just breathe and be with the ground, while the rest of the class were doing supine poses. After a few weeks when the pain level had decreased and her body had become accustomed to lying on the floor, I encouraged her to experiment with micromovements. Slowly and gradually she was able to do more, until eventually she was able to join in with the rest of the class. It took time, courage and reassurance for her to get there.​
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7) Anatomical integrity

Maintaining anatomical integrity during movement is key in preventing back pain. When there is already back pain, it is something to pay attention to.

In gyms they call this exercising with ‘form’. In yoga this is about sitting and standing up straight, being grounded, keeping congruency between the regions of the spine, and using joints within their natural range of movement.

It may not be possible to sit upright while there is pain, but as yoga teachers it's something we can spot and help the student work towards over time.

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Patanjali’s ‘sthira sukham asanam’ indicates that we ideally need to have good stability and strength, balanced with ease and mobility. When we don't, anatomical integrity is lacking. This sensitive balance and dynamic equilibrium is reflected in biology. With back pain, this balance is usually off, so again it is something we can help people work towards as they rehabilitate.

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When there's pain there’s usually a visible lack of flow in body movement. Whatever poses we teach or practice, cultivating a sense of fluidity and grounding provides a better anatomical pattern of health that is conducive to healing of the back pain over time.

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Yoga teacher Q&A
get-togethers on Zoom

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Dates for your diary

The next three Q&A meetings are on:

Saturday 18th May 10-11am

Friday 21st June 2.30-3.30pm

Saturday 13th July 10-11am

To receive email invitations to the Q&A sessions, sign up here​

Wishing you enjoyable May bank holidays,

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Please feel free to pass this newsletter on to any yoga teacher friends or colleagues who might be interested in any of the content. They can sign up to receive newsletters to their own inbox at www.yogauk.com

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