Yoga for back pain is ideal

Yoga for back pain is often recommended as a gentle and relaxing treatment and is said to help the mind heal the body.

The aim of yoga is to increase flexibility, suppleness, strength, stability, posture, breathing, coordination, body-awareness, better posture, balance, improved self-awareness, and increased blood flow and oxygen circulation.

Yoga consists of a series of gentle moves - at its most basic, stretches and poses designed to create flexible, supple muscles. It is combined with meditation to a larger or lesser degree. For the advanced yoga practitioner, there are more strenuous and complicated poses. A novice should start out with simple, gentle movements under the guidance of a professional yoga instructor who understands you have a back problem.

If your pain is very bad, precluding you from too much movement, the meditative and visualization exercises in yoga will endow you with a sense of well-being and relax your body - giving you some measure of pain relief.

Strictly speaking, yoga is not an exercise routine, but a series of poses that release the body's natural energy and creates a sense of well-being and suppleness. Yoga for back pain is ideal in that it places little strain on the spine and can also be useful as a method of warming up and cooling down between more vigorous exercises.

Yoga increases the strength of both spinal and abdominal muscles, to give your spine better support. We're not amoeba and without the support of the muscles of our backs and tummies, our spines would collapse.

There are two main types of yoga for spinal pain: Hatha yoga concentrates more on increasing muscle strength and coordination, while Raja yoga relaxes the mind and teaches you to breathe correctly and deeply, something many of us don't do. But, the two are designed to work together to create a sense of mind/body harmony.

Yoga is meant to create improved body awareness and should never be uncomfortable or painful. If you have bad body posture from years of working at a desk in an office or not standing correctly, you may find some poses initially uncomfortable, but with gentle, regular repetition, you will learn to train your body.

You can practice many yoga techniques during the day, at home, and enjoy the benefits of a few minutes of relaxing meditation almost anywhere you are - even in the traffic or at the supermarket.

If you suffer from severe backache, do first mention to your doctor you are interested in doing yoga.

Also read our article about Back Pain Management