After 3 weeks of doing yoga every day, we are all feeling pretty sore. There are sore knees, wrists, elbows... you name it, we got it. My back has been killing me for the last week and I just chalked it up to me swapping from doing yoga 3 days a week in real life to my current life of 3 practices a day... 3 way more intense practices than my normal 55 minute routine at Moxie Yoga in SF :)
Turns out, my issue is a bit different from just being overworked. After enlisting Corey (my teacher) for some help during a back bend workshop, I finally realized why I'm in so much pain. I have been doing backbends wrong all my life and all of those poor practices finally cumulated into a very painful, very annoying injury.
When you do a proper back bend, like in Wheel pose, you are supposed to support a lot of your weight with your shoulders and distribute the bend throughout your whole back so no one part of it gets overly bent or tweaked. My back naturally slopes a bit more in the part of my spine just above my butt... which is great for a Beyoncé bootie but also makes me naturally more prone to over bending my back in that area, which I now realize I've been doing.
Once corey showed me how to properly adjust my back bend, it was honestly as if I was seeing color for the first time ever. It was so amazingly easy to come up into a back bend - I felt like I could hold it for hours... before I would struggle to stay up for more than a few seconds.
The most helpful tips he gave me were to keep my knees pointed forward and not have my feel too far apart. Also, to make sure to internally rotate my arms as I'm lifting up and point my pinkies away from my head a bit. By taking all of Corey's advice, I was able to reduce the compression happening in my lower back which in turn took away back pain during & after my practice and just felt all around better.
I found a cute photo on an awesome site called Yoga By Candace which perfectly shows what I was trying to describe above. Hopefully this helps your future back bends :)
I'm still fairly sore from the incorrect way I had been doing backbends, so as usual, I'm off to lather on pounds of Tiger Balm :)
