Yoga and Scoliosis
Can yoga help with Scoliosis? by ShareLove.Fund’s Rainbow Women Social Enterprise endeavor and sponsored by your generous donations.
Scoliosis refers to a condition in which the spine curves abnormally. Normally, your spine has a curve at the lower back and another one at the top of your shoulders. However, if your spine curves anywhere else along its length, like in the picture above, you could be suffering from scoliosis. Scoliosis can commonly be caused by genetic conditions, birth defects or neurological abnormalities.
One type of exercise that is gaining popularity both with doctors and those suffering from scoliosis is yoga. Since physical activity is recommended as one of the ways of managing scoliosis, yoga is a form of treatment that an increasing number of doctors are recommending. However, it is very important that you don’t start without proper guidance and advice from your physician about which exercises are safe to do and which aren’t.
How Yoga Can Help With Scoliosis?
Proper yoga poses require a stable core and flexibility. Given these conditions, it is easy to see how yoga could help with the condition. Many yoga poses need parts of the body to be stretched while other parts contract. The movement patterns hold the body in a certain position for a particular amount of time. Often this helps with the thoracic spine and its mobility.
There are two concepts related to your spine’s stability that doctors and physiotherapists look at, especially if you’re suffering from scoliosis. These concepts are force closure and form. The force closure is made up of connective tissue and muscles that keep the spine properly aligned. Yoga helps to strengthen the force closure, which helps in managing pain and, over time, even improvement in the way you function overall. Where form is concerned, yoga can again help by improving the overall alignment or maintaining a neutral spine.
Some studies have even shown that certain poses such as the side plank pose helped patients with scoliosis improve the primary scoliotic spinal curve.
How to Get Started
The first and most important thing you need to know before you start yoga for scoliosis is the pattern of scoliosis you suffer from. This means that you need to know which way the spinal curve goes and what its rotation is. Without this knowledge you won’t know which poses can actually help you.
Once you have this information, start with simple poses. The first thing you want to align is the breathing, so right now the pose isn’t quite as important. The breath needs to come into the area where there is compression. Stretching that area can help you both manage the pain and correct the scoliosis.
While practicing yoga specifically for scoliosis, there is one thing you must accept. The muscles in your back and spine are uneven in length and strength. The ones on the convex side of the scoliotic curve are longer and weaker, whereas the ones on the concave side are tighter and shorter. Therefore, what you need to do is stretch the tighter muscles and strengthen the weaker ones.
Before you begin yoga or any other form of exercise meant to target your scoliosis ensure you have received advice from your doctor, your physiotherapist and your yoga instructor. It is best if you perform the exercises in a supervised environment. That said, yoga can be a very helpful tool to manage the muscle pain and discomfort that scoliosis causes so don’t hesitate to try it.