Yogaground Blog

You’ve got an injury, a reaction, a restriction. You didn’t ask for it, but it happened.

Sometimes you can do the sensible thing and take time out with lots of rest and come back to normal life when the injury has fully cleared up.,

But often life isn’t perfect, you still need to maintain some mobility. Here are some tips to help you cope. I’m assuming that your injury is not life threatening and that you are following the advice of medical professionals.

Don’t give up! You have the power to help yourself. If you are giving yourself a hard time about being less than perfect, reflect on the fact that every great athlete, dancer, yogi or body worker has at some point had to cope with injury.

Accept that the injury has happened. Accept that your life has changed in a way you didn’t want or plan. Acceptance doesn’t mean that you have to like it.

You have a body and at the same time, you are more than your body. It means you can still be your authentic self despite having a body which is not working at full potential.

Many of the usual ways of dealing with injury contain an inherent opposition. ‘Powering through’, ‘gritting your teeth and carrying on’ suggest a mind over body or a mind against body type approach. If this works, great. For me, finding ways of getting my mind to work with my body is preferable.

Give yourself permission to feel whatever you feel. And that means whatever you feel, whether it is sulks/trantrums/blaming/self pity/relief, even if you believe them unacceptable or weird. There’s a story about Pablo Cassals, the great cellist, who mangled his hand on a skiing holiday. He admitted later that his first response was to think “thank god I don’t have to play the cello”. Self compassion is likely to be in very short supply at this point. Anything you can do to decrease beating yourself up is welcome.

Once the injury has happened and there is pain, the flight/fight/freeze response will start to kick in. It will partially numb your sensations but accept that your body IQ has just dropped. A lot of thoughts about movement are just wrong as your body is fighting between what was and what is.

Accept help when it is offered, you need it and you will surely return the favour at some point in the future.

A mistake is to try and move like you are not injured. Your body will fight back and you get’ll upset.

Affirm that you can still move very freely and at the same time accept a reduced range of motion or an adapted range of motion. For example, with a leg injury, do smaller strides and maybe a slower pace. You can always find the fluid uplift from the earth and surrender of weight to the earth, even in moments which seem impossible. Take time, trust the life force and move. And if you fail, it’s OK, you’ll get it another time.

Things take longer, small distances become scary. Give yourself more time for your body to organise itself in the transitions between positions. For example, take a couple of breaths before moving from sitting to standing.

Accept that your muscles need to move through slightly different pathways. Take time to allow those new pathways to emerge, don’t rush. Your mind expects that you move in a certain way. You’ll feel confusion during the process of allowing these new pathways to emerge.

Persuade all the muscles crossing the injured part to keep moving when you move. Again, never force this. Sometimes the muscles just need time to freak out and lock up.

Accept that there may be pain. Let go of the tendency to avoid the pain or get into it. Notice your reaction to the pain, take time to reassure yourself that you are managing your body in the best way you know how. If the pain is persistent, seek help. The internet is a good resource for instant tips but also make appointments with your doctor.

Use pain killers, but don’t train on them. If you need to do something athletic which outside of normal daily movements, avoid using pain killers if you can as they can give you a false confidence.

And finally, make a commitment to explore the lessons which need to be learned at some point in the future when you have healed enough to listen without judgement to what your body needs to tell you.

1. Give your neck a rest! Your neck is one of the most overworked parts of your body. Lying down with the support of a book or cushion under your head and consciously relaxing your neck will help your whole spine.

2. Quiet hands. Our hands are always busy busy busy, either doing something or holding the thoughts of doing. Quieting our hands allows our shoulders to relax and guess where the shoulders are attached to? Your spine of course.

3. Explore neutral spine. Neutral spine is a place where the curves of your spine are in an optimum relationship with each other. Years of habits mean that we’re never really in neutral spine, most of us are actually frozen in a forward bend or back bend. Taking time to explore what neutral spine means to you lying on your side, on your back and on your front (that is, somewhere you can experience total ease and comfort) will help to release the years of bad habits.

4. Take a few minutes each day to consciously move your spine in all the directions it’s capable of. Bending forward, bending back, bending to the side and rotation. Start from neutral, do the movement and go back to neutral to absorb the benefits of this. Yoga poses are great for these but it doesn’t have to be a full on asana to bring the benefits.

5. Relax your shoulders when you breath. All too often we are subconsciously trying to breath by moving our shoulders up and down as opposed to letting the breath come from the action of the diaphragm in the middle of your body. Shoulders move with the breath rather than trying to control the breath.

6. Allow your shoulder blades to respond to and support the movement of arms in the same way your eyes track the movement of a ball you want to catch. Most often, your finger tips initiate arm movement and so your shoulder blades should respond to this. All the students I’ve taught who have shoulder problems brace or fix their shoulder blades before moving their arms.

7. You have two bones at the bottom off your pelvis. They’re called the sitz bones or ishial tuberosities.  When you sit, see if you can find them so that the weight of your torso is moving through these bones. Sitting on your tailbone (slouching back) is storing up problems for the years to come.

8. Do movements which pulse force and energy through your spine. If you’re really fit, jumping and running will provide this. If you want to do this in low impact way, bouncing on a swiss ball or doing pulsing movement lying on a mat will help. It helps to keep the joints in the spine mobile.

9. Cultivate awareness of arms and legs and their relationship to your spine. If you have a very painful area or damaged area in your spine, working with arms or legs can be a way into treating and healing the spine.

10. Become mindful of the way that your internal organs support and are supported by your spine. This is quite an advanced subject, so just beginning with how your lungs support your upper spine and the movement of your arms is a good starting place.

I do all of these things on a regular basis and over the years it’s really helped me build a strong spine. If I get really run down or practice yoga in an over aggressive way, I start getting an aching back. Other than that,  my spine feels great most of the time.

Most of these tips are ones that I’ve learnt over the years, the one about quiet hands is from Steve Hamlin, a Feldenkrais practitioner in the US.

As a flat foot, I’ve been subjected to teachers telling me to ‘lift your arches’. I even had one teacher sitting at my feet and basically shouting at my poor arches. It has spectacularly failed to produce the slightest change in my body.

It’s a pity because I really needed someone to help me with my feet. I’ve been wondering why that advice didn’t work at all. I’ve realised with my feet, it is not the shape of the foot which produces the problems so much as my response to the ground through my feet.

First of all, there’s quite a debate as to whether flat feet are just another variation in the normal range of the human condition or if they are a problem which needs to be corrected. Some people with flat feet have no problems at all and are able to lead very active lives, being capable of walking long distances. My father was one such person. Take a look at the wikipedia report on flat feet.

Secondly, the foot is an immensely complex part of the human body and each foot has a unique path towards ease and good use.

Thirdly, it is not the shape of your foot which produces the problems so much as your foot’s response to the ground when weight is put through your foot. In my case, I’ve realised that my foot has been chronically stressed over the years and has been even more over-stressed by trying to lift my arches.

So, my strategy has changed and I’m now looking at what I actually do when weight goes through my foot. Gripping with the soles of my feet and clenching my toes seem to be one of the things I do on a regular basis. Now imagine gripping your soles of your feet, clenching your toes and then trying to lift your arches. It makes me tense to write about it, let alone do it. You’ll see why I’m reaching for my gun.

So what might be more helpful advice? Well, asking all students to get in touch with how they put weight through their feet is a really good start. I’ve had students who have very well formed arches and whose feet are as dead as a doornail. Their feet are permanently cold and they have lost almost all sensation in the foot. Giving students a chance to explore how weight going into their feet plays out in the whole rest of their body is an approach that I’ve started taking and I’ve found it a much more supportive approach then trying to get students to correct ‘problems’.

Asking students to relax their jaws (or some other part of their body that they have better contact with) and then notice the effect on their balance and their feet is an approach which seems to work for some students. It gives them an idea that everything is interconnected. It gives them something real and practical to work on rather work directly on an area they already have poor contact with.

And of course, as a yoga teacher, I’ve never given students well meaning but rather superficial advice that a senior teacher has passed on as a revealed truth to be applied in all circumstances!