How Yoga Can Help With Lower Back Pain

Yoga is a form of exercise that involves physical and mental wellbeing, and it has been said to help relieve body pain. In this article, we will concentrate on low back pain and how yoga can play a role in relieving it.

What Are The Benefits of Yoga
Yoga offers both physical and mental benefits for the human body.
The physical benefits are:

• Increased flexibility
• Improved muscle tone
• Improved posture
• Improves bone health
• Improves cardiovascular health
• Prevents muscular injury

The mental benefits are:

• Relaxes the mind
• Helps in stress management

Causes of Low Back Pain
Low back pain is one of the most common work-related injuries. It involves pain at the waist and a lot of factors contribute to the pain.
The causes of low back pain are:
1.     Sitting or lying poorly puts stress on the back  
2.     Tight muscles of the back and abdomen
3.     Involuntary contraction of the back muscles, which is known as spasm
4.     Falling and landing on your back or being hit at the back
5.     Lifting with your back bent over instead of bending your legs
6.     Overstretching of ligaments and muscles, which is popularly known as a sprain and strain respectively
7.     Weakness of the back muscles or abdominal muscles
8.     Tight muscles in the legs
9.     Sitting for long periods of time
10.  Pregnancy, which puts a lot of load on the back muscles
11.  A slip of the discs that allow for easy movement of the bones in the back on each other
12.  Medical conditions like cancer, kidney stones or weak pelvic muscles


How Can Yoga Help With Back Pain
Many times we look at conventional remedies for backache like analgesics, tens units or even massages. But looking at the benefits of yoga and causes of back pain, we can see that yoga can help prevent back pain and alleviate the pain as well. We will be looking at yoga poses that can target the major causes of pain.
While doing yoga, always remember to breathe.
Some of these yoga poses that can help relieve the causes of low back pain are:

1. Downward Facing Dog
This pose balances out muscles in the back and lower legs and also stretches the muscles of the back, hamstrings and calf muscles.

2. Cobra Pose
This pose stretches the abdominal muscle and decreases any form of stiffness in the lower back

3. Child’s Pose
This pose stretches the lower back and muscles in the legs. It also helps in reducing stress and relaxes the muscles on the anterior part of your body.

4. Cat-Cow Pose
Pregnant women can do this pose. This pose stretches the back muscles and the abdominal muscles. It increases flexibility in the spine.

5. Spinal Twist
This pose lengthens the spine and prevents the intervertebral discs from drying up.

Conclusion
Yoga offers a lot of poses that stretch the major muscles in the body. It also has a balancing complex which means it engages other muscles that may contribute to lower back pain such as downward facing dog pose that stretches the back muscles and hamstrings which, when tight, can cause pain at the low back.

Yoga is effective in pain relief and also has added benefits. The poses can also be done anywhere even at work.

Article by Dr. Charles-Davies, a medical doctor that spends some of his time sharing helpful health information across the internet.