Vinyasa Yoga and Thai massage can help you prevent Lower Back Pain, improve your flexibility and tone your muscles
Do you suffer from back pain?
Back pain is estimated to affect 80% of adults at some point in their lives and 1 in 5 of us will visit a health professional in any given year to address this problem.
Are you in a sedentary job, spending lots of hours behind a desk in front of a computer screen?
This can help to compound the problem as over time the spine is being compressed in an unbalanced position, thus resulting in lower back pain. In conjunction with incorrect posture and how your desk is set up all assists in putting pressure on the back creating tension or spinal disc problems or at least a painful muscular unbalance or even sciatica.
Is your desk set up correctly?
For example, are you twisting or bending several times during the day whilst seated to get something out of a bottom desk draw, if these items are heavy along with the weight of your own body (for most of us, two-thirds of our body weight is above the waist) creates a greater strain on the back and the spinal discs in particular.
While heavy lifting is a well-known cause of back injuries, disc damage is just as frequently caused by the smaller but repetitious forward-bending movements that we do during our daily activities at work.
Your posture whilst seated at the desk, although at the beginning of the day you maybe more aware of it and make a conscious effort to sit correctly, but by lunchtime or later your posture has started to slip, either slouching, rounding the shoulders, stretching arms out towards the keyboard, pushing the chin forward to see the screen…the list is endless
By the end of the day all of these factors add to strain on the body and result in that visit to the health professional!
Vinyasa Yoga can help to reduce those visits as the focus on posture will make you more aware of how you are holding your body either walking or sitting at your desk. In addition, during the class due to the nature of Vinyasa the continuous movement not only will increase your flexibility and balance but will also help to strengthen and tone your body.
You will still have to address your desk layout (and the physiotherapist at swissphysio can help you there as well) so that the repetitive twisting and bending actions are reduced or eliminated completely but focusing on gaining a happy, healthy spine will reduce the likelihood of having a back problem in the future.
And thats not even mentioning the joys of what Yoga can bring to reducing your stress levels!
If you feel like a Yoga class at the end of your working day sounds too ambitious at the moment or you just want to completely relax you could always try Traditional Thai Massage, a series of movements (similar to those you do in yoga) but the practitioner does the work for you! They will help to create movement in the joints, increase your flexibility through the assisted stretching and energy flow throughout the body during the 90 or 120 minute massage.