yoga & resistance bands by kristin frederick
Most of us come to our yoga mats to find relief from pain and discomfort.
Whether our discomfort is physical, mental, or both, the yoga practice can provide great tools for managing it. The physical practice of yoga, or asana, can be useful for temporarily relieving tension in the body. When practiced consistently, asana can help us increase both our strength and flexibility, but which of those is providing us relief from tension? It depends on the person. Some of us need more strength, some more flexibility and others need both. Our bodies, just like our minds, prefer balance. Unfortunately, I learned this the hard way.
About two years into my practice, the combination of my love of asana, some really bad advice, and my minimal education in anatomy lead me to abandon all other forms of movement except for yoga. 6 months later, I began to feel tension in places I had never experienced before. Of course, I did what any die-hard yogi would do; I stretched the areas that felt tight. It didn’t help. In fact, it continued to get exponentially worse.
So why didn’t stretching provide relief?
The tension I felt was actually in the areas I overstretched. Constantly stretching my body without the strength work to balance it out created a lot of weakness and instability, particularly around my hips and low back. It is believed that when your nervous system senses instability surrounding a joint, it will send a signal of discomfort or stiffness to the area to protect you from moving into a range of motion that you can’t control. In addition, these same signals may be sent when your nervous system has difficulty sensing where a joint is in space. This is often referred to as a loss of proprioception and has been associated with repetitive postures such as sitting. (1)
Do you experience nagging pain or discomfort in your low back, hips, butt, shoulders, upper back and/or neck?
If you answered yes, think about how often you spend sitting, rounding your back, shoulders rolling forward and your head forward of your shoulders. When your body assumes these shapes, many of the muscles of your back body are put into a lengthened position (even if it doesn’t feel like a stretch). Over time, this can lead the muscles of the back to become weak, which can result in them feeling tight. Interestingly, this can also leave the chest muscles feeling tense as a result of being in a prolonged contracted position. When you begin to experience stiffness, you do what we have all been told would provide us relief from it, stretch. Maybe you experience temporary relief, so you look for assistance by stepping onto your yoga mat.
So, you go to a yoga class and focus on stretching, because that’s what yoga is, right? Unfortunately, that’s a common misconception. Asana is actually a balance of steadiness and ease, or as the yoga sutras say, sthira and sukha.
Stability or steadiness comes first thru muscular engagement and then from that place we find the stretch or ease. Although, as you now know, more stretching might not be what many students truly need to relieve their discomfort. Now, think about your average fast paced vinyasa flow class. This type of class usually includes a number of repetitive movements, as well as quite a few poses that specifically stretch the back of the body. On top of that, we often bring our existing imbalances into our asana practice and end up reinforcing them.
Let’s specifically look at some of the poses in the “vinyasa”, chatarunga (low pushup) and upward facing dog or cobra. All of these poses require a great deal of upper back strength to keep the shoulders back. Particularly when it comes to chatarunga, what often happens is our shoulders roll forward and we mirror the same posture we are trying to balance out. Comparatively, think about how often we are in a pose that specifically stretches the back of the body like, forward fold, flat back, downdog, childs pose, triangle, pyramid pose. This is great if what you need is to stretch the back of your body, but again that’s not what everyone needs.
Let me be clear this is not a call to abandon your asana practice or your desk job.
When practiced in moderation, the postures themselves aren’t harmful to the body; it’s the repetition and lack of mindfulness that creates a problem. Additionally, we need to spend more time countering these postures in order to bring the body into balance. Even better, you can find ways to incorporate more strengthening elements into your yoga practice.
This is where yoga with resistance bands came into the picture for me, and why I’m offering it to my students now.
In many cases, the addition of the bands helps to make sure the desired balance of effort and ease is achieved by providing something to press into or stopping point. This can be especially helpful for a more flexible student. Their flexibility can result in trouble engaging their muscles and knowing when they’ve gone too far into a stretch. These yogis often report an increase in stability, as well as a feeling of being held in when working with the resistance bands. On the other hand, the sensory feedback they provide can give someone who is on the stiffer side the input their nervous system needs to enable a stronger mind-body connection to their tense areas. Students have reported that the tactile information provided by the bands brought awareness to areas with which they had previously felt disconnected. Finally, sometimes students’ even report being able to do poses that they normally aren’t able to after using the bands to activate the supporting muscles of the pose.
If you’re interested, I’ll be offering Yoga with Resistance Bands Workshops and Yoga Conditioning classes in the coming months.
This type of work can help you more easily identify the areas in which you need more strength versus those that need more flexibility. Ultimately, we all want to work towards the coveted balance between both.
I recently launched my first online course, Get Strong Yogi! Get on the waitlist to find out when we will launch it again!
(1) Dr. Greg Lehman, Reconciling Biomechanics With Pain Science, Recovery Strategies – Pain Guidebook, http://www.greglehman.ca/pain-science-workbooks/
Kristin Frederick’s vinyasa classes are breath-centered and focus on incorporating strength and stability into a practice that is often biased towards flexibility. In an effort to promote both mindfulness and body awareness, she emphasizes the importance of anatomy and alignment while teaching. She teaches Vinyasa and Yoga Conditioning at Yoga Home – see her current schedule here.