Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The sternocleidomastoid

Excessive cellphone use can lead to shoulder and neck pain.

Holding a phone to your ear for extended periods sets up a string of prolonged tension in a gaggle of muscles that are prone to adapt to their shortened position. These include the upper trapezius, levator scapulae, supraspinatus. and pectoralis minor. So when you end your call and lower the arm, these muscles actually remain partially contracted in their “hold the phone” mode unless they’re fully stretched out. In addition, there are many specialized cranial nerves that flow underneath and within those muscles — and when those get blocked or compressed, you’ll get that “pinched nerve” sensation that can set up shop in your neck and shoulders for days on end.

In my Yoga Tune Up® classes, I work with dozens of students who have neck issues and rotator cuff injuries. While the causes of such injuries and pains are infinite, they often include basic underlying postural imbalances — and the imbalances caused by the repetitive stress of holding a cell phone is too often overlooked.

I’ve found that along with a consistent yoga practice, self-massage with my Yoga Tune Up® Therapy Balls has been an important element in healing and preventing these imbalances. Using the balls for targeted massage, along with a stretching program, helps to work out the tension built up in these areas by increasing circulation while lengthening and loosening all of the fibers in those spastic “cell phone grasping” muscles.

I highly recommend you compliment your yoga practice with some form of targeted massage therapy, as it is the combination of stretching and trigger point therapy that will keep your neck, shoulders and upper back relaxed and pain free.

She, like many women, had not been able to juggle the many demands of new motherhood with taking care of her own body, and as a result had never rebuilt the strength of her core that was lost through pregnancy. This had resulted in what was now a chronic lower back pain problem.

If this sounds familiar, then you should know that a simple 10-minute daily routine can begin to build strength and relieve the excess discomfort from the lower back. I recommended for her (and for you) the Sidewinder pose as a place to start, which can be found in the Quick Fix for the Lower Back video. It strengthens the lower back and oblique muscles without putting undue pressure on the lower back, and so can be performed safely for those with back pain. Strengthening the core can bring relief to a chronically painful lower back and make life more enjoyable again!

Setting aside vanity for a moment, rebuilding core strength is vital for the body after childbirth since it’s the number one way we can protect the lower back. Healthy abdominal muscles actually stick out a little bit (sorry Cosmo, but you’ve got it wrong!) and you should know that the yoga teachers and other instructors photographed for magazines are all pulling in their healthy muscles (and probably Photoshopped to boot!).

Working to regain core strength will give you a healthy and functioning body that can handle all the new challenges a mother faces. I recommend you start with Revolved Abdominal Pose version 1.5, which I’ve posted below, and can also be found in the Quick Fix Yoga for Lower Back video. This pose and the others found in the video will get you on the path to a stronger core, and that greater strength will give you more vitality than any personal chef ever could.

Click here to view the embedded video.

After childbirth, yoga practice can help relieve back pain by finding core strength.

The Myth of the Six-Pack

Most people know about the coveted “six-pack” called the rectus abdominus, and they lie uppermost on the abdomen, so they are often considered a sign of health and core strength. However, there are several other muscle groups that make up the abdomen, and are equally important for overall core health.

Picture the abdomen as a precious package that holds within it many major systems of the body (like digestion and reproduction) but without the protective covering of the ribcage. It would make sense to wrap this package in every direction, the way you would wrap a package in tape, to provide the greatest coverage for those important organs. In addition to the “six-pack” muscles, there are two sets of opposing diagonal muscles that wrap around the sides of the torso. There’s also a wide band of muscle that wraps horizontally like a cummerbund and attaches onto the back of the body. All of these muscles overlap each other to provide maximum coverage to the precious organs (and precious baby in utero!) beneath. And so they all need strengthening to create a support system for the lower back.

What Happens To Muscles After Childbirth

During pregnancy, these different layers of muscles get stretched to accommodate the growing baby. For about one-third of all pregnant women, the “six-pack” muscles will actually split down the middle at some point during pregnancy, labor, or delivery, a condition called diastasis recti. Although not especially dangerous, this condition does tend to lead to greater lower back pain, as the core muscles are not able to work as effectively. After childbirth, the abdominal muscles are no longer being held in that stretched out position, but they have lost a lot of their elasticity and strength. Apart from our vanity that propels us to get that “six-pack” back, we need all of those muscles to support the body while taking care of the baby’s many and varied needs!

1. Relieve Lower Back Pain with Self-Massage If you are currently experiencing lower back pain, I recommend self massage at home with the Yoga Tune Up® Therapy Balls. You’ll experience the relief of deep muscle relaxation after only a few sessions.

2. Begin A Core Strength Routine To build core strength, begin to add yoga fitness to your daily routine with a beginner yoga dvd.

3. Get Stronger and Stronger! For a more advanced core strength program, you can increase the difficulty of your routine with a more challenging yoga exercise program.

A strong and well-functioning core after childbirth will not only support your lower back but will increase your overall health and energy!

And then I started teaching, and every so often someone would come up to me after class and say something like, “When I do such-and-such pose, my knee kind of hurts on the outside.” And then they would pause, and look at me expectantly. The pause was always uncomfortable, because I would hem and haw for a bit, and then unleash this gem, “Well, maybe you shouldn’t do that pose,” followed by something generically useless like, “Take care of yourself.” After a while, it really started to bother me that I couldn’t do more to serve my students and help them get out of pain. I began to turn my studies and my teaching in the direction of anatomy, therapeutic work, kinesiology and the like. As a result of this path change, I spent last weekend assisting Jill Miller teach Yoga Tune Up® Anatomy at Liberation Yoga’s Teacher Training.

On day one of the training, the trainees reminded me what it was like to be new to anatomy: they were hearing strange words and working hard to give them context, sometimes finding themselves totally confused, and occasionally discovering moments of clarity and comprehension. The difference between their training and mine was that by day three, these trainees were naming muscles, directions of movement, and bony landmarks like they’d been doing it all their lives.  I credit this difference not to any lack of ability in my first anatomy teacher, but instead in the approach to the material. For a long time for me, anatomy was a concept that lived in books and diagrams, but this training was different. The Yoga Tune Up® Integrated Embodied Anatomy is exactly what it claims to be: a hands on (yourself and others) approach to the endlessly magical and mysterious world of the human body that we all get to live in. Ball rolling, Simon says games, and full embodiment of poses and movements took anatomy out of the books and into the trainees’ bodies.

With this kind of an in-the-body introductory experience, we got to see the trainees’ interest sparked as they felt the empowerment of truly owning their own anatomy. Hopefully for some, this spark will ignite a passion for a topic that will continue to hold their attention for their entire teaching careers. It might lead them to become Yoga Tune Up® teachers, or even fully-fledged Dorkasana practitioners.

Kathy’s face began to grimace within 5 seconds of holding the pose. As I was about to inquire, she came out of tree and began hobbling around in pain. “I’ll tell you later” she responded to my questions.

Most frequent areas of Plantar Fasciitis pain

Kathy soon confided in me that she was recovering from plantar fasciitis, a fact that she did not share on her intake questionnaire. As we spoke further, Kathy disclosed that high impact running on the treadmill too many days per week was probably the cause, according to her physician.

We tend to disconnect from the health of our feet, and attempt to “work-out” virtually every part of our body except our feet.  To many of us, our feet could be invisible, when in fact we rely on them to transport us through life. Our feet root us to the earth, and we need care for them in the way any living creature deserves.

One fun and very effective way to heed the call of discomfort in our feet is through Yoga Tune Up® Therapy Ball exercises. There is nothing like  rolling out the plantar fascia in every direction with the Therapy Balls to keep the soles flexible and supportive.

With Yoga Tune Up® Therapy Ball work, Kathy eventually stood tall and strong in tree pose!

Naturally, whenever I begin teaching a class of rank beginners, I immediately provide the guideline: yoga is practiced barefoot! Following that announcement, I invariably encounter a room full of deer-in the-headlights expressions from my students. The mere suggestion of exposing their feet to the world triggers emotions from shyness to rebellion. One of my more self-conscious students remarked: “my toes are so curly and ugly!”

Typically, we keep our feet hidden and encased in shoes and socks the entire day. And more often than not, the fit of our shoes is less than optimal, which can be a recipe for foot disaster. Plantar fasciitis, described in my previous article is the all too common result of neglecting to care for our feet. Over time, the flexible agility of the feet we started out with as children begins to disappear.

In order to start reclaiming the balanced foundation of our body in our feet, we can consciously stretch and strengthen the toes and soles. The Yoga Tune Up ® toe exercise I’ve posted below (and which can also be found here) will allow us to once again experience foot agility, and the subsequent willingness to fully inhabit our yoga poses through the “sole” of our practice.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In this video he shows his creative self-massage techniques with the balls during his flights. Ever the captain, he also shows his specific quick fixes that he designed for the flight attendants using the YTU Therapy Balls. Andrew displays how you can roll out shoulder pain, hip pain, foot pain and even a stiff lower back. The Yoga Tune Up® Balls are designed with a special grippy rubber that grabs onto layers of skin, connective tissue and muscle to provide a deep penetrating massage that kneads you right to the bone providing targeted trigger point therapy. On long flights, our bodies become profoundly dehydrated and stiff due to the circulating air, and sitting still in cramped uncomfortable seats. The Yoga Tune Up Therapy Balls introduce movement and circulation back into those stiff tired muscles, so that the body is refreshed, rehydrated, and nudged back into vibrancy.

In fact, when I told my student, Dominic, who is a flight attendant, that I was writing this blog about a Pilot and the Therapy Balls, he told me to add this, “My whole body aches due to jet lag and servicing our customers at 38,000 ft.  I find IMMEDIATE relief by using my YTU Balls in the galley and at my hotel layovers. I have no idea how I survived the friendly skies with out them.”

I travel nearly 170 days a year, and am proud to say that my body feels fantastic when I travel. YTU keeps me limber, strong and deeply relaxed, but the balls play a significant role in trouble-shooting areas that are culprits of stiffness and tension with my long bouts of travel! I am so grateful to Andrew for showing me even more ways to use my balls when in cramped spaces on the airplane! Wait till you see what can be done in the cockpit!

Let us know how you use your Yoga Tune Up® Therapy Balls when you travel!