Baby Your Back

By Nora Isaacs

Target your back pain with Viniyoga

Yoga can fix back-related problems, but not just any yoga. In fact, the wrong poses can make back problems worse. But Viniyoga sequences are designed as therapy for specific health issues. The sequences presented here are tailored to relieve lower-back pain.

Everyone knows someone who swears that yoga healed their aching back. And now even the latest science backs up these claims: A 2005 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that practicing yoga postures was more effective than traditional treatments for chronic lower-back pain.

But wait—be careful. The truth is that depending on your particular back problem, moves that show up in most popular forms of yoga—intense twists, inversions, and even a basic Warrior pose—can actually do damage, especially if performed with improper alignment.

However, Viniyoga—the kind proven beneficial in that back-pain study—can bring relief. This technique is really yoga therapy, in which different postures are prescribed by a Viniyoga teacher. When it comes to the back, carefully chosen sequences can help stabilize hyper-mobile joints, loosen contracted muscles, establish new muscular patterns, and increase circulation, says Gary Kraftsow, founder of the American Viniyoga Institute and designer of the lower-back study.

Viniyoga uses the principle of proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF). PNF simply means warming up and contracting a muscle before stretching it. Where other styles are static, Viniyoga emphasizes repetition, moving in and out of postures and gradually building the number of breaths you stay in a pose. As you do the reps, you “focus on the breath, observing how the body opens, taking you deeper without force,” says Robin Rothenberg, a Viniyoga therapist in Issaquah, Washington, who coauthored the protocol for the lower-back study with Kraftsow and was the instructor for the yoga classes participants took. This method allows you to “increase the range of motion slowly and cautiously,” she says.

The four sequences below can be used at home without an instructor or therapist. (Before you try this routines, make sure your doctor has ruled out a herniated disk, which will require different treatment.) Remember, too, that you don't need to wait until your back blows up to turn to yoga. Lucky with your back so far? Take the initiative and practice all these sequences once a week. It just might keep you from joining the Back Pain Legions.

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