3 Missing Pieces to Heal Your Back

You’ve gone to your Chiropractor, Massage therapist, Physiotherapist and Osteopath…. and you feel better for awhile, but you slip back into the back pain that brought you there in the first place! How do we end this cycle?

(p.s. I love my healthcare team and they are part of my own health management and in rehabilitation in injury. They are amazing at what they do…. AND you have so much more power to make their appointments work better for you and getting lasting results which is why I wrote this… to empower you)

Although there can be a number of factors like injuries, conditions, surgical plates etc. I have found after working with clients 1:1 it really comes down to these 3 things. If you can work on understanding and improving these 3 things, regardless of your condition your back will feel better.

The 3 Missing Pieces to Heal your Back Pain are:

1. Shoulder Blades and Hips must be able to move well (in all directions)

2. Breathing Mechanics and Core needs re-patterning

3. Operate within your Capacity

Let’s take a deeper dive into each of these to find out why they are so important.

What is between your shoulders blades and hips? Your back!

If your shoulder blades are stuck and have limited movement you will compensate somewhere else which is fine….. until the pain comes and its no longer fine.

Shoulder blades are triangular bones that are supposed to glide over top of the rib cage in all directions. There are a lot of muscles that cross over and under the shoulder blades and even have attachments to the shoulder blades. You can imagine then if your shoulder blades are not sliding well in all directions how those muscles and their attachments start to get tense, stuck, or sticky while pulling on their attachments (where they start and finish in the body), some of which attach to your back and hips which is where you are probably feeling the pain even though the problem is further up.

Same goes for your hips! A lot of people don’t actually know that one of your hip flexors (the psoas muscle) has attachments into the thoracic spine (mid back) and travel through the diaphragm (your breathing muscle)!

A simple solution would be to stretch your hip flexors right? Well yes and no. The idea of teaching the muscle to lengthen and contract is a good one, BUT, that muscle itself is a little more nuanced to get to all of the attachments and require some supporting movements like twists and side bends and breath (because remember it travels through your diaphragm).

This is your psoas muscle (your primary hip flexor). Can you see the attachment in the spine? This is why assessing your hip movement is important in fixing your back pain. It’s all connected.

An addition alignment of your shoulders, ribs and hips matters which is why I spend a lot of time here with my clients and group classes. If your hips are pulling forwards and your ribs are lifting up this alignment will affect your core and you will feel this in your low back. Which brings me to my next point…. the core.

The way you are breathing directly affects your core and therefore your back. Your deep core is like a canister with a bottom, a top, and a wall that travels from the back to the front. If any of these pieces are not strong enough, connected enough or not moving well it will affect the whole system. Working on getting these pieces moving together like a well oiled machine will not only get you breathing better but you will naturally feel stronger and be able to carry and disperse more load. (think of if someone hands you something heavy…. can you absorb the weight across your core or do you fold at the hips and feel it in your back?)

Absorbing more and carrying more is all about understanding your capacity. Not just your muscles but your energy level too. This is why so often I see people with back pain also feeling fatigued. They are constantly pushing through their limits and oscillating between ‘holding it together’ and ‘collapse’ by the end of the day. If you can fine tune your awareness to understand your capacity ie. how much weight you can carry, for how long, emotional stress, environmental stress etc. and peel back when you’re noticing it or even better… adding some breath or gentle movement in to help get you back on track so you don’t reach that collapse stage. Each time you build on this your capacity increases! You can start to do more! Get back to the things you love to do with a greater understanding so you trust yourself not to get hurt again as you’re building up your strength and integrity for the things you want to do.

If all of this sounds like exactly what you need i’m offering a group program which will address these 3 missing pieces and more. Its a personalized approach that I will guide you through specifically for your body and circumstances teaching you and guiding you so you learn how to move, and what operating in your capacity means for you. It’s called Back Pain and Burnout find out more here.

Workshops and Group Classes

How an oversized T-Shirt healed my shoulder injury

I had so much pain in my left shoulder. The list of things I couldn’t do was growing everyday; blow drying my hair, putting my seat belt on, putting on a long sleeve shirt… you get the idea. Things I had to do everyday, not to mention my hobbies and activities were painful too. You see I had injured my shoulder badly and the worst part was every morning I’d wake up in more pain. It felt like my efforts and appointments to heal that day were getting me nowhere. Until a very knowledgeable and resourceful chiropractor (Dr. Nicole Ciarolo, The Health Centre Integrative Therapies) gave me the t-shirt idea and BOOM! I started seeing a possibility that I could get better, that I could heal. 
Every morning I’d wake up and my arms would be up over my head, either sleeping on my stomach, side or back, they would be numb/asleep, then tingly then ouch!!! I used to describe the sensation in my shoulder as if my shoulder joint was an extra cheesy pizza (because I love pizza) and my arm bone was that first slice that’s being taken out and its held together only by the cheesy string. And when we are talking pizza (have I made your mouth water?) this is a good thing, shoulders? Not so much! It was like I couldn’t get a break from pain to make steps forward to heal. The step forward I needed? Believe it or not something that cost me nothing at all, something I had lying around my house…. an oversized T-shirt! 

The fact that its oversized matters. Hear me out on this because if you are experiencing shoulder pain this simple trick can be the starting line to healing.

Here is how to start the healing process:

• Before you go to bed each night put on an oversized t-shirt.

• Instead of putting your arms through the arm holes as you normally would, keep your arms inside the t-shirt and only have your head pop out the top like a human burrito. This keeps your arms by your side so they can’t lift over your head. Restricting your arms gives your injured arm(s) the much needed rest they need to heal at night so you don’t feel like you’re starting all over again in the morning like its some kind of injured arm Groundhog Day (if you’ve never seen the movie, he relives Groundhog Day every day until he learns the lessons he needs to from that day and makes the appropriate changes).

• Be patient. This may take some getting used to sleeping like a burrito. Give it two weeks at least and see if you notice a difference. 

Did this completely heal my shoulder? No, but it was a start. It was that glimmer of hope that healing is possible and I wasn’t going to be this way forever. Wearing the t-shirt at night helped reduce my pain. What did I do next? I actually gave myself scoliosis from layering on compensation patterns before finding yoga therapy (that’s another blog post altogether). Your story should be different! Which brings me to what do YOU do next? Well..that’s where yoga therapy comes in. 

Yoga Therapy with Ashlie can help you reduce pain by re-training the muscles so they work the way they were intended to work. When each of the muscles in the shoulder back and arm are moving the way they were designed to, there is balance and ease of movement. Everyday functions like putting dishes away in the cupboard or putting on a jacket becomes easy again. 

I typically work one-on-one because everyone’s body is so unique and responds so differently to the exercises. As a Yoga Therapist, I take a whole mind/body approach and work with you on what will create the most healing for you. In this example with the shoulder injury you may be surprised to find out that some hip exercises may work into the personalized practice and could be the key to alleviating the pain completely!

The ultimate goal for me as a yoga therapist is to help give you the tools to heal. You can get back to the activities you love that bring vitality to your life. Interested to know more? Visit my website www.fuelyourflow.com and you can book a complimentary consultation to find out how yoga therapy can help you feel better in your body.