Table Of ContentCONTENTS
Reviews
Chapter One - Introduction
A Yoga Teacher’s Journey Out Of Yoga-Induced Back Pain
Chapter Two - How to Use This Course
Chapter Three - Braced Neutral
Chapter Four - Standing Deep Breathing
Chapter Five - Spinal Elongation
Chapter Six - Hip Hinge Progressions
Chapter Seven - Eagle
Chapter Eight - Hip Airplane
Chapter Nine - Triangle 1
Chapter Ten - Triangle 2
Chapter Eleven - Reverse Lunges
Chapter Twelve - Belly-Down Corpse Pose
Chapter Thirteen - Cat-Camel
Chapter Fourteen - Bird Dog
Chapter Fifteen - Plank Variations
Chapter Sixteen - McGill Curl-Ups
Chapter Seventeen - Bridge
Chapter Eighteen - Passive Thoracic Extension
Chapter Nineteen - Carries
Chapter Twenty - Stir-the-Pot
Chapter Twenty-One - Fixed Firm
Chapter Twenty-Two - Meditation, Breath Awareness, and Finishing Your
Practice
Reviews of The Low Back Yogi program
“I started going to group yoga classes a few years ago to complement
my normal routine and help prevent injuries. I am quite happy to have been
introduced to Justin's series, as the sequence is far more tailored to my
needs. Quite usefully, Justin explains the logic behind the poses chosen, as
well as the reasoning behind why you might be better off skipping some of
the poses included in typical group classes. I recommend the course to
anyone who has dealt with back pain in the past as well as anyone who
wants to improve core strength and stability.”
-Jacob Mays
“I think he did a great job of presenting the material. He focused on a
specific therapy (yoga for the low back) instead of trying to teach all yoga
for all body parts to everyone and that was a wonderful thing because it
delivered exactly what was promised in the title of the course…He seems to
CARE about the practitioners too which is nice. He gives reasons why you
should do things a certain way and he gives advice as to how to approach
the practice and what to do for your back pain when you're not practicing.
His goal really seems to be helping people in pain. There were some non
traditional moves that were new to me and that says a lot because I'm
always studying exercise and constantly searching for variety. I find anyone
who can inspire me with something new very refreshing!!!”
-Sky Nicholas
“This feels revolutionary. I think with continued practice this could help
relieve lower back pain for many people familiar with yoga…The instructor
is obviously very knowledgeable and yet also has a gentle, encouraging
tone. He is a joy to watch and listen to. I don't think this course needs to be
changed in any way. It does exactly what it says, and I believe it would
provide great results over time for dedicated students who proceed with the
caution the instructor recommends.”
-Patricia Smith
“I don't know anything about yoga but this helped me and it's one I'll
watch again and again and take notes.”
-Lovely L. Jones
Acknowledgments
I found the keys to solving my chronic back pain in three books written
by Dr. Stu McGill: Low Back Disorders, Ultimate Back Fitness and
Performance, and Back Mechanic. I would like to thank Dr. McGill for his
years of dedicated research as director of the spine biomechanics lab at the
University of Waterloo. I would also like to thank my many yoga students
over the years who encouraged me to write this book, particularly those
students who participated in the video version of this yoga course on
Udemy and provided feedback. You have been instrumental to the success
of the Low Back Yogi program, and I am deeply grateful for your
contributions.
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
A Yoga Teacher’s Journey Out Of Yoga-Induced Back Pain
Yoga has somehow managed to get itself a great reputation for
helping to improve back pain, but here’s yoga’s dirty little secret: most
group yoga classes are absolute murder on the back, and can do far more
harm than good in many cases.
Here’s the science:
The middle of your spinal discs are made up of a liquid gel, called
the nucleus, which is surrounded by rings of collagen fibers that keep the
nucleus in place.
What happens when you repeatedly bend forward into spinal
flexion, as you so often do in yoga poses, is that you create hydraulic
pressure in the nucleus.
Every forward-bending cycle causes the collagen fibers to loosen
and, over time, to slowly delaminate.
All this forward-bending produces hydraulic stress of the nucleus,
posteriorly, on the fibers that are slowly delaminating.
As a result, repeated spinal flexion will slowly pump the nucleus
through the delaminating collagen fibers, to create a posterior bulge in the
spinal disc.
As Dr. Stu McGill has been known to say, “life isn’t fair,” and
one’s ability to withstand repeated cycles of flexion depends greatly on the
discs you inherited from your parents. Some people can get away with
spinal flexion for longer, and under much higher loads, than others.
As a yoga practitioner turned yoga instructor, I got away with
aggressive yogic flexion exercises for about two years, feeling no ill effects.
Then, when I did suddenly feel the onset of chronic back pain, it was too
late. The damage had already been done.
You do not feel the delamination process happening in your spinal
discs, you only feel it when it’s too late, when the disc material bulges
through the delaminated collagen fibers and causes nerve irritation.
If you go to a yoga class already experiencing low back pain, this
delamination process has probably already begun — perhaps from an injury,
too much sitting, aggressive exercise, etc.— and most yoga classes will only
make the pain worse in the long term. If you start a yoga practice without
back pain, chances are your group yoga classes will give you back pain if
you keep at it long enough.
The confusing thing about this is that yoga stretching will almost
always provide some short-term relief of back pain symptoms, even if the
postures are exacerbating underlying structural issues. This happens
because the “stretch reflex” is a neurological phenomenon that reduces pain
sensitivity, but unfortunately it only lasts about 15 to 20 minutes. (See
https://www.theptdc.com/2017/04/back-pain-myths/ for more from Dr.
McGill on this issue.) Like most things that feel good, the pleasure we feel
from stretching can make us feel like all we need is more of that feel-good-
thing. But if you have back pain, the last thing I recommend you should do
is go to a yoga class and engage in aggressive spinal-flexion and spine-
twisting postures, to ‘loosen up.’ Chances are, you’re already doing too
much rounding and slouching in your day-to-day life. Going to yoga class,
and rounding and twisting your spine even more, isn’t going to do you any
favors.
Trust me on this.
Yoga made me feel so good at first that I decided to dedicate my
life to teaching it…but then, suddenly, I found that I was in so much pain
that my life began to revolve around how much my back was hurting.
You’d think that suddenly having crawl to the bathroom on my
hands and knees would make me re-evaluate my yoga practice, but all my
teachers and gurus were telling me that yoga was ‘good’ for my bad back,
and my whole life was tied up in yoga, so I couldn’t conceive that it was
hurting me. I just thought, “Wow, if my back is hurting this bad while I’m
doing a lot of yoga, imagine how much worse it would be if I weren’t doing
any yoga at all!” I couldn’t let in the notion that the thing I’d based my
career on was actually hurting me.
Students often come to yoga thinking that if they can just ‘open
up,’ improve their flexibility, their range of motion, they will feel relief
from their ‘locked-up’ backs.
But what if our central nervous systems are smarter than we are?
What if our back muscles are ‘locking up’ for a reason, to prevent us from
engaging in harmful movement patterns? What if—as has been shown time
and again—improved flexibility is an increased risk factor for back pain,
rather than a preventative measure, as is so often assumed?
What if improved strength, stiffness and stability in our spines is
what we need to lead more pain-free lives? This would fly in the face of
what I like to call “Yoga Logic,” which says that more flexibility is always
better. But this is what the science bears out:
THE MORE ‘FLEXIBLE’ YOUR SPINE, THE MORE YOU ARE
PUTTING YOURSELF AT RISK FOR BACK PAIN.
When it comes to most back pain, the fact is that there is no known
benefit to greater spinal flexibility.
The research undertaken by Dr. Stu McGill’s Spine Biomechanics
Laboratory at the University of Waterloo has proven time and again that
delaminated collagen fibers and micro-movements of the spinal joints,
irritating the spinal nerves, are the prime culprits in back pain. Therefore,
targeting the back muscles for yoga stretching and flexibility work will
cause further weakness, instability, delamination and pain.
This is what happened to me.
I was able to eliminate my debilitating lower back pain, but only by
quitting my group yoga practice—not to mention my yoga teaching career
—and applying Dr. McGill’s research and creating an individualized,
home-based yoga practice for myself.
There is something to be said for the sense of discipline and
community that one can derive from a strong group yoga experience.
Unfortunately, this comes at a price: lack of personal attention, poorly-
trained and/or inexperienced instructors, pre-set posture sequences that
might be good for someone’s bottom line but which have nothing to do with
your body. The popularity and corporatization of yoga has resulted in a
concomitant lack of autonomy for yoga teachers, who have been turned into
trained parrots whose job it is to recite scripts, play certain music, lead
people through pre-set one-size-fits-all posture sequences that have been
established by a guru or a corporation. It has become a billion dollar
industry built on the backs of people making poverty-level wages, resulting
in high turnover. For the most part, group yoga instructors in America are
under paid, under trained, and woefully ill equipped to deal with back pain
patients. I have come to believe that a one-size-fits-all approach to any form
of exercise is a recipe for disaster; for injury, re-injury, and chronic pain.
When I left my own teaching career and set my mind to creating a
home yoga practice that would heal my back, I felt like I was starting from
scratch. My poor yoga-abused back was hyper sensitive to forward-
bending, but I also didn’t do well with end-range extension (those deep,
sexy back bends).
Figuring out which postures would help me rather than hurt me
wasn’t easy, since most yoga poses are seriously contraindicated for back
pain, and I had to get past my attachment to “Yoga Logic.” But, after great
effort and research, I have developed a challenging yet conservative
approach to yoga that eliminates most of the problematic issues that link
yoga with chronic back pain.
Instead of focusing on arbitrary “flexibility,” the focus of this
course is on strength, endurance, stability, and appropriate mobility. Some
areas of the body are great candidates for yoga-style mobility work—ball
and socket joints like the shoulders and hips, for example— but not the
spinal joints, which need to be ‘locked down’ in those of us with back pain.
The concepts of Beginner’s Mind, forgetting everything you’ve
been taught and think you know about yoga, and Mastery of Simplicity,
which really just boils down to patience, are concepts I encourage my
students to embrace.
Most rank-and-file yoga teachers mean well, but I strongly believe
that for those of us with serious back problems, the only way to experience
the benefits of a sensible yoga practice that will contribute to good back
health, rather than wrecking it, is to establish an individualized home
practice and arm ourselves with knowledge about the science of back pain.
I was afraid of my back pain for many years, because I didn’t
understand it. I didn’t understand it because I was afraid of looking beyond
the soft tissue, afraid that if I had “disc problems” or more profound
structural issues, I would wind up needing back surgery (which was not
true). I also didn’t understand my back pain because, for economic reasons,
the science of back pain hasn’t penetrated the yoga world…like, at all. If it
ever does penetrate, yoga studios are going to have to drastically rethink
their business model and teaching practices.
