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You’ve tweaked your back. It may be a stabbing pain that catches with certain movements, it may be that you cannot straighten up, or maybe it’s an electrical, nervy sensation in your buttock.  

A back spasm is never welcome—but it is a signal we can act on—when we know how. Image by: Kampus Production

It’s true that time is a great healer—and that most back pain resolves itself without intervention—but there are also things we can do to accelerate the healing, that can help us feel better immediately, and protect us in the longer term. 

Should I take pain meds?

Pain meds (muscle relaxants, anti-inflammatories, and pain signal blockers) can be useful in allowing you to remain reasonably active, preserve your mental health, work, care for dependents, and more. They can also have negative side effects and create dependence. Using pain meds is a very individual decision to be made with your medical advisors, but if you do use meds, be sure you are using the relief they give you as a window of opportunity to address the root causes of your back pain.

Should I keep moving or rest up? 

There is research showing that for back pain, maintaining normal activities as tolerated gives a better outcome than bed rest. Maintaining gentle movement is nearly always advisable as it promotes healthy circulation and healing in the injured area. It also counters joint stiffness, muscle weakness, and loss of fitness. As the saying goes, “motion is lotion.” Maintaining regular activities as tolerated also helps you keep up with your friends, hobbies, and tasks, and staves off depression. 

In our experience doing normal activities with truly normal (healthy) posture gives an even better outcome.

Activities done with healthy posture are protective against back spasms and injuries.

Move like you are meant to

Unless it was a freak accident, think back to what caused this spasm. Going forward, what are you going to do differently to make sure it doesn’t happen again? Are there movements to avoid until you have learned what is truly healthy for your body, be that in bending, twisting, or reaching? Students have sometimes discovered that certain “healthy” exercises, such as cat-cow, or roll-downs, feel wonderful at the time, but that such alternating flexion and extension provokes their backs to stiffen up or spasm later. 

Poorly designed stretch and mobility exercises such as cat-cow actually push deeper into existing curves, provoking inflammation and stiffness. Images from Freepik 

Non-drug treatments 

Alternative or additional treatment for back spasms might include massage, physical therapy, acupuncture, chiropractic, and osteopathy. It would be fair to say that while many of our students find one or more of these modalities helpful, they are seldom sufficient to get to the root cause of their back flare-ups and prevent them from recurring. When I was a practicing acupuncturist, I found that my patients responded better to treatment for back pain when I also helped them with their posture. Their bodies could heal and strengthen better when they stopped unwittingly reverting to poor bending, lifting, walking, sitting, and sleeping positions after their treatments.

Gokhale Method® solutions

I would like to offer two key Gokhale Method techniques that can accelerate your journey out of pain, plus get you started on creating the baseline conditions to keep your back healthy into the future. 

You will use readily available surfaces—a mattress or an exercise mat, and the backrest of a chair—to put your back into mild traction. You will be able to use this surface to contact and gently stretch your skin, which stretches the flesh underneath and gently eases your vertebrae apart. This will gradually tease out tension and spasm, facilitate circulation and healing, and bring peace to the area. These techniques are useful for five minute “resets” during the day, or for hours at a time, as needed.

Caution: If your back pain is persistent or severe, we recommend you consult your medical team prior to using these techniques.

Technique 1: Stretchlying

Stretchlying can transform lying down into therapeutic traction and comfort—even as you sleep. You can get started with this video.

Technique 2: Stretchsitting

Stretchsitting can transform compressive sitting (and driving) into hours of therapeutic traction and comfort. You can get started with this video.

You can learn these techniques in greater detail, with modifications for your body, in our in-person Foundations Course and our online Gokhale Elements. My book, 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back, has illustrated, step-by-step instructions. Our stretchsit® cushion is a handy tool to make poorly designed chairs more comfortable and healthy. Here you can find a video on how to attach it to just about any chair. We’ve put it on sale until April 1 for $54.90, discounted from $59.90, plus free domestic shipping.

The stretchsit® cushion not only creates a healthier shape for your backrest, its soft “sticky” nubs are specially designed to give comfortable traction. 

Doing things differently

Pain is nature's biofeedback mechanism—one which alerts us to the threat or occurrence of injury, which we should act on. Unfortunately our culture has not equipped us well to interpret our pain signals, nor to understand the systematic errors we may be making in our body use. 

Once we recognize that poor postural habits are the root cause of our back pain, the process of change can begin. A teacher’s experienced eye can be invaluable in assessing your individual postural patterns and issues, helping you to steer out of trouble and into a healthier relationship with your body.

The way we make every movement determines whether our back has length and support, or is vulnerable to damaging stress. Here I am guiding a student in glidewalking. 

Best next action steps 

If you would like to know how changing your posture can prevent your back pain, get started by booking a consultation, online, or in person with one of our teachers. 

You can sign up below to join any one of our upcoming FREE Online Workshops…

According to Dr. Tammy Chen’s NY Times column, dental patients are suffering from an “epidemic of cracked teeth” due in part to posture. How can we avoid a similar fate? Image courtesy Engin Akyurt on Unsplash.

I recently came across a New York Times column by Tammy Chen, DDS, a prosthodontist with a practice in Manhattan, describing the “epidemic of cracked teeth” she’s seen in her patients during the COVID pandemic. Dr. Chen names two suspected culprits: the slumped posture many people adopt while working from home with improvised furniture, and excessive anxiety and stress. Both of these culprits lead to jaw clenching and tooth grinding.

This man’s C-spine — an intensely rounded upper back and tucked pelvis — are all too common in people working from home and on laptops. As Dr. Chen pointed out, such postural habits can have deleterious effects on the jaw.

The dangers of a C-spine
While working remotely, people are slumping and hunching at their computers more than ever before. For many unaware of how to sit healthfully, lack of access to office workspaces (and in some cases, ergonomic furniture) has been difficult to adjust to. Anyone plagued by a C-spine — with an intensely tucked pelvis below rounded, hunched shoulders — is doing themself some real damage if they don’t learn new ways of using their body. I’m always calling out the unhealthy stresses this puts on discs, nerves, bones, and ligaments in the back and neck, but the consequences of poor posture don't stop there.

Gaming posture also often tends toward a C-spine, to the detriment of gamers’ long-term spinal health, as well as jaw health.

As Dr. Chen points out, nerves passing through the neck and shoulder lead directly to the temporomandibular joint (TMJ). TMJ dysfunction is a widespread problem in our culture and can lead to pain, clicking, and popping in the jaw. So it stands to reason (and I’ve seen in my decades teaching) that hunched, slumped posture in the upper body, including the neck and shoulders through which nerves pass, has detrimental effects on the jaw.

The temporomandibular joint (TMJ) connects the jaw to the skull. Original image courtesy Wikipedia user Jmarchn under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Healthier posture = healthier teeth
Thankfully, learning new and healthful ways of using the upper body while sitting and sleeping is within all of our reach. When sitting, the alternative to collapsing into a C-spine is to first fix the foundation of the spine, which is the pelvis. When the pelvis is tucked under, it provides a wonky base for the spine to rest on. Like a building with poor foundations, the spine is then distorted as a consequence, rounding out the back to then cantilever forward with the upper body. This obliges the muscles in the neck and shoulders to do overtime supporting the substantial weight of the head, creating tension and compression all the way through to the jaw.

The remedy is to learn to position the pelvis well by stretchsitting or stacksitting — so named because they either allow the spine to stretch out straight (stretchsitting), or for the bones of the spine to stack upright and relaxed (stacksitting). Both enable sustainable shoulder placement, and a well positioned neck and head. Bingo! Their harmonious arrangement of bones and soft tissues gives our nerves the space and pathways they need to function happily.

Our jaws and teeth are among the body parts where anxiety and stress most noticeably take their toll. Image courtesy Nhia Moua on Unsplash.

Anxiety and stress affect the jaw
Jaw clenching and tooth grinding at night while sleeping are typically the result of anxiety and stress, both of which are increasingly common in 2020. This added pressure and friction on the dental surfaces are another factor Dr. Chen suspects in the high number of cracked teeth she’s seen in her practice since June. How can posture help here?

Learning stretchlying brings our students a level of comfort and rest many have never experienced before. Image courtesy Minnie Zhou on Unsplash.

The luxuriously comfortable and relaxed postures we teach for sleep help relieve tension all throughout the body and improve sleep quality. Better, deeper sleep gives us a more stable footing on which to meet the day, even in stressful settings, and can help our mental health considerably. Why not take steps to improve our sleep quality if it can help our health, both mental and dental?

We recommend stretchlying on the back because it supports and gently tractions the body in ways that allow muscles that have been overworking to finally relax, releasing their grip on the back, the neck and, yes, the jaw. It may seem surprising to link healthy posture and dental health, but it actually makes perfect sense that jaw tension and teeth grinding can have positional causes.

If you’d like to revamp your understanding of comfort and perhaps invest in something other than your dentist’s next vacation, try an Online Initial Consultation with one of our online teachers. We also have a new Free Online Workshop all about how you can use posture to relieve stress! We look forward to supporting you (and your pearly whites) in these challenging times.

I’ve taught stretchlying on the side for decades. So it’s a (welcome) surprise to discover a way of arranging the neck that is both more effective in adding additional neck length and more relaxing for the neck muscles.

It takes good form to be able to get rest on a surface this hard.
 

In July, reindeer herders in Samiland corral their reindeer to mark the ears of the unbranded calves. This involves stretches of waiting, some of it done reclining on the side, as above.

To date, I’ve taught students to grasp a clump of hair at the base of the skull and pull backward and upward so as to elongate the neck and slide the head back along the pillow into a healthier configuration.

Grasping the hair to guide the back of the head up and back.

My head is supported by a pillow and my forearm acting as a second pillow.

A new technique for lengthening the neck in stretchlying on the side
When I sleep on my side, I usually sleep on just one pillow and place my forearm under the pillow to add a second layer of thickness. Recently I discovered that I could use that forearm to manipulate my head position and enhance the stretch of the back of my neck. By slightly extending my forearm, I was able to elongate my neck further. Using my arm beneath the pillow, I was easily able to manipulate the pillow to move my head where I wanted it to go — rotated forward and glided back. This without tensing a single muscle in my neck and getting a better result — more fine-tuned and with a stronger stretch if that’s what I want (I do). The head’s journey back was very smooth — the pillow provides a soft, cushioned interface, and almost creates the illusion someone is doing the maneuver to you.

A supportive family supported by J-spines!

Forearm and pillow supporting an elongated neck. Enjoying a happy moment on the day of the public television program shoot.

Have you discovered extra techniques that improve your neck’s posture journey? Please do share your discoveries so everyone can benefit!