Those suffering from chronic pain due to spinal misalignment often wonder if practicing yoga can help. Yoga can be very beneficial for easing spinal misalignment pain, especially when combined with general chiropractic treatment. Because a majority of chiropractors will use chiropractic adjustment as the sole treatment for spinal misalignment, placing much less focus on exercise or flexibility, yoga can fill in the gaps and enhance relaxation in a natural, restorative way.
However, it’s important to note that general chiropractic treatment and yoga each have limitations. For example, neither yoga nor general chiropractic treatment can resolve chronic pain commonly caused by postural and spinal alignment issues, and the pain will return once chiropractic treatment and yoga have been stopped. Also, while yoga can help with pain and improve overall health and mood, it generally only provides short-term relief. Additionally, some yoga poses can be detrimental to spinal health. This varies from person to person.
Learning which poses are better for your postural health is the best way to enhance your chiropractic care.
Understanding the Harmony Between Chiropractic Care and Yoga
Since chronic back pain can stem from poor posture, poor ergonomics and trauma, and other behaviors that can affect spinal alignment, yoga can enhance the benefits of chiropractic care by strengthening muscles and improving range of motion, balance, and posture. The right yoga routine can complement chiropractic care in the following ways:
Yoga Helps Prevent Future Injury
Both general chiropractic care and yoga aim to promote balance, reduce muscle tightness, and ensure proper joint function. Each of these benefits aims to reduce recovery time for current injuries and prevent the likelihood of future injuries. When the two practices are combined, the overall results can be even more effective.
Yoga Improves Range of Motion
Yoga relaxes muscles to improve flexibility and allows you to move your joints in a normal direction with less effort and restriction. Regularly practicing yoga to ease muscle tension and improve range of motion can allow your chiropractor to go more in-depth with treatment.
Yoga Strengthens Muscles
Regular exercise routines typically focus on large muscle groups, while yoga works to target all muscle groups to improve endurance and functional strength. Using yoga for increased muscle tone and balance can help your body respond better to chiropractic treatments.
Yoga Promotes Overall Well-Being
Both chiropractic care and yoga emphasize healthier lifestyles to aid their long-term benefits. This includes focusing on better nutrition and emotional health. Both practices also work to relax muscles and improve blood and nutrient flow, releasing hormones that help alleviate anxiety and depression and reducing the physical symptoms associated with anxiety and depression, such as muscle tension.
Enhancing Yoga Practice with Chiropractic BioPhysics®
Our bodies tend to break down over time due to cumulative injuries and the relentless force of gravity. The way our spine weakens and changes shape and how we absorb force as we walk and interact with gravity varies greatly from person to person. Chiropractic BioPhysics® (CBP) goes beyond just alleviating the pain associated with spinal weakness and misalignment; it renders nonsurgical structural rehabilitation of the spine and posture through in-depth measurements and customized treatment plans. Just as CBP focuses on an individual’s optimal spinal alignment, so should your yoga practice.
While it’s extremely difficult to find a yoga instructor who knows your structural pathologies and who can tailor poses specifically to you and your spine, discussing your yoga practices with a CBP chiropractor can help you resolve any of the yoga limitations you may have. While Chiropractic BioPhysics® works to fix your spinal misalignment and posture and resolve your physical limitations for improved long-term physical health, the in-depth measurements and images obtained for CBP treatment allow your chiropractor to help you understand which yoga poses could be detrimental during this treatment and which ones can enhance it.
Communicating with your chiropractor is essential if you want to get the most out of your chiropractic care and yoga practice. At PostureWorks, we use Chiropractic BioPhysics® to rehabilitate your spinal alignment and posture for optimal physical health. We can help you get the most out of your yoga practice by discussing how to combine it with postural exercises based on your unique spinal alignment. We tailor our treatments to your specific needs for greater long-term health so that your yoga workouts can reach even higher levels.
Chiropractic BioPhysics®, or CBP, is a deeply researched and results-oriented corrective care technique. CBP-trained chiropractors aim to realign the spine back to health and optimal function while eliminating the source of pain and circulatory and nervous dysfunction. As with all chiropractic care, CBP is conservative, painless, and non-invasive. To find out more about how chiropractic care and yoga can work together, contact us today to schedule an examination and take the first step toward a pain-free life.
