Good posture is defined as the position in which your body is under the least amount of stress. It can facilitate breathing, and prevent a number of unpleasant and possibly painful ailments from occurring. Your parents weren’t joking around when they kept telling you to “sit up straight!”
Over the course of the past several days, the invigorating experience of a good night’s sleep has escaped your grasp, interrupted by the reemergence of your chronic lower back pain. And no matter how you’ve tossed and turned, trying to get positioned comfortably upon your worn out mattress, the nagging pain and discomfort have kept you awake. If lower back pain has been keeping you up at night, take heart, as you are not alone.
As human beings, our bodies crave water, as we are over 70% comprised of that precious substance. Most of us, at one point or another, will suffer from the life-altering discomfort of back pain. Combining the two, what do our natural instincts tell us about using aqua therapy as a beneficial form of recovery? And, especially when our back pain prohibits us from enjoying our regular methods of exercise, including running?
Aqua therapy, also called “water therapy” or “pool therapy”, has been found to provide a number of back pain-relieving benefits when land-based exercises simply aren’t an option. Now let’s take a look at 4 of the key benefits of using aqua therapy when suffering from back pain.
From pregnant women to the UPS driver who is delivering your packages, many people are regularly plagued with sciatica. Sciatica is back or leg pain that radiates in the posterior thigh and often to the groin and even down into the toes. Sciatica can also be accompanied by numbness and tingling in the affected extremity. Check out these three stretches that can help relieve sciatica back pain.
Millions of Americans have experienced back pain at one point or another in their life, and it is one of the most common complaints that a doctor will hear from a patient on a visit. Understanding the source of your pain can be very overwhelming and frustrating, especially when a structural explanation cannot be provided.
Perhaps you are feeling sluggish, bloated, or like you simply have no energy to get through the day. Whatever it is that have you thinking about an all-over detox, yoga offers a natural and calming way to reboot your body. Detoxing with yoga poses offers some incredible health benefits that will revitalize both your body and mind. Specific yoga poses can remove toxins and waste from the body, improve digestion, and stimulate your circulatory and lymphatic systems. Others can balance hormones, improve sleep pattern and mental and emotional clarity, increase energy, and even aid in weight loss. Essentially, yoga poses could detox your body by releasing physical, mental, and emotional toxicity. Detox with these five yoga poses:
When we were kids we knew that stretching was important because they told us so, we avoided it if it meant we skipped right to recess. Now that we’ve grown up a bit, we wouldn’t step out the door in our running shoes without first warming up and stretching. We know it’s good for us so we do it.
In this day and age where we’re frequently sitting for 12-15 hours a day, we’re not moving as much as we should or would like to. Does that mean that stretching is no longer beneficial to our bodies? Absolutely not! Even if the most you can manage some days is the walk to and from your car (all while deliberately avoiding eye contact with your running shoes), stretching will help maintain your flexibility and mobility, strengthen your muscles, and can even provide neck and back pain relief that are symptoms of our common daily activities.
Tightness in the shoulders is often an underlying cause of a myriad of problems including neck pain, mid-upper back pain, and tension headaches. Individuals who spend a significant amount of time at a desk or working at a computer are especially susceptible to carrying tension in the shoulders. Below are five of the best stretches to relieve tight shoulders.
Lower back pain is one of the most common ailments that affect approximately 31 million Americans per year. Surprisingly, it is one of the leading causes of disability and affects up to 80% of individuals at one point or another. (Castillo) There are many causes for lower back pain as the lower back is comprised of muscles, nerves, bones, joints and ligaments. This pain is often different for each individual and may depend on the individual’s history and type and severity of pain experienced. Pain may be experienced by an individual directly after certain activities, after an injury, or as a result of a chronic condition. Since the bottom of the spine supports a lot of the body’s weight, damage or disruption to this area can cause pain in other parts of the body.
In this age of booming technology, many of us spend the majority of the day trapped behind a computer. That means, on average, we spend 40 hours a week typing on a keyboard or moving a mouse. When you add it all up, that’s a lot of strain on your wrists and the muscles and tendons that help make them work. Let’s take a closer look at what’s really going on and what you can do to fight the pain.
