Empowered Yogi Podcast

The Missing Link In Your Low Back Pain Recovery Journey

• Cathy Aganoff • Season 1 • Episode 2

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Episode 2: The Missing Link in Your Low Back Pain Recovery Journey

Are you doing all the right things for your back pain, but still not getting lasting relief? In this episode of The Empowered Yogi Podcast, Brisbane physiotherapist and yoga therapist Cathy Aganoff reveals the often-overlooked missing link in low back pain recovery and how yoga therapy can help you finally break the cycle of recurring pain.

You’ll discover:

  • Why common treatments like massage and core exercises often aren’t enough
  • The three key foundations of long-term low back pain recovery
  • How awareness of your neutral spine, core stability, and hip hinge movement can transform healing
  • The role yoga therapy plays in reconnecting your body and brain for pain-free living

Whether you’re struggling with ongoing low back pain, or you’re a yoga teacher, physio, or health professional looking for fresh insights, this episode offers practical tools and thought-shifts to support lasting change.

✨ Key takeaway: Recovery isn’t about doing more, it’s about addressing the missing link that’s holding you back.

👉 Listen now to learn how you can apply these strategies in your own life and start moving toward a stronger, pain-free future.

🔹 Resources & Links Mentioned in This Episode

Thanks for listening. If today's episode landed for you and you had some aha moments and insights, I’d really love to connect with you and hear what they are.

The best place to connect with me is over on my insta. You can DM me there @cathys_yogajournal and if you enjoyed the episode I invite to give it a 5 star rating and leave me a review.

SPEAKER_00:

Have you found yourself wondering if you're missing something? That you're doing all the things, acupuncture, massage, and core focused workouts, but you're still experiencing recurring episodes of low back pain. You may be surprised to know that none of these things actually help to address the root cause of most cases of low back pain. In this episode, I'm going to show you the three vital steps to actually overcoming most cases of low back pain. So you can actually make move forward with your practice and wellness goals and stop taking one step forward and two steps backwards every time you have a flare up. Welcome to the Empowered Yogi podcast, where movement and neuroscience meets yoga and spirituality. I'm Cathy Aganoff, physiotherapist and yoga teacher, with over 20 years of experience helping yoga lovers overcome injuries and reclaim their yoga practice and lifestyle. I'm here to share with you my most valuable teachings to help you get off that recurring injury hamster wheel and get back to thriving on the mat. So I mentioned that there's these three things you need to overcome lower back pain. And you may not know this about me, but I actually suffered with recurring low back pain in my early years as a physio. And to be honest, I was missing all three of these components. Two of them for sure. I had the first one sort of okay, but I knew what it was from my physio education, but for sure I hadn't embodied it. So I guess it doesn't really count. Once I figured this out, I spent a good 18 months working through all three of these steps in my own body. I had just started practicing yoga at this stage and I was going through so many of these aha moments on the mat. Maybe you can relate. It's this experience where you're discovering all the little nuances of your movement on the mat and it's kind of like cha-ching and clarity dawns. And over 20 years now, of helping clients overcome lower back pain. I've discovered time and time again that if one of these steps is missing, you usually remain stuck on the recurring low back pain hamster wheel. This frustrating cycle where you have a flare up, so you stop and rest and have a few treatments maybe, eventually it resolves and you think it's all good or maybe it just returns to a manageable baseline. And so you go back to your normal life and yoga practice and bam, It happens again. And every few months you find yourself back in the loop. You're constantly taking one step forwards and two steps backwards and it's frustrating. And maybe you've just resigned yourself to the belief that this is just you now, that you just have your physio or osteo or massage appointments and you just learn to manage it and live with it. But I also think that if you're here listening to this episode, then maybe there's also a part of you that senses deep down there is a solution that isn't just about learning to live with it. And so if that sounds familiar to you, then keep on listening, dear yoga friend, because I'm about to reveal all three components to healing lower back pain and what it looks like when one of the steps is missing. And by the end of this episode, you'll have clarity on which step you need to give more attention to and how to go about that. The good news is that if you are someone who is willing to roll up your sleeves and take full responsibility for your healing, there is a way to get off this injury hamster wheel for good. There's actually three things that you need to focus on. I'm going to give you all three here and then I'm going to unpack it a little bit more so that you can hopefully get more clarity on which of these three you may be missing or not quite nailing. Okay, so diving right into the first one. which is to develop your neutral spine awareness. And it's the first pillar of my signature program, the Empowered Yogi Method. Essentially, this step is about learning how to find your neutral spine. There is some nuance to this step because you may have noticed this by glancing at your fellow yogis on the mat next to you, that our anatomy is actually quite varied. Not so much that we have different bones, We're part of the same species, of course, but the shape and size of our bones varies a ton. And this actually creates a lot of variation in the range of motion in our joints. So because of this, your neutral spine may look a little different to the yogi on the mat next to you. And that is okay. There is no one size fits all neutral spine alignment here. But in saying that, the cues to adopt this position are much the same. It's just how far you go with those cues may vary. There are actually five cues that I teach for nailing your neutral spine, and I'm going to teach you the first one now. But before I do, I want to tell you why this step is so important. And the reason is this. The neutral spine is the strongest position for the individual joints to buffer loads. In the neutral position, which for the spine is an S-shaped curve, the individual joints are evenly loaded from front to back and side to side. So any load placed on the spine in this neutral position is more evenly distributed, which prevents a concentration of load or stress in one part of the spine. You see, even standing in Tadasana or mountain pose, your spine is absorbing load. There's the load of your head and upper body traveling down from above through each segment of the spine. And there's the load from the ground reaction forces traveling up through your feet, your legs, your hips and into your spine from below. Your spine is basically one big load transmission mechanism. And it's really important. I also mentioned here, so I'm not at any risk of spreading misinformation, that it's somehow bad or wrong to bend from your spine because our spine needs to be able to move in all directions and do so regularly to be healthy and resilient. And that is one reason why I'm such a big fan of yoga for overall spine health. But while this is true, We also need to be strategic in loading the spine in a neutral position more of the time, especially when the load is higher or more repetitive, like is in the case with bending, a movement that you most likely do more than 100 times a day. Not addressing this step usually results in overload of the spine over time because too much force concentrates in one area of the spine. Where exactly that point of overload concentrates varies from person to person because our movement and anatomy is so nuanced. For you it could be higher up the spine slightly. For someone else it could be quite low down in the lower back or down in the SI joint even. The other example of overload from not adopting your neutral spine is in sitting. If you don't have a good neutral spine awareness then you're most likely to swing between two misalignments when sitting at the computer or sitting in general. The most obvious one being slumped sitting. And then what do you do when you realize you're slumping? Maybe when you were a kid, it was your mom or your teacher that said, sit up straight. And so you swung from a slump to a military type posture and puffed out your chest, both of which are missing the mark. Getting this dialed in is critical for healing your low back issues and to be totally transparent it really requires some expert guidance to navigate in the beginning but once you learn this and it becomes hardwired into your brain's blueprint then you're empowered with the neural circuitry so it's yours it's not something you can unlearn unlike when you receive a passive treatment it's something that's actually hardwired into your brain and so when you get up off the treatment table after a manual adjustment, you inevitably go back to the way your spine was positioned before you lay down, based on your brain's blueprint for spine alignment. So this is why I'm such an advocate for the empowered yogi method of rewiring your posture and movement patterns, because nothing changes long term unless you change at a contribute to your recovery from recurring lower back pain, but it allows you to keep practicing yoga and any of your other beloved activities without having to stop completely. So you don't have to miss out on all the great side benefits you get from yoga and other forms of exercise like walking or running, like that boost to your mental health that you get. Getting this step right is kind of like laying the foundation and frame of a house. If it's solid and a Everything built on top is stable, balanced, and able to withstand pressure from all sides. But remember, you don't have to live in neutral, just visit more often. Okay, so as promised, the first cue for a neutral spine. This is the first of five, and they're not really intended to be practiced individually. So please just take in this cue as a concept here, not something necessarily to practice on your own. on its own too much. I will go deeper in a future episode and unpack all five so that you can learn this properly. For now I just want you to visualize it and understand the concept of your neutral spine and why it's important. So if you were laying on your back in supine with your knees bent and your feet on the floor the first cue is to lengthen your tailbone down towards the floor to create a slight curve in your low back. You could imagine Imagine that there's a marshmallow positioned in the center of your low back that you're trying not to squash. You're lightly touching this imaginary marshmallow, but not squashing it down into the floor. Okay, see if you can just visualize this for a moment, or you can have a go at doing it if you can get down onto the floor easily. This action of lengthening the tailbone down towards the floor positions the lower back and sacrum in their neutral position. As I mentioned, to receive the benefit, you need all five cues working together, and I'll share these in a future episode. But now let's say that you've addressed component one. You know all five key elements of alignment for a neutral spine. You've practiced it and importantly embodied it, and it's part of your brain's blueprint. Now we actually have to start building the capacity of the muscles around the spine to be able to help buffer the loads put on the spine. AKA, we need to start strengthening the surrounding muscles in a strategic way that balances out the loads and creates more effective load buffering for the joints. I call this second component core stability, which is the second pillar we address in EYM. This step is not about doing more abdominal core workouts. In fact, too much focus on abdominal strengthening can actually unbalance the forces acting on the spine, making it worse. Trying to fix your back pain by only doing ab exercises is like fixing three flat tires by over-inflating the remaining one. It throws everything off balance. So this step is about targeting not just the front body muscles like the abs, but also the back body muscles like the glutes and the deep core stability muscles and doing so in combination with your neutral spine awareness. Another common mistake I see many people making in attempting to strengthen their glutes as a way to help improve their core stability is doing global exercises like squats and lunges. The complexity of the movement and the load level is usually too high for someone who has a history of lower back pain which has resulted in an inhibition of the glutes. All you end up doing is putting more load on the quads, the thigh muscles and the back muscles to do more work. You see your brain has various blueprints for how to execute movement and if your brain's blueprint doesn't involve a strong connection to your glutes then when you do squats or lunges you're not actually targeting your glutes they just end up getting bypassed. Apart from having a history of low back pain which causes this inhibition of your glutes, there's also the issue of our sitting epidemic, which has caused most people I see to have grossly underactive glutes from just sitting on them all day and losing that strong blueprint for engaging them during your normal everyday movements. Okay. So because of this, there's a strategic way that we need to go about this step of core stability. You usually can't get away with just a general strength or weights program at the gym. Okay so what about the third component which I call developing your hip hinge strategy. This is where you learn to shift your dominant movement strategy or pattern of movement from a spine dominant strategy to a hip dominant strategy. You see most people unknowingly move about with the fulcrum of their movement during say bending the fulcrum is somewhere up in the lower spine. The This is usually because of, again, prolonged sitting and underactive glutes and that lack of neutral spine awareness. So your brain has this strong blueprint for moving from your spine and an underdeveloped or weak blueprint for moving from the hips. And when you learn to move from your hips, you get this incredible load buffering capacity because when you move from your hips, you can maintain your neutral spine, which also has an optimized load buffering effect and the activation of the glutes and the deep hip flexors is also increased by this hip hinge. So you get this incredible supercharged load buffering capacity during bending as compared to bending over with the fulcrum of movement up in the lower spine. Relying on the spine to move about instead of the hips as your dominant pattern is like piling everything onto a bicycle with when you're moving house instead of hiring a removalist truck to get the job done. The hips and glutes are built for heavy lifting and repetition while the lower back is better for steering and support. The hips and glutes are structurally built to handle load while the lumbar spine isn't. What I've found over 20 years of working with clients with low back pain that when you combine all three of these components you get this optimized healing effect. You not only get better and actually recover your injury long term, but you get better quicker because you're not continually taking one step forwards and two steps backwards, never getting off the injury hamster wheel. And you gain this incredible resilience, not just to physical demands like yoga poses and other activities that you enjoy, maybe like hiking or running, but also the mental and emotional resilience that helps you to navigate and overcome all kinds of challenges and stresses in your life. So here's what happens when there's a missing link in your healing journey. When one of these important components I've outlined is missing. Let's say you've got step one and two down. So you've learned to embody your neutral spine more of the time and you're gradually strengthening the surrounding core muscles to balance out the forces acting on the spine. You're likely developing a good resilience to load and starting to feel like you can do a bit more or you're tolerating your normal activities a bit more. The problem is not incorporating step three your hip hinge strategy. It's often difficult to have success with step two the strengthening part because a big part of what helps you to really bias your glutes and your deep hip flexors is learning to move more from your hips. Doing exercises that don't involve a hip hinge strategy is missing a big part of this transformation. And it's also less functional. Learning the hip hinge strategy ultimately is what allows you to be able to do a forward bend on the mat or the myriad of ways you bend off the mat in your normal life while harnessing the powerhouse load buffering capacity of your glutes. So you need your hip hinge strategy dialed to really make progress with step two, core stability or core strength. And the biggest problem I see is that without this knowledge and understanding of how the hip hinge strategy helps you to buffer loads more effectively, you're more likely to end up flaring up another episode again as soon as you resume your normal life, which ultimately involves a ton of bending. Or another scenario that can happen, and I see this too is that there's a focus on step two which is core stability or core strengthening and step three your hip hinge training maybe you're doing deadlifts at the gym and incorporating a hip hinge strategy and you're doing a lot of core strengthening for your glutes and hip flexors and abs but you haven't incorporated step one the neutral spine awareness and so you may end up overloading your spine with too much spine extension or not enough when you do your deadlifts and so you end up overloading your low back. So step one is super important. We need to get that good neutral spine for effective load buffering so that you don't continually experience overload and more recurring episodes of pain that keeps you stuck in the loop of recurring low back pain and failing to make real progress with your goals. What about a situation where there's step one your neutral spine awareness, and step three, where there's a hip hinge strategy. You're moving from the hips, but you're not doing any of step two, strengthening work for your core. You're just focusing on the movement shift. Well, in this case, actually, you may still get there eventually because the movement pattern shift would actually slowly encourage the core muscles that are needed to get stronger. The problem is, is, it would be slower and the recovery would likely be a fair bit bumpier. You would likely still have more flare-ups along the way before you got there. And probably because of this, you may end up quitting thinking it wasn't working. So I'm curious, which one of these three is the missing link for you? Now, if it's all three, that's okay. That's pretty much where most of my clients start their journey, to be honest. So no judgements. It's completely normal to not have any of these three components nailed if you're a modern yogi living a modern lifestyle with all of its challenges. You don't know what you don't know, but here's where the rubber meets the road. When you do know and you experience that aha or eureka moment where everything just makes sense, you will be faced with the choice to either keep doing what you're doing and hoping something magically changes or choose anything. empowerment and step off the injury hamster wheel and take aligned action. If you've had any aha moments or you've realized that one or more of these three steps has been missing in your recovery journey, I'd love to know which ones. Drop into my DMs on Instagram or Facebook Messenger and let me know which one's been missing. I'll drop these links into the show notes so you can get in touch with me. And if this episode is resonating with you, I'd also love it if you could rate this podcast five stars and leave me a written review that is the greatest support you could give the podcast in helping these teachings reach other yoga lovers like you who may be experiencing similar low back issues if you want to learn more about how to implement these three steps I invite you to head to my website and register your interest by joining the waitlist and in the last episode I shared that I wanted to leave you with a powerful mantra at the end of each episode to take away that encapsulates the main teaching. And for this episode, there's actually two. Remember that you can click the link in the show notes to download a visual affirmation card of these mantras each week. You can download them to your phone wallpaper or print them for your journal. So the two mantras for this week, I am in charge of my own healing and I recognize that my personal power to transform myself comes from changing the way I'm wired. And my brain is neuroplastic and capable of rewiring itself to a new optimized way of moving that allows my body to heal. Now you know the three crucial steps for overcoming recurring low back pain on the mat. There's another important lesson I want to impart in my next episode that ties in really closely to one of these three steps. In the next episode, I'll be answering this important question that comes up a lot with my clients working with low back pain. How do I modify my yoga practice? In particular, I'll be unpacking the most important pose to modify in your low back pain recovery journey so that you can feel confident you're doing the right thing for your low back on the mat. Thanks for being here and I'm so excited to continue this journey with you. Namaste.

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