Empowered Yogi Podcast

The Most Important Yoga Pose To Modify For Your Low Back

• Cathy Aganoff • Season 1 • Episode 3

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Episode 3: The Most Important Pose to Modify for Your Low Back in Yoga

What if the yoga pose causing your low back pain isn’t what you think? In this episode of The Empowered Yogi Podcast, Brisbane physiotherapist and yoga teacher Cathy Aganoff reveals the single most important movement to modify if you want lasting low back pain relief, and it’s not a backbend or twist.

You’ll learn:

  • Why one common yoga transition is responsible for so much spinal overload.
  • The science behind hip hinging and glute activation and why your brain may have “forgotten” how to move this way.
  • How a simple modification can build resilience in your spine and protect your back on and off the mat.
  • A practical mantra you can carry into your practice and daily life.

If you’ve felt frustrated by recurring back pain during or after yoga, or overwhelmed by conflicting advice online, this episode will give you clarity and confidence in how to move forward.

✨ Key takeaway: You don’t need to stop practising yoga. You just need to retrain how you move.

Free resource: Register for Cathy’s live workshop to learn this modification step-by-step → cathyaganoff.com.au

Resources & Links Mentioned in This Episode

Thanks for listening. If you’re ready to break free from the injury-recovery cycle and future-proof your yoga practice, hit follow so you never miss an episode. And if you find value here, please scroll down and leave a 5 star review. It helps more yogis like you discover this work.

The best place to connect with me is over on my insta. You can DM me there @cathys_yogajournal. I'd love to know any aha moments you had from this episode. It helps me to know what's resonating with you and how to serve you better.

SPEAKER_00:

What is the most important pose to modify for your low back in yoga? You might be surprised to learn my answer to this. It's probably not what you think. And I always have a bit of a chuckle when I teach this to my clients because they usually find it a bit cringe at first, and I know they're thinking, OMG, my family will pay me out so much if I do this. It's what I spend a good chunk of time working with my clients, helping them to modify and retrain the way they do it. I would go so far as to say it's about 50% of the process for rehabilitating lower back pain and preventing future episodes. Welcome to the Empowered Yogi Podcast, where movement and neuroscience meets yoga and spirituality. I'm Kathy 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'm going to unpack why this pose is the source of so much overload on the low back and what you need to do to modify it so that it not only reduces the overload but also creates a ton of resilience in your low back. The type of resilience to load that will not only allow you to keep practicing yoga for life, but will keep you resilient to your active lifestyle off the mat too. You know, for me, like when I think back to my gym days when I did gymnastics as a kid, I was never like an amazing gymnast. What's that saying? That gym t-shirt from the 90s I used to wear. It was like, I eat, sleep, talk, walk, dream, breathe, live, and love gymnastics. But I wasn't like super good at it or anything. I just really loved it. I always wanted to be amazing at it. I ended up quitting training when I was 15 to become a coach. And I did that for a few years. And I think that background has really set me up pretty perfectly for what I do now. It is like the perfect balance for a yoga teacher and physio. I think that's why when I started practicing yoga, there was like this deep resonance with the practice because it got me back in touch with my body in a way that I hadn't for over a decade by the time I did my first yoga class. So one thing that I reflect on in my gymnastics years was I would look at these incredible gymnasts that I wanted to be like, and they had this what seemed like a buoyancy about them, this springiness that I just didn't seem to have. I always felt like it was a struggle to tumble. I landed heavy and I struggled to get amplitude, and I always blamed being tall at the time, and I just kind of ended up resigning to the belief that my body was just not quite constructed like some of these other gymnasts that I trained with. Like I was missing something that they had. Some part of my anatomy was missing or something. This was one of the first big awakenings I had when I started practicing yoga. It was twofold, really. Firstly, I remember so clearly I was at my first YTT, yoga teacher training in Morocco. Oddly, actually, that's where the studio I was practicing at in London held a lot of their intensive 200-hour YTTs. And I remember doing Pinchamarayasana, forearm stand for those that don't know the Sanskrit. I did forearm stand for the first time, and I remember being like, huh, why after only practicing yoga for a short time, maybe it was about 12 months by this stage, why am I able to do this pose that I thought my body wouldn't be cut out for? Like after 10 years of doing gymnastics, I couldn't do this. It didn't feel like this. What is this element I was missing back then that I've somehow tapped into in my yoga practice? So the first part of this was actually the awakening to the subtle truth that I was believing a story about what I could and couldn't do. And it was like a profound awareness shift suddenly in that moment. This realization that I even had a story that I had identified with and that that story I was believing was actually not a fact. I had this experiential breakthrough well before I had ever heard anyone sprouting yoga philosophy at me. You know, this idea that we are coached to recognize on the mat that not only we are not our thoughts, but our thoughts are not facts. So there was that. That was a that was big. But the other part was this shift in my core strength. What had changed without me even trying to do core work specifically? So this is what I became obsessed over trying to figure out, and is a key part of the movement transformation I experienced that allowed me to heal my lower back pain. But not just that, it opened up a whole new belief system of what was possible for me in terms of asana, like what poses I could do, but then the bigger picture that if this was a story I was telling myself and believing, what else am I telling myself about myself that isn't true, that I could also shift my story around? This is a whole other podcast episode to dive into, and I look forward to unpacking more of the mental and emotional landscape shifts with you that I experienced and that I also now coach my students to open up to on the mat. But I just really wanted to preface this episode with how I came to discover this particular modification that I'm teaching in this episode. If this topic has sparked your interest, then I'll hazard a guess that you've felt some confusion around exactly what poses need modifying and how much when you have a flare-up of low back pain. Yes, you know that you need to listen to your body and respond by easing off the intensity of poses that cause pain, but generally you may have felt some confusion and uncertainty around what else you should be doing beyond that. And if you're like many of my clients with low back pain, you may feel like you're good at the time during a class while you're warm and moving and your blood is flowing, but you feel the aggravation afterwards when you've cooled down. And you may have become overwhelmed to some extent trying to decipher all the conflicting advice that you've come across on YouTube, on social media, and different yoga teachers who may tell you how to modify your practice. All these different experts who all seem to have different takes on what to do, and you're left wondering what advice to listen to. I get it. I know it's frustrating to receive conflicting advice and not have clarity around the best path forward. I see this in my clients, especially when they've been on that injury hamster wheel for a while, and often they've seen many different doctors or therapists trying to help solve their back issues. So, what is this culprit pose? You're probably wondering. No, it's not a back bend, it's not a twist, it's kind of a forward bend, but to be more precise, it's actually a transition. And it's the transition we not only do at least half a dozen times in a typical yoga flow style practice, but many more times off the mat too. It's the transition from standing in, say, Tadasana, mountain pose, or Urdvahastasana, reaching the hands together overhead, to utanasana, or again for those that aren't used to the Sanskrit, into a forward fold. So just take a moment and visualize this with me. You're in mountain pose, standing with your hands together in front of your heart. You breathe in and reach your arms up overhead, pressing your palms together. You then fold forwards to touch the mat. You with me? Maybe you've even got a visual of your alignment when you do it. Typically, there is some portion of the bend coming from the spine, some from the hips, and some from the knees. Now, to illustrate why this post-transition is such a culprit, I need to get my anatomy nerd hat on for a second. And before I do that, I also want to preface this explanation by saying two things. Firstly, this information you receive from listening to this podcast is not intended to replace any individual advice from a healthcare practitioner. It is for education purposes only. I have not done an individual assessment with you to know your exact situation and body, so please keep that in mind. And secondly, there are actually no wrong ways to move your spine. Your spine is built to move in all directions and it needs to do so regularly to be healthy and resilient. That's one reason why I love yoga asana practice so much, because it does this so beautifully. However, because of the habitual ways we live as modern yogis with office jobs and devices, we do sit a lot. And because of this, and this is going to be somewhat simplified for the purpose of clarity, but basically we sit on our butts all day and we've lost the effective neural pathways in the brain to activate our glutes and move effectively from our hips using our glutes when we bend. As the saying goes, use it or lose it. It's like a path through the forest. If you stop walking it, the trail disappears under weeds and growth. And the next time you try to walk through the forest, the path may be unrecognizable, and so you find a new path that's maybe not as good. Maybe it's got a few more obstacles that makes it less efficient but still gets you there. You can still bend forwards by bending your spine, but rather than getting that good load distribution and load buffering that comes from the neutral spine and hip hinge, you have this less efficient strategy that causes you to absorb more stress into the tissues of your low back. Which is fine to do sometimes. It only tends to be a problem if it's the only way you are conditioned to move. And so the repetition of using this less efficient pathway is more likely to lead to overload on your spine. So most people rely far too much on bending from their spine. And so this is the pose or transition that I'm saying is the most important to modify. And the modification I'm suggesting to help your low back is to learn how to effectively hinge more from your hips and utilize the powerhouse muscles of your glutes to buffer the load. Remember when I said I have a chuckle when I teach this to my clients? Because I'm literally teaching them to booty pop their way around their kitchen, and so we often have a laugh that they need to channel their best Miley Cyrus twerk move. Obviously, that's an exaggeration. I'm not serious that you need to twerk, but I like the analogy because it's really often the opposite to the movement pattern they've been doing and really helps to visualize it. So we sit slumped in our chairs with a flexed spine. Even if you think you sit up straight, sometimes a straight or flat back is actually a relative slump because the low back is supposed to have a slight extension curve. So your brain has practiced this position of flexion so much it has this highly developed neural pathway and motor map for the spine in flexion. It's like when you drive home that same route from work every day. The journey becomes memorized in your body, and you arrive home and wonder how you got home because you're on autopilot. So your brain has memorized bending from your spine, and that's its autopilot. Now there's a second culprit I want to call out here, not directly related to sitting. It's this observation that I've made over 20 years in clinical practice that the vast majority of people I work with have taken away one thing from any manual handling training that they've had through their workplace or school and or even just social media and the rhetoric out there. And that is the message that it's most important to bend from the knees to protect your back when you lift or just when you're bending in general. So this may be a topic for another episode so that I don't get on my soapbox about it too much and sidetrack us here. But what happens is with this belief that you must bend from your knees to protect your low back and the effect of the sitting epidemic, both of these have led to this phenomenon where most people not only have weak glutes, but associated with that is that they don't have a strong map in their brain for bending from their hips while keeping their spine aligned in its natural curves. Now, before you jump into any ideas that bending the spine is bad or wrong, and you must try not to bend your spine. Remember it that's definitely not true. We need the spine to be resilient in all directions to be healthy. But, but, but, but, always a but there is an advantage to maintaining your spine in its natural curves when you are adding load or repetition. That's because in this position the joints in the spine and pelvis are primed to acclimate and buffer the loads of the bend or movement that you may be doing. So it's not that we only want to bend with a neutral spine, moving from the hips, but we do want to prioritize this. And even we want to accentuate this for a while at least, to some extent, to counteract the effect of underutilizing this pathway for so long. So, in the attempt to make this pattern more dominant, we actually do want to prioritize it over bending from the spine. One thing you may be wondering is well, doesn't it depend on what exactly the injury in my low back is? What if I've got a disc bulge versus osteoarthritis in my spine, or I've just got bad posture? The answer is yes, these different conditions typically require slightly different modifications or methods of deloading and slightly different approaches to rehabilitate or strengthen. And so it's nuanced and the program always needs to be individually prescribed. You can't just start booty popping your way around the house and expect your low back to be healed. But what I'm trying to convey here is although the timing and steps to get there may look different from person to person, ultimately working up to this skill of moving more from your hips with a neutral spine will allow you to better acclimate to the loads of bending. This highly repetitive movement pattern that we all encounter both on and off the mat. So making this shift with the right guidance and strategy will not only help your low back injury to heal, but will protect you from future injury and excess wear and tear. If you're curious how to execute this shift, I teach this in my live workshop. You can register for this for free on my website, KathyAgonoff.com.au. I've also got a link in the show notes that will take you directly to the live workshop registration page. Okay, so quick recap. The pose that is most important to modify in your practice to improve the way your spine acclimates load is actually a transition. And it's the transition from standing into a forward bend. I talked about how there are two main culprits that cause this transition to be problematic and that have affected our ability to do it well, and they are sitting on our butts too much and misunderstanding or too much focus on bending from the knees. The mantra for you to take away from this episode is this. I unload my spine and allow it to heal by harnessing the incredible load buffering capacity of my hips. If you've been managing this injury for a while, there's something else you may have noticed that affects your low back, and that is the effect of stress. The good news is that as someone who's interested in yoga, you're supremely placed to navigate this effect and overcome its effect in your body. In the next episode, I'm actually going to be unpacking the link between lower back pain and stress and how your yoga practice can be a powerful tool to help. And if you found value from this episode, I'd love it if you could leave a review by scrolling down to the bottom, click the five stars, and better yet, write a few words too. Subscribe to the podcast to be reminded of new episodes coming out, also. Thank you so much for your precious attention and for trusting me as your guide to healing and thriving on the map. From my heart to yours, thank you. Not my stay.