Empowered Yogi Podcast

Should You Rest From Yoga to Help Heal Your Low Back Pain?

• Cathy Aganoff • Season 1 • Episode 5

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Is resting from yoga actually making your low back pain worse?
In this episode, Cathy breaks down one of the most common and most harmful beliefs yogis have about managing recurring low back pain. The idea that pain always means tissue damage, and that rest is the safest response.

You’ll learn:
 ✨ Why pulling back from your yoga practice can increase nervous system sensitivity
 ✨ The surprising science behind pain, load, and your brain’s “protectometer”
 ✨ How chronic pain becomes a learned pathway (even after tissues have healed)
 ✨ Why rest helps in the short term… but can stall long-term recovery
 ✨ The difference between acute vs chronic pain and why the rules are different
 ✨ A step-by-step method (the BRM – Biofeedback Response Method) to keep practising yoga safely during recovery
✨ How to modify poses without reinforcing fear, avoidance, or hypersensitivity
✨ The mindset shift every yogi needs to make to break the recurring flare-up cycle

If you’ve ever wondered why your back feels better when you rest, but flares up the moment you return to yoga, pilates, or even daily tasks. This episode will help you understand exactly what’s going on and what to do instead.

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Prefer to read?
This episode is available as a blog: cathyaganoff.com.au/blog
 

🎧 Listen now to learn how to stay on the mat while healing your back safely, calmly and confidently.

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:

Hello, how's it going? I've had a bit of a change of scenery for the podcast this week. It makes no difference if you're listening in, but if you're on YouTube, you'll notice that I'm not in the studio. I'm in my living room. We are having an intense heat wave in Brisbane at the moment. And I think that the grid has probably been overloaded and to the point of failing, and we're without power at the studio. So I've had to cancel my afternoon classes. It's way too hot to be there without air conditioning. And I know that you hot yogis out there love it, but in my hometown of Brisbane, they do not love it when it is literally the same temperature outside as it is inside the heated yoga room. So that's where we're at, and hopefully the power comes back on soon. But, anyways, in today's episode, we're going to be talking about how taking rest from your yoga practice may actually be the worst way to manage recurring episodes of lower back pain on the mat. And I'm going to be revealing the number one belief that's not only causing you to pull away from doing yoga, but is also sabotaging your healing from recurrent lower back pain. And I'm going to tell you what to do instead so that you can stay engaged with your arsena practice while navigating injury. The problem is when you aggravate your lower back pain, it naturally elicits fear. Pain and fear are deeply linked. That fear then causes you to pull away from anything that might cause pain, whether that's a yoga class, going for a run, or just simply doing physical work around your house. But what if pulling away too much from these activities is actually making the problem worse? Because it's making your brain and body more sensitive over time. In this episode, I'm going to help you solve this dilemma. I'm going to show you how you can keep practicing yoga throughout your recovery journey in a way that nurtures your recovery and avoids this hypersensitivity trap, that fateful trap that leads so many people to withdraw from their practice and lifestyle completely. Welcome to the Empowered Yogi Podcast, where movement and neuroscience meet yoga and spirituality. I'm Kathy Aginov, physiotherapist and yoga teacher, with over 20 years of experience in helping yoga lovers overcome injury and reclaimer that yoga practice. I'm here to share with you my most valuable teaching to help you get off that recurring injury. So let's start with the number one belief that's getting in the way of your lower back pain recovery. That's what I'm going to answer for you in this episode. I'll tell you straight up what it is, but more importantly, I'm going to spend most of this episode helping you understand how and why this belief is operating. And then most importantly, what to do about it so that you can begin the process of rewiring it. I also just need to preface this episode by saying the information that I'm sharing is for education purposes only and is not intended to replace any individual advice from a healthcare professional. Okay, so the number one belief sabotaging your recovery is the belief that your tissues are under threat from damage. The belief that when you experience pain in your low back, you are damaging the tissues of your lower back. Now, of course, this can be true sometimes, especially if you're experiencing acute an acute injury involving obvious physical trauma. But is that always true that pain equals tissue damage? When let's explore a few examples. What about when you're in a pose, like pastyavantanasana, uh seated forward fold? Maybe you've got really flexible hamstrings and you don't feel much of a stretch there. But for many people, those poses will elicit a strong stretching sensation in the hamstrings that might feel like pain. Does that painful stretch sensation automatically mean you're tearing your hamstring? I mean, it could if you went too far and forced yourself into the range, but hopefully you're not pushing that hard in your poses normally. So what about this example? You're kneeling on a very thin yoga mat, thin enough that you may as well be kneeling straight onto the floorboards. The pressure under your kneecaps feels painful. Does that pain mean you're damaging your kneecap? Again, maybe if you stayed there for a very long time, you might develop a bone bruise. But in day-to-day practice, that's usually not what's happening. Another common one would be if you're in a long-standing sequence and you get to that final warrior two on one side and your quads are shaking and burning. It hurts. Does that mean you're damaging your quads? Most of us would say no, that's muscle fatigue and load, not necessarily damage. So we already have examples from everyday practice where pain or intense sensation doesn't automatically mean tissue damage. So I want to share a client story to bring this to life. And I won't use her real name, of course, so I'll just call her Sarah. I worked with Sarah years ago after she injured her low back. She wasn't really sure how she heard it, other than that she was lifting weights at the gym about five days a week and doing yoga two or three times a week. She thought she might have injured her back doing a deadlift at the gym. That's what she believed had caused the issue. She wasn't much of a cardio fan, but on a drunken night out for a 40th, she agreed to do a triathlon event with her friends. It was a team event, so one person does the swim, one person does the run, and one person does the bike. And so Sarah volunteered for the bike because she didn't see herself as a runner and she wasn't a strong swimmer. About two months into her training, she was at the gym on leg day and felt a little twang in her low back after a set of deadlifts. She didn't think too much of it and finished the workout. The next day, when she woke up, she bent down to open a drawer in the kitchen and suddenly felt a strong spasm in her back and a shooting pain into her leg. And she was pretty freaked out by this type of shooting pain because she'd never had it before. So she went to the GP, um, was given strong painkillers and told to lay down and rest until she felt better. Anytime she tried to get up, her lower back would spasm. So she just kept resting and taking painkillers. After almost two weeks of bed rest, the pain settled right down, and she felt like she could go back to the gym and her regular yoga class and just kind of take it easy. But what she didn't realize was even that the even within those two weeks of bed rest, she had already caused her muscles to weaken. The next day she had another big flare-up of pain. So again, she went back to the GP, more painkillers, more bed rest. After a couple of weeks, again her symptoms eased. She tried to go back to the gym and the cycle repeated again. And this happened another three or four times before she finally decided to stop the gym and yoga altogether and see if a long period of rest, like a year off, would be the solution. After a year of no yoga, no gym, and very limited physical activity in general, she came to see me for the first time. And she said to me, Kathy, why does it get better and heal when I rest and then get re-injured when I do basic things like just sit in my car? Why could I deadlift 100 kg before and now I can't even tie my shoe without causing an injury? How come after a year it hasn't healed properly? This was the moment I realized that she, like most clients I work with who go through a similar journey, had a belief interfering with her recovery. And without challenging and changing that belief, she would likely remain stuck in that repeated reinjury loop. And actually, there were two beliefs we had to change for her to fully recover from this repetitive pain cycle. The first belief was, as I mentioned, was that my pain is always associated with tissue damage. So I asked her, Sarah, have you ever heard of phantom pain? And she said, Yeah. But what's that got to do with my lower back issue? I haven't lost a limb, I hope. I said, Well, your low back pain is operating in a similar way to an amputee who experiences pain in their amputated limb after it's been removed. Someone loses a limb and yet they continue to experience pain in that limb. Not only is there no tissue damage occurring, there's literally no tissue there at all. Crazy, right? I said, unless you get a lobotomy, you're likely going to keep experiencing this pattern of pain until we address the root of the pain. It's not just coming from your low back, it's coming from your brain. And before anyone gets upset, I am joking, I'm not recommending a lobotomy for your lower back pain. What I explained to her was that yes, there's a portion of her symptoms coming from her lower back tissues, but that portion is not necessarily about any ongoing damage. It's about load. Her tissues were being loaded in fairly normal ways, but the message, the that message of load was being delivered to a part of her brain that was detecting that otherwise normal load as threatening. At this point, her brain wasn't detecting damage, it was detecting load on tissues that weren't conditioned to handle that load. And it was sounding the alarm. That load was then triggering the pain pathway that her brain had memorized over the previous year or so, just like in phantom pain. I said, your brain has a map for this pain pathway, and every time you load up those tissues of your lower back to even a moderate level, it's triggering a pain response. It is related to what's going on in your tissues, but it's not responding to damage. It's responding to load. Which brings me to the second belief we had to change, that rest is what heals my low back pain. She asked me, Kathy, why has it not healed after resting for 12 months or more? How long does it take? I told her that her low back had likely healed structurally within about three months after the initial injury. So every time she rested, she wasn't helping her lower back tissues to heal. She was they'd already healed. She was simply taking the load off, which allowed the part of her brain that was detecting threat to calm down temporarily. But because she didn't have a strategy for how to get back to her normal yoga practice and gym routine, every time she returned to activity, the jump in load level was experienced by that part of the brain, often called the protectometer, as threatening. She was seesawing from complete rest to relatively high load with nothing in between. So of course her brain's threat detector, her protectometer, was having a meltdown each time. And each time it became more and more sensitive to load. At first, it only barks when someone actually comes to the door. But if it's been startled too many times, repeatedly, like loud noises, unexpected knocks, unfamiliar footsteps, it starts barking at every shadow. And it's not trying to annoy you, it's trying to keep you safe. But now it's overguarding, it's reacting to things that aren't true threats. That's what happens with a sensitized nervous system and a sensitized protectometer. So not all pain is associated with tissue damage. In fact, there's good evidence in the literature that after about three months of ongoing pain in a particular area of your body, your brain memorizes that pain pathway and creates a map for it. Just like it does when you learn to play an instrument or practice any skill. So after those first three months, when you place your tissues under load, the brain receives a signal about that load and may interpret it as threatening because it has practiced the pain pathway so consistently. It responds by sending a message of pain to the area, even though no tissue damage is occurring. We have to remember this and remind ourselves of it regularly throughout our recovery, because the belief that pain equals damage is so deeply wired into us. It tends to take over. So with Sarah, after one year, there was no ongoing tissue damage. That had healed. The prolonged rest was simply making her more and more sensitive to any kind of load. Her inner threat detector was perceiving the load of, say, bending down to tie her shoes as dangerous because it had practiced that pain response, that pain response pathway so heavily, like a professional musician memorizing a piece of music. And the threshold of load that it now perceives as threatening has been dialed way down. On top of that, there's another input at play, your emotional response to pain and to your beliefs about what that pain means. I talked more about this in the last episode about stress and lower back pain. So I recommend going back and listening to that if you haven't already. Because the amygdala, your brain's emotional center, feeds directly into your pain centers. When you feel pain, the fear that's automatically triggered can actually intensify the pain signal. Now, the full emotional piece is a whole episode in itself. So for today, I want you just to see that Sarah had a belief problem. We couldn't even get down to the nitty-gritty of the three mechanical steps of lower back pain recovery that I often talk about, the physical steps, until we'd started to shift these two beliefs that were quietly sabotaging her recovery. Every attempt to strengthen her lower back was triggering that sensitized threat detector system. So we had to be really strategic. What I want you to take away from Sarah's story is really just this idea that rest is medicine, but too much becomes poison. So let me just say I get it. But of course, you want to avoid the thing that causes you pain. It's completely natural to do that. It's a normal physiological protective response. We're all wired neurologically to avoid pain. But the problem is there's a difference between acute pain, like putting your hand on a hot stove, and chronic or persistent pain, which is a different situation entirely. Let's look at it this way. If rest was really the best way to manage low back pain, then wouldn't everyone who stopped practicing yoga for a year just heal? We know that's not what happens. In fact, many people start doing yoga in the first place to heal their lower back pain. Don't get me wrong, relative rest is important. We absolutely need to be able to soothe that protectometer response in the brain. But we also need to know what do we need to do instead? What's the solution to this protectometer hypersensitivity trap? This is where I prefer a different term. Instead of just rest, I use the word de-load. And it's actually the first component we address inside the empowered yogi method. It's not about doing nothing, it's about de-loading. Because the understanding is that there's this threshold level of load on the structures of the lower spine that is conducive to healing. If we dip down below this threshold for too long, we create more sensitivity to load and delay healing. It's kind of like watering a plant, too little and it withers, too much and it drowns. Just the right amount, though, helps it to grow strong and resilient. So we have to stay within that healing threshold while recovering from conditions like low back pain. I have a whole strategy and framework for how to navigate this target threshold that I teach inside the empowered yogi method. And because you're a podcast listener, I'm actually going to share an overview of it with you here. It's the same framework I use to help clients navigate other conditions like sit bone pain, SI joint pain, and hip bursitis. Over the years, I realized I was saying the same things over and over again to students and clients. Whether they had low back pain, hip bersitis, sit bone pain, or SI joint pain, no matter what the specific area of symptoms was, the method of managing load or delading to the appropriate level was very similar. And from this, I developed what I call the BRM, the biofeedback response method for responding to your felt sensations on the mat in the context of injury or injury recovery. So the BRM is the new way for how to keep practicing yoga with a non-acute injury. Now, just to be clear, I'm not talking about a fresh, acute injury where there's obvious inflammation, bruising, or acute tissue damage. Like if you've just rolled your ankle and it's puffy and bruised, this is not the situation for this method. But for persistent, non-acute, lower back pain and similar conditions, the BRM is incredibly helpful. So how to do this method? Let's say you're in a pose like Pashy Matanasana, or let's say utanasana. You would move into the pose slowly and gently to a modest depth or range, less than you'd normally go to. So if it's in utanasana, you'd only go partway into the fold. Then step two is to tune into your body and notice the first onset of pain or discomfort. Step three would be then to back off the range, the depth or intensity of muscular engagement sometimes in the pose until the sensation that you feel is minimal, tolerable, or non-existent. And then consider also reducing the time that you spend in the pose as another way to reduce the overall load. The final step is to connect with your go-to affirmation of reassurance and safety. A phrase that reminds your system that you are safe, supported, and not in danger. So something like my body is safe, I am safe. Sometimes you might feel like the pain is there all the time, and changing the depth or range of the pose doesn't really change it. In that case, you have to determine the intensity of the pain and whether it's reasonable to stay. So for example, notice whether the pain is A, non-existent or mild but tolerable. B is it moderate pain and perhaps it's t tolerable but only for a short time? Or is it C strong pain, so not tolerable even for a short time? If it's A, you can likely stay in the pose. If it's B, you may be able to stay there for a short period of time. If it's C, that pose or movement is not appropriate for you right now, and you likely need to regress to simpler movements or more floor-based poses for that, for the time being. It's this exposure to normal but modest load, movements and poses that might create some sensation, but are still tolerable and not overwhelming, that helps us soothe and retrain the nervous system. We're not aiming for no sensation ever. We're aiming for a level that doesn't send the brain's protective response into overdrive. This is how we gently condition the brain and nervous system to reduce hypersensitivity in the tissues and increase your capacity over time. Avoiding movement and load altogether by withdrawing from your practice and other physical activities and taking complete rest for too long tends to make things worse. It increases sensitivity to load as the tissues become more deconditioned and the protectometer gets even more jumpy. The BRM allows you to keep practicing, but to modify and moderate the loads to a level that that's reasonable and supportive of your recovery. So hopefully by now you can see how the BRM applies practically in your yoga practice. The method is most useful when you're experiencing an exacerbation of your symptoms, when pain levels and irritability are higher. Once you've recovered, then we're more interested in optimizing how your joints and the surrounding muscles of your lower back are adapting to the loads of different poses, working on things like core stability, movement patterns, and alignment tweaks. I talked about some of this back in episode two, and I'll go deeper into that in future episodes. We also know that chronic pain is associated with elevated cytokines, these inflammatory proteins in the body. And there's a link between how you think and how you feel and the level of cytokines circulating in your body. Your brain's protectometer helps to modulate hormones and neurotransmitters and influences the release of cytokines to control inflammation. So step five in the BRM, inserting your go-to affirmation of safety, is not just fluffy mindset work. It's actually an important part of soothing your brain's overprotective response. It's as simple as think calmer thoughts, feel calmer sensations, experience more calm in your body. But of course, training yourself to actually think calm thoughts on purpose is a skill. And that's what we're going to dive into in the next episode. In the next episode, I'm going to teach you a practical method called segment intending for helping to reprogram your subconscious. It's based on the yogic practice of sankhalpa, and it's a way to deliberately cultivate elevated emotions like gratitude and help reduce the over-release of cytokines that contribute to chronic pain. The core premise of this podcast is about healing from injury and reclaiming your yoga practice. And part of that is healing the mind and emotions too. The beautiful side effect of doing this deeper work to heal your lower back is that you're upgrading your brain's blueprint, not just for movement, but for living. There was this band I used to love when I was probably 16. If you're from Australia and over the age of 40, you might know them as Grinspoon. They had this album called Guide to Better Living, and it was one of my favorites at the time. They're definitely not what I think of as yoga music. They're more of a 90s punk rock band. My dog's digging in the background, so I hope that wasn't too distracting. But for some reason, that phrase really sticks with me, that guide to better living. Because understanding healing in this way and following this kind of method, it really is a guide to better living. I hope you're starting to see how it can serve you in more ways than just resolving your low back issues. And not to downplay that goal, being free of back pain is life-changing. But I also want to inspire within you the idea that healing the physical layer is just the beginning. There are so many more layers to unpack and expand. That's what yoga is for me.