| camel pose: ustrasana |
"You're only as young as your spine is flexible." I'm not sure who said this, but it makes sense when you think about how much we rely on our backbone. Our spine is flexing and contracting with almost every move we make.
According to CBS News, eight out of ten Americans will experience debilitating back pain sometime in their lives. Additionally, more than 1.2 million Americans undergo spinal surgery each year. That's
more than TRIPLE the number of coronary by-pass surgeries (415,000),
and nearly FOUR TIMES the number of hip replacements (327,000).
The most common culprit of back pain, is believed to be related to the gelatinous disks which cushion the vertebrae. "I think most people would think it's the inter-vertebral discs, whether
it's herniated or whether it's just worn and arthritic and associated
with pain," said Dr. Augustus White, a professor at Harvard Medical
School.
In the adult body, these inter-vertebral discs have no blood supply of their own, but instead rely on nearby vessels to nourish them. With normal aging, the limited supply of blood flow diminishes and the discs gradually dry out and become thinner. Dry and thin discs become rigid, causing in pain and injury along the spine.
Enter Yoga. Yoga has long claimed that all its bendy, stretchy, and twisty poses are good for your spine. In 2011, a scientific study examined such declarations and found that yoga can, in fact, counteract deterioration of inter-vertebral discs. The 2011 study involved a group of 36 participants, who were each examined by a team of physicians in Taiwan. "Half [of the participants] had taught Hatha yoga for at least 10 years, and the other half were judged to have exhibited good health. The two groups showed no statistical difference by age or sex. The physicians then scanned all the spines and carefully inspected the discs for signs of damage. The results, the team wrote, showed that yoga teachers had 'significantly less' degenerative disease then the control group."
"Why? The physicians suggested that spinal flexing may have caused more nutrients to diffuse into the disks. Another possibility, they wrote, was that the repeated tension and compression of the disks stimulated the production of growth factors that limited aging" (Broad, 41).
Science is beginning to catch up to what yogi's have known for years.
References:
Chin-Ming Jeng, Tzu-Chieh Cheng, Ching-Huei Kung, et al., "Yoga and Disc Degenerative Disease in Cervical and Lumbar Spine: An MR Imaging-based Case Control Study," European Spine Journal, vol. 20, no. 3 (March 2011), pp. 408-13.
