Teach you how to prevent muscle damage

If you don't practice yoga properly, it can easily cause muscle and spinal damage. How to avoid this? We bring you some tips on preventing yoga injuries, so you may wish to refer to it.

In yoga, students can easily damage their lower ribs, crush their lower waist and sprain their lower neck. The most obvious are lower waist injuries during backward bending exercises and neck injuries during forward bending exercises, as well as rib injuries during "banana-like" handstands and twists. Students do this exercise out of habit, posture, and past exercise training that makes other vertebral joints tighter or harder-such as the upper part of the thoracic or lumbar spine between the shoulder blades.

Finally, when practicing yoga poses, we want to improve the activity of those vertebrae that tend to harden. When these vertebrae become flexible, those originally flexible areas no longer need to compensate for these tense areas. Instead, they can play a role in releasing freedom, bringing relaxation and reshaping space in the body. This will introduce the next principle. When we start moving from the spine and maintain a relaxed state, we can combine spine and large joint exercises to advance into the next yoga pose.

Combining spinal movements with large joint movements

Once your body is relaxed, you can feel that your spine is in the starting position of movement. The next step is to move your limbs freely and easily. The easiest way is to focus on the large joints first, especially the shoulder and hip joints. Some yoga practitioners may find it strange because some special yoga systems start with the movement of hands and feet. According to anatomical and kinematic principles, the shoulder and hip joints are closest to the spine, which makes it easier to connect with spinal motion. The first step in connecting the spine to the shoulder or hip joint is to understand the "bands" that connect the joints, called the scapular girdle and the pelvic girdle.

shoulder girdle

The scapula girdle is a complex of bones, muscles, fascia, nerves, blood vessels and the scapula joint. They work together to support, lift and stabilize the arms and allow them to move freely-for example, helping to raise and lower the arms in the Surya Namaskar, and providing strength to the arms in the Chaturanga Dandasana and Adho Mukha Svanasana.

Treat yourself well: Get into painless exercise

Pain is a word with many meanings and understandings. Everyone has a different experience about what pain is and how to feel it. What one person says about pain can differ significantly in description and feeling from what another person says about pain. For clarity, we use the pain spectrum to describe it.

One end is "good pain", the other end is "bad pain", and in the middle is a less clear set of pain and tingling feelings.

"Good pain" is discomfort caused by muscle fatigue. Muscle fatigue occurs when the muscle fibers are at a critical point where they can no longer contract. At this time, the nerves still stimulate the fibers to contract, but the fibers no longer respond. It may be due to the exhaustion of stored energy or the accumulation of lactic acid. This phenomenon is good. The result of muscle fatigue or "good pain" is an increase in strength.

At the other end of the pain spectrum is "bad pain"-burning, tearing, tension pain that can make people question why they sign up for yoga. After a yoga class, this pain can last for five to six days. It can cause you to wrinkle your forehead or brow, clench your teeth, and your breathing becomes shallow. This pain is not conducive to establishing balance. On the contrary, it increases body tension, making smooth and easy breathing stiff and limited, and muscles and fascia also contract strongly, allowing tension to be transmitted through the body. When you feel this pain, your muscle strength and flexibility decrease.

Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS)

Delayed muscle soreness is a muscle soreness that is felt only after two or three days of practicing yoga. You may be surprised by the soreness, especially if you don't feel muscle discomfort or fatigue while practicing yoga poses. If you have developed delayed muscle soreness, it will usually disappear four days after practicing yoga. A simple yoga practice of breathing and relaxing can help the body expel lactic acid and other metabolic waste products that are responsible for soreness.

Now, we enter the last principle-less is more.

From shallow to deep: Before entering complex yoga poses, first gain muscle strength, stability, softness and flexibility from simple yoga poses. Moving from shallow to deep is not an unfamiliar concept. The concept is expressed by starting in small steps when babies learn to walk and not biting down more food than you can chew in one bite. When starting to learn new yoga poses, whether you are a beginner or an advanced practitioner, you should start with simpler yoga poses before entering complex yoga poses.

Compared to complex yoga poses, simple yoga poses use fewer joints. For example, the Dandasana is a simple pose in which the legs move in unison at both hip joints and move forward to achieve balance. To make it more complex, we can go into Marichyasana.

By adding a cane-like twisting action, different postures are formed on the left and right sides, and the arms adjust the spine to twist. During the twisting, the pelvis may lose balance, which means that the chance of sprain or injury will also increase. Since complex yoga poses can easily lose balance or increase the chance of sprain, in order to prevent yoga injuries, it is particularly important to start from simple poses and gain muscle strength, stability, softness and flexibility from them. (Internship Editor: Yan Lili)