Yoga for Chronic Pain.

AshAlvarezz

I can’t work out; physically the only exercise I can do due to my health issues is swimming. But I’ve been looking into trying some easy Yoga to try to help with my chronic pain/chronic illnesses if possible & maybe even my depression/anxiety.

Any tips/advice is welcome!

PinkyPan1

I use yoga to deal with my chronic pain. I found YWA.. Yoga WIth Adriene on YouTube.
I do yoga daily and it has changed my life.
https://youtu.be/oBu-pQG6sTY

elsie6hickman

Just listen to your body, and use props as necessary. I've never used it for chronic pain yet, mainly because there are no good yoga classes here, but I used it for stress and I think it saved my life.

Candyspun

It does help drastically, and as someone else said, the key is to listen to your body

MikePfirrman

Tai Chi is fantastic too. My wife has chronic pain and some yoga moves can be tough on her.

NorthCascades

A comprehensive guide to the new science of treating lower back pain
A review of 80-plus studies upends the conventional wisdom.


Yoga, Pilates, and tai chi seem to help — but it’s not clear that they’re any better than other exercise
There’s lots of research on back pain and yoga. Not all of it is high-quality, but taken together, the evidence pretty uniformly suggests yoga can both decrease pain and improve back-related function. (You can read more about yoga’s health benefits — and the difficulties of studying the practice — in this Show Me the Evidence.)

The most recent Cochrane systematic review on yoga and chronic low back pain, published in 2017, sums up the results of the best available studies, which mostly focused on the Iyengar, Hatha, or Viniyoga forms of yoga:

There is low- to moderate-certainty evidence that yoga compared to non-exercise controls results in small to moderate improvements in back-related function at three and six months. Yoga may also be slightly more effective for pain at three and six months, however the effect size did not meet predefined levels of minimum clinical importance.

So again, this isn’t an end-all treatment — but the evidence we have points in the direction of a benefit.

Importantly, the review authors also noted that it’s not clear whether yoga is better than other exercises, since there were few head-to-head comparisons tracking yoga against other kinds of workouts.

As for tai chi and Pilates, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), a federal agency that crunches the best available data on the effectiveness of health care interventions, recently published a comprehensive 800-page systematic review of research on noninvasive treatments for low back pain, including these two kinds of exercises. It found „tai chi seemed to reduce chronic back pain and help people return to their daily activities when compared with no exercise, and that it was more effective in alleviating pain than backward walking or jogging but not necessarily better than swimming.

For Pilates, the evidence was a little more mixed: It was associated with small or no effects on pain and no effects on function compared with other types of exercise. Again, though, pretty much every back expert I spoke to said any exercise is better than no exercise, so if Pilates is something you enjoy, do it.

Chieflrg

Yoga worked well for me, but heavy compound lifts were the fix for dealing with chronic pain for me. Hope things work well for you.

mmebouchon

Yoga stretches in the pool help too. Try to find a yoga class for people recovering from injuries that has a very supportive leader. Then be really honest about your limitations and start slowly.

smklong

I’m following this for suggestions. I suffer from chronic migraines and exercise is a big inducer for me.

Libby81

Depending on the type of yoga you choose to try it may help with core stability and flexibility. As mentioned above adding compound lifts into your routine can be a huge help too. Deadlifts have been great for me and recurrent sciatic nerve pain