Healing old and more recent injuries

photo by gregor_y

This has been a frequently asked question when I am talking to new members. They want to know if yoga will help them heal their new or old injuries.

The short answer is that it depends. In most cases a yoga practice will help to heal the injures if you do your practice with care. Make your teacher aware of your injury and ask them what modifications you should do.

A few years ago I dropped my laptop on my foot.  A bone on the top my foot was knocked out of place and required some physio therapy to get it put back into place.  I had great difficulty walking for a couple of weeks while the foot was healing.  As you would expect some yoga poses were extremely difficult to do as well.  Triangle pose was particularly difficult.

After about six weeks the injury had healed enough that it no longer was noticeable for normal activities. I was able to walk normally.  Triangle pose was still uncomfortable, but not painful.  The yoga poses showed that the injury still had some healing left to do.

The foot continued to complain over the next year as it slowly healed.  Each time I did triangle pose the complaint from the foot was less and less.  After about one year there was no more complete from the foot injury.  It had completely healed.

One of our members started coming to classes with a back injury from a car accident. She had been going to a chiropractor on a regular basis for a year and still had some pain in her back.

After about six months of twice a week yoga classes she found that she no longer needed to go the chiropractor and that the pain was gone from her back.

You experience may vary. There have been a few people that have come to the studio with old injuries.  They found that the yoga poses that they were doing made the injuries worse and they had to stop doing yoga.

In most cases yoga can help you heal your injuries if you do your yoga practice with care and be gentle with the injured area.

February 2009 Newsletter

photo by gregor_y