Yoga to Help Back Pain: Upper Body | Natalie Jill

Hi, guys. Natalie, Jill, back on, happy, healthy, and bit with my good friend Om Yoga Kim, who is back to show us more moves to help alleviate back pain. We're going to show you yoga moves, help stretch you out and alleviate that back pain. So we're focusing on upper body today. Hopefully, you've caught our one on lower body. Today's all upper body. What have you got, Kim?

All right, so let's start in child's pose. You want to start towards the end of your mat since you're going to be stretching your body forward. And then take your knees only as wide apart as it feels good. So if this is too much pressure on your hip bones, what you can also do for a modification is just walk your knees together closer, and that alleviates the pressure on your hips.

This already feels so good on back. Just rounding it out like this.

Yeah. It smooths out your tailbone down, and then your big toe will just gather behind you. Cool. So once you stretch your arms out in front of you, then relax your elbows to the mat and just let your shoulders part from the center of your back. Perfect. If you have blocks, then a variation to add more stretch to your arms would be to set the blocks underneath your elbows. You want to just lift your arms up and then just rest your forehead back to the mat. So you can tell already just visually, that this is definitely going to stretch out her shoulders more, even her side bodies, simply because of the elevation of her arms. All right, now press up to a tabletop position, and I'll set the blocks aside. Tabletop is just adjusting your knees below your hip bones and your palms right beneath your shoulders. This is the tabletop. Now we're going to move into puppy pose. Keep your hip bones high over your heels and just drop your forehead to the mat and stretch your arms out in front of you. Perfect. Yeah. So you can see it's similar to child's pose, except for her tailbone stays high. And this is to allow more stretch in the arms. And then as you stretch your arms forward, your forehead is going to rest to the mat.

I'm just going to stay like this because it feels really good.

Big stretch on the shoulders. And then what you can do for an added opening on the shoulders is tense your fingertips and then lift up high onto your fingertips, like. Yeah. So tense your fingertips like that. And then squeeze your arm bones straight and walk your hands further forward. Good. Yeah. So that's giving a really big opening all across her side body here as well as her shoulders. Doesn't that Feel good.

Oh, my God.

So good. Feels so good. It's really opening up across the back line of her body as well. Across the back lateral muscles, the rhomboids right here. It's just an overall stretch across the the back side of the trunk. Perfect. And then once you're ready, let's now come up, back to the tabletop position. Crawl your palms up, and this pose is called Thread the Needle. Thread the needle is going to work even deeper into the scapula, which is this part of your back right here. You've got two shoulder wings right here. So take your right arm up and out to the side. Now, on your exhale, slide your arm all the way underneath you and land softly on your shoulder and the side of your face. So what this is doing is with her arm out, it's tugging on the shoulder blade to create space here between the two shoulder blades. I always like to adjust your arm forward. Good. And then with this hand, there are several options. This palm is used to direct your one shoulder over the other shoulder. You can keep your hand here or navigably start to crawl your hand up and over across the other.

I know this looks like it's really funky, but it feels so good.

Yeah, it feels amazing. You got to try this. And all she's doing when she moves her hand up here is she sends her elbow out, and it just allows for a deeper stretch across the backside. And then another arm variation is to take this arm and loop it behind you for a half wrap. So these fingertips will crawl to the crook of your right hip and tuck your elbow wing in a little bit. And then this stretches across the chest as we're getting into the backside. The right back side. Perfect. Now place your palm back down, press that tabletop position, and we'll even it out by doing the other side. Left arm up and out, and glide your arm all the way underneath you. Perfect. Good. And the same thing you'll do, always remembering, though, that your left and right sides are going to be different. So make the adjustments that you need for this side that could be different from the first side, and then go ahead and crawl your hands up towards the top of your skull, press your elbow back, and notice how her head is resting the entire time. So you want to make sure that the side of your head is down, and then slowly walk back. Come into tabletop position. Take a seat onto your heels. Clasp your palms together behind you for a chest expansion. If this is too much to clasp your palms, you can always grab a strap. Looks like this. Or you can also just grab like a dish towel. If you don't have a strap, then just grab onto your lace your hands together, send your knuckles towards your tailbone. Big breath in, exhale. Look up to the sky and move into a back room. Bend. Great chest stretch round your shoulder caps even tighter behind you.

You know what's funny is for a long time, I didn't realize that some of my upper back pain was from doing so much forward motion here. So by stretching and opening up here, it's released that.

Yeah. And so much of what we do during the day is we're constantly rounding and caving our body forward without knowing it. Whether you're eating, drinking, or talking on the bone, we always round forward. This is an amazing opening to pull the shoulder blades and the shoulder caps back to where they belong.

Those are awesome.

Helps you with your posture sitting up tall.

Thanks, Kim. These were awesome. So three exercises, different variations to help with back pain. Lower and upper. All doing yoga inspired from Om Yoga. Kim. Thank you, thank you.