After a certain age, your chances of throwing out your back once in a while are pretty good. It doesn‘t take much. Just lift a heavy box the wrong way or spend too much time working in the yard and you‘re laid flat for a week.
So what can you take to get you back on your feet? Pain killers or muscle relaxers, right? Well, according to a new study published in the medical journal Spine, you‘re actually better off taking a yoga class.
In this $400,000 study funded by the National Institutes of Health, researchers followed 90 men and women with back pain over a period of three years. The participants all had mild to moderate functional disability due to their chronic back pain.
Researchers divided the men and women into two groups. The first group received conventional medical therapy, which included drug treatments. The other group practiced yoga for 90 minutes twice a week. They focused on postures that would ease their chronic back pain.
The results of the study were impressive. The yoga group had less pain, functional disability, and depression compared to the group receiving standard medical treatment. In fact, the yoga group fared better than their counterparts even six months after stopping their biweekly exercises. Furthermore, when the yoga group had pain, it was less intense than the control group. Plus, they could manage it with less medication.
Bottom line here folks: if you‘re prone to back pain, get yourself enrolled in a yoga class. It might just get you off the "bad back" bandwagon.
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