Occasionally the topic of pain comes up in yoga class. I find this distressing. I never want students to experience pain during or after their yoga practice, but sometimes it does happen. You can experience soreness after a good workout, but what is the difference between soreness and pain? And how do you tell them apart.
The Role of the Breath in Yoga Class
During practice, the breath should be paramount. Calm, steady breathing as you move through the poses is an indicator of yoga - the yoking, or union, of the body, mind and breath. Breath that is held, ragged or worse, it sounds like a steam locomotive, is the sign of imposing your will over your body. So, the first question to ask is: “What is your breathing like during your practice?” If you can stay focused on your breathing and keep it calm and steady, you are less likely to hurt yourself.
The next time you are in class, pay attention to your breath. There is a common breathing technique in yoga called Ujjayyi, which means “upwardly victorious breath”. This is where you breathe in and out through your nose with a slight constriction in the back of the throat (the glottis). This creates a breathing sound deep in the back of your throat that some say sounds like Darth Vader. I like to say it sounds like the ocean or the wind in the trees. The inhalations and exhalations should be of equal length, about five seconds each. The breathing itself should not feel strenuous: it is possible to overdo even breathing exercises! The sensation of the breath over the duration of an inhale or and exhale should be even.
The purpose of the breath is threefold: First, is meant to keep you present. In order to constrict the glottis, you have to stay attentive to what you are doing. The moment you lose the sound of the breath, your mind has drifted off into the past or the future and you are no longer paying attention to your body. Second, it is meant to build heat in order to increase circulation and promote flexibility. And third, it is meant to keep you safe. Accidents happen when our attention wanders. If the attention wanders away from the breath, it is also wandering away from the body.
What are you feeling while you do your yoga practice?
I often wonder what people are feeling during class. Sometimes, I will have the class do a pose on one side and then I will ask the question: “How does that side feel different that the other side?” This part of the practice is meant to prime the pump of turning your attention inward to experience what you are feeling. Although I am no longer amazed when people say they don’t feel anything, I do these inquiries to send people inside to train them to pay attention to how they feel. Our primary way of interacting with the universe is to experience it through our body and our five senses. If you don’t feel anything, you can’t differentiate between what is good or bad for your body. If you don’t know how you are feeling, who does?
Sensation and pain.
How do you differentiate between sensation and pain? First of all, you do not want to feel pain in a joint when working into your yoga poses. Generally speaking, you should feel stretch in the belly of a muscle, not in the attachment site, which is usually at a joint. Pain is something that does not subside as you stay in a pose; it often intensifies. Discomfort is something that changes as you stay in a pose. When you release any held tension anywhere else in the body, the discomfort lessens
If you have pain in the body; let’s say you have an injury that you are trying to heal, follow this protocol: Assign your pain a number between 1 and 10. Let’s say it’s a 6. As you do your practice, the number may go up to a 7, but not to an 8. (Rehabilitating an injury can be painful.) When you stop the pose, or exercise, you are doing, the pain should drop back down to the original number. If it doesn’t, maybe you went too far. But, here is the important point: If you pain does not drop back down to a 6 or lower, then you went too far. You only know this through hindsight! It is very important to pay attention to how you are feeling during your workout.
There is also a big difference between chronic pain and acute pain. Acute pain is the result of an injury and needs time to heal. Chronic pain is serving a psychological purpose. This is the subject of a different blog post.
Recovery and Over-training
When you were twenty, you could work out every day, stay out all night and get up and do it again the next day. As you age, that doesn’t work so well anymore. Up until I was 50 I felt I could do almost anything I wanted to do. After 50 the rules changed: I need to nap sometimes, I need a day off to recuperate. And, at the same time, I need to be very consistent. I work out almost every day each week. But, I don’t do the same workout every day. Sometimes I do yoga, sometimes I lift weights, for cardio I run, swim or ride my bike. While I need a day off from time to time, I also need to commit to working out consistently each week.
The Signs of Over-Training
How do you know you are over doing it? Over training affects your sleep; it may cause insomnia. It is also fine to be sore after a workout, but after a while, as your body becomes conditioned your soreness should go away. If you are consistently sore, you may be over training. Also, if you body and your limbs feel heavy and lethargic, that may be a sign that you are hitting it too hard. If you are feeling these things, back off, vary your workout and maybe take a day or two off to rest and recuperate.
When I did my yoga training, we were encouraged to have one day a week set aside for a restorative practice: meditation, pranayama, supported poses or yoga nidra. Do you have rest built into your workout schedule?
Pain and the Ego
Often students push themselves too hard because they want to be seen as more advanced. In a public class, sometimes the ego gets in the way. Imagine you are a newer yoga student and you come to class and set up your mat next to somebody who has been practicing yoga several times a week for years. It would be unreasonable to expect to do what they can do. If you were new to lifting weights and saw somebody lifting 100 lbs and tried to do that, too, you might hurt yourself. You might want to try 5 lbs. at first and slowly work your way up from there. The same thing with yoga; in all of my classes I offer modifications for the range of abilities and limitations. It is up to the student to accept where they are and work with what they’ve got. That can sometimes be hard to do.
It is also important to make sure you are in the right class. Often people come to class because it fits their schedule, not because it is the right class for them. How can you tell if you are in the right class? You should be able to do about 75% of the class. If you can do less than that, find an easier class. If you can do 100% of the class, you might want to stay there if you are comfortable, but if you want to improve you might want to find a more challenging class.
In choosing which class you go to, I recommend you take a long and honest look at yourself. Are you in good shape? This means that you work out regularly and feel fit and strong. Or are you de-conditioned? If you are de-conditioned, you might want to start at a very gentle level and work there for a while until you feel you are up for more of a challenge. Do you have good proprioceptive sense? Proprioception is knowing where your body is in space and what it is doing, even without looking at it. While this is something that yoga enhances, if you are lacking this sense a beginner class is where you start to learn it. Are you injured or do you have any other physical limitation? If you are injured, take it easy by starting with the basics and allow yourself to heal. If you have a physical limitation, it is still possible to do yoga, but it takes some time to learn how to modify for your specific issue. Also, if you have to modify more than 25% of the class, you might be in the wrong class.
Remember to keep the ego in check; stay connected to your breath and take the time to feel the sensations in your body. If you get hurt in class because you were pushing too hard, you will be the one who doesn’t show up to class the next day. While accidents can and do happen, the sign of a more advanced practitioner is someone doesn’t hurt themselves doing yoga.
There is a story in yoga where a student asks the teacher how long it will take before they can touch the floor in a standing forward fold. The teacher asks them to bend over and reach as low as they can with straight legs. The teacher then puts a stack of papers on the floor tall enough that the student can just touch the top of the stack with their fingertips. The answer is: “Practice every day and remove one sheet of paper a day.”
That is the essence of yoga. As Patthabi Jois was famous for saying: “Practice, practice, all is coming.”
Do you have any questions about pain and your yoga practice? If so, leave your comments below. While I cannot guarantee that I can answer every question, I may use your question as a future topic for a blog post.