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Trigger point therapists are sometimes
called upon to treat patients with yoga injuries. Yoga is excellent for general
health and pain prevention. However, under certain conditions, yoga exacerbates
or even initiates a pain problem. A fairly flexible yoga instructor and dancer
came to MYO
Pain Relief Center
in Glenview, Illinois for
therapy earlier this year. She had participated in a yoga retreat. Immediately after the retreat, she felt fabulous. However,
a few days later, she started tightening up. I found some deep pelvic muscles
that were significantly stretched for the first time at the retreat referring pain to her groin area. After a few weeks of aggressive myofascial trigger point therapy, she no longer experienced acute pelvic
pain. This case illustrates that yoga is not helping a pain problem when you
stretch a muscle or muscle groups that have trigger points.
To improve the effectiveness of yoga
and prevent injuries, we teach our patients, whether they are yoga novices or accomplished yoga instructors, to treat muscles
that they notice are too tight both before and after yoga. This may be done by
compressing specific muscles identified in a Myofascial Pain Identification Chart with a body therapy ball, a tennis ball, a large rolling pin, or other hand
tools and pressing on those spots and sort of ironing them to make them longer and less painful. This becomes even more important for older persons, but it is not uncommon for younger persons to have
trigger points in their muscles. By doing this, they are preventing pain and
are more correctly doing the yoga postures because it is more likely that they are using all the muscles fibers during yoga
after they have deactivated the trigger points. This, in turn, makes yoga a much
more efficacious modality for pain relief. These techniques will also help the
relatively inflexible person or the person with pain over their entire body (as in fibromyalgia) to get to the point where
they can perform yoga.
Sharon Sauer, CMTPT, LMT
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