Progressing Strength of the Legs and Resiliency of the Body

Strength is resiliency for the body! When you are strong, you can get pulled off balance and recover. If you are weak, chances are you will get injured. And as we age, we lose muscle mass and strength each passing year. Leg strength provides "shock-absorption" for the back and spine.

Strength training the big muscles of the legs also helps your brain by releasing brain-derived growth hormones. So it is not only good for your legs, but good for your mind too! You MUST prioritize strength in your exercise program.

In this video, I share 3 ways to progress your strength training program for the lower body. Each week we do this very exercise in my yoga class as a Tabata set, which is a high intensity interval set of 20 seconds effort and then 10 seconds of rest repeated 8 times. So we do 4 minutes of squats each week and I encourage my students to repeat the set at home in between classes.

Does STRESS affect your PAIN? Copy and Paste the link below to Take the Quiz and Find Out!

https://stephanie-kelley-1ef2.mykajabi.com/pl/116416

I created "Mind Your Spine" to help you learn to pay attention to what your body is telling you. As a Physical Therapist that uses Yoga as the primary treatment, I know that the body has great wisdom. But how can you tell what your body is telling you? Watch these videos and as you learn to listen carefully, you will unlock the potential, not only to live without pain, but to live the life you were meant to live.

Namaste,

Stephanie

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Mind You Spine with Backward Bending

Because many of you sit all day and have been doing so for many years, you have lost the ability to comfortably bend backward. Your mid- and upper back is rounded and stiff and your hips are stuck in flexion (the position of sitting). You also wear your rounded posture like a protective shell to protect our hearts from the barrage of negativity and hurt all around us. You stiffen in the hips because energetically, that is where you store suppressed emotions. Men are afraid to show emotions for fear of being labeled "weak". Women are afraid to show emotions for fear of being labeled "dramatic" or "bitchy". All of this posturing and suppressing is making you SICK! In this video you will learn how to physically open the front of the body to improve both your upright posture and backward bending of the spine. You can practice these exercises everyday. Your spine was meant to move this way. It's NATURAL! You can use this motion to also feel how it is to live your NATURAL emotional self. Slowly practice connecting to your emotions. Feel how your posture shifts when you are around negativity. Notice your discomfort when you stifle an emotional reaction. With practice and time, you will learn to posture yourself in situations and around others to open WHOLLY and with compassion.

Namaste,

Stephanie

P.S. Does stress affect your Pain? Take the Quiz and Find Out!

The Magic Pill for Shoulder Pain

This gentle exercise will support your shoulders so you can reach for the stars!

The weight of responsibility takes a toll on your shoulders each day. From taking care of your self, to taking care of others, our arms were meant to do the heavy lifting of life. In this video you will learn how to give your shoulders a little support before asking them to carry, lift and reach.

But has the heavy lifting become a burden? Do you lack support for all that you need to get done in a day?

Besides creating physical support for your arms and shoulders through exercise, maybe what you really need is emotional and social support. Shoulder and/or neck pain can be a symptom of overwhelm.

Who can you ask for help? How can you delegate some tasks? What trusted friend will listen as you lighten some of you emotional load? You might be surprised how addressing your emotional health can affect the physical pain that you experience each day.

Rather than continuing to push through the endless tasks each day, find some time to prioritize the list and then find ways to lighten your load. Create time to do more of what you love and less of what you consider to be a burden. Your shoulders will thank you.

Namaste,

Stephanie

Relieve Pain by Taking Time for YOU!

When you are not tuned into your own health, you can be of very little benefit to others. I have learned this lesson through the practice and community of yoga. It took me a while to understand all of the focus on “self care”. At first I thought that “self care” meant isolating myself from my family and taking time away from work. But I have come to realize that “self care” can happen daily through intentional small actions. When you realize the effect of even a small act of self kindness, then you begin to want more. The small bits of self care begin to accumulate into a way of living and knowing that:

“When I care for myself , I give everyone so much more”

The process of self care is different for each person and is reveled when you listen very closely. The way that I listen is by going inside my own head and body through a regular meditation practice. These are the self care acts that have been reveled to me and incorporated into my life over the last few years:

  • Stop the negative self talk

    • When I make a mistake, instead of saying “You idiot!” in my head, I say: “You’re doing the best you can”.

  • Celebrate moving more

    • When I leave my phone upstairs instead of saying “Oh Crap"!” in my head, I say: “Great! I get to challenge my legs and heart.”

  • Stop being scared of activities that may have created pain in the past

    • Instead of being worried that gardening will exacerbate my back pain, enjoy working in the dirt and know that any back soreness will go away in 24 hours.

  • Eat in a way that makes me feel good

    • I have played with my diet enough over the years to know that an anti-inflammatory diet feels best for my body and mind. So instead of focusing on what calories or “bad” food, I focus on what makes me feel good.

  • Move (instead of exercise) in a way that my body craves

    • Trying to understand the benefits of the different types of exercise (like trying to understand what to eat) can be frustrating. Rather than focusing on my daily does of prescribed exercise, I try to move in a variety of ways throughout the week. Several times a week I breathe hard (aerobic exercise), I feel a challenge in my core, legs, and arms (strength training), and I feel tension across my muscles and joints (flexibility). I let the sensations of my body dictate what type of movement I do each day. I have found that it responds to what I did (or did not do) the day before. Too much sitting? I need to challenge my core and arms and do some backward bending. Too much focused concentration? I need to breathe hard, challenge my legs and do some forward bending.

  • Creating time for a spiritual practice is mandatory

    • Yoga has helped me transition from a religious practice to a spiritual practice. As I listen to a guided meditation or sermon, I take time to reflect on how the lesson applies to my life. Spirituality has become woven into my thoughts and actions.

As you can see, my self care is as much about caring for my mind and spirit as it is about caring for my body. All 3 are important and affect each other. Over the past few years one or the other may take priority during any given time. And once I have created a “good” habit of self care, I look to create another one. It has become a practice of understanding life and health as a process rather than a “fixed point”. This understanding has given me so much more contentment each day.

Namaste,

Stephanie

Support for Your Spine and for You

Clients that come to my yoga class or to see me privately always start by telling me about the injury or damage sustained to the body. It is usually a story of something broken with the assumption that it can’t be fixed. What I have learned is that very few people really understand the functional anatomy of their body and (it seems even less!) of the spine. He or she has only been exposed to reports or pictures of the damage or pathology of the body. The words and images have “stuck” so that now the client’s impression of the body or spine is one of being broken or “a mess”.

My goal is to improve your understanding of how amazing the body really is. It has the potential to heal, but when a tissue is damaged (like a ligament) the body has one or more “back up” systems to create support for injured the area. For example, the disc is not the only connective tissue that holds your vertebra together! You have many more ligaments, muscle, and fascia that create layers upon layers of support for your spine.

So if you like anatomy, you’ll like this video. And if you’ve ever seen an X-Ray or MRI of your spine, watch this video to put a new and maybe more positive image into your brain about your low back.

I also offer another way for you to think about support. Your spine may feel less supported when you talk to yourself in a negative way. The messages that you send to yourself have the ability to break you down or create support. Try telling yourself this:

  • I’m doing the best that I can

  • I am enough

  • I am worthy of love

  • I can learn from this failure

Once you start giving yourself internal support, you will start to notice that you also have external support. You have family, friends and colleagues that are ready to support you.

Because the practice of yoga integrates the body and mind, a physical practice focused on creating support of the low back can help you realize the other ways and people that are present to support you.

This month and next, I’m offering a few evening classes to increase the support that I can offer you. Check out my schedule and sign up at Balancing Owl Yoga.

Another way to get support is in my online class: Yoga for a Better Back. It offers 10 hours of content in lessons, meditations and gentle yoga. Each module provides a level of support that progresses as you learn and practice.

Namaste,

Stephanie

Find Comfort in the New Year

We all need some comfort each day. But you FIRST need to realize that you are uncomfortable and ask yourself WHY. So many of us disconnect from what we feel each day in order to just survive. You may unconsciously find ways to create the comfort you so dearly NEED. From the first cup of coffee in the morning to foraging in the pantry at the end of the day, these subconscious actions don’t deal with the true source of discomfort and don’t really give us long lasting comfort.

So we must first deal with the discomfort, not avoid or keep pushing through discomfort in order to create lasting change for the better. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

  • When do you feel discomfort?

  • Where do you feel that discomfort in your body?

  • Is the discomfort a physical experience or does it correspond to emotional or mental discomfort?

  • What would directly affect the discomfort that you feel right now?

Because the primary goal of Yoga is to “yoke” our physical sensations with emotional and spiritual sensations, movement may help you find answers to the questions above. You can start on the floor with cat/cow creating gentle movement and exploring comfort vs discomfort. Most yoga classes progress to standing poses. So you’ll want to try those too.

In this video I will address 3 out of 4 of what I call the “Fundamental Four“ (here’s a handout for detailed cues). Fundamental because they are the standing poses performed in almost every yoga class. It is important that you are familiar and comfortable in these poses. My instruction will help you learn the poses and make them your own with both COMFORT and EASE.

Namaste,

Stephanie

P.S. Are ready to really find out the source of your low back pain? My 4 Module Online Course, Yoga for a Better Back, is a commitment to feeling better in the New Year. It takes 8-12 weeks to complete, but will give you a much better understanding of WHY your back hurts and HOW you can make lasting change.

What's Really The Cause of Your Poor Posture?

I had a discussion with my yoga students about posture. This group of women are all in their 50s and 60s, and each of them (like me) remember a grandmother or other adult admonishing them for a bad posture. We talked a little about why there is an emphasis on a good posture in our culture. Our conversation led me to look into the history of posture.  I found this statement from an interesting website, ThePowerofPosture.net:

"In 18th century middle-class society, proper posture was an essential ingredient in formal situations. The body positioning of strangers was shrewdly evaluated as a measurement of upbringing, physical attractiveness, trustworthiness, self-control, and dignity. Respectable people regarded erect posture as the very thing that set us apart from the animals. Likewise, collapsed posture was seen as a manifestation of immorality and stupidity, a symptom of poor character that lead to things like masturbation and other failures of self-control."

With those strong statements you can understand how our beliefs around posture were formed.  I wonder how close you hold the belief that our posture tells us something about the essence of the person?  In my training as a physical therapist, my beliefs about posture and whether posture is an "impairment" have changed over the years.  In my early career, I was trained to believe that we could "train" and ultimately "change" someone's posture.  But with practice, I began to doubt whether real change in someone's posture could be sustained. When posture was the main focus of treatment, it led to frustration on both the patient and my part.  I also began to wonder how much a person's posture really "resulted" in someone’s pain.  So over my years of practice and now integrating yoga, I have a broader perspective regarding the role that posture plays in our lives, Body, Mind and Spirit.  

Body:

I believe that MOVEMENT in and out of posture is much more important than MAINTAINING a STATIC posture.  It seems that no matter what posture we assume: sitting, standing, slumped or erect; if we sustain that posture for LONG periods of time there will be trouble.  Joan Vernikos, in her book Sitting Kills, Moving Heals, states that the problem is not how much we sit during the day (8 hours +), but how long we sustain that posture without moving.  She advocates frequent low-intensity movement throughout the day to combat the negative effects of sustained sitting.

Mental:

I have seen how changing a person's posture can change also their attitude and affect. 

Try the alignment practice describe in the video placing 3 points of your body along the wall.

Do you notice a difference in your mind and body between these two positions?

When I did this activity at a health fair, the majority of people said yes, they could feel a difference in their body. The improved posture brought awareness to their breath filling lower into the body, chest or belly.  But what was also amazing was how the look on their faces transformed.  With an improved upright posture, people raised their eyebrows and the corners of the mouth, that's right, into a SMILE.  

Spirit:

Why is it so hard to maintain a "good" posture?  Many Physical Therapists and others "Body Workers" focus so much on our posture as the source of pain in the neck and back.  I believe that if it was ONLY a problem of the body, then it would be an easy fix. Improving strength and flexibility should be enough.  We blame our jobs, our computers, and our hand held devices on a curved spine. 

But I have come to view this curved spine as a protective position.  We wear this curved spine like a “Turtle Shell or Amour of Protection”.  Some people even have their shoulders drawn up around their ears.  So I have wondered, what are we trying to protect?  Our heart as the source of love?  Our throats as the center of expression?  Maybe our efforts should be focused on how to allow our Spirit to Shine and our True Self to emerge.

Brene Brown, in her book Braving the Wilderness, says for wholehearted living you need to have a Strong Back (COURAGE), a Soft Front (LOVE AND ACCEPTANCE, even for yourself), and a Wild Heart (LIVE YOUR TRUEST SELF).

I think that advice just may be the solution to the postural dilemma.

Namaste,

Stephanie

It's not degenerative discs causing your pain, it's your hips!

Click on the picture above or this link: https://youtu.be/Oc0xJ65OJvs

Most of my patients and clients with back pain have tight hips which ABSOLUTELY contributes to their back pain.  In this video you will learn physical and emotional reasons WHY your hips are tight (hint: too much sitting and too much stress while you are sitting). I will lead you through a few moves to assess your own hips to see if they are tight. Then I will provide 3 ways to do something about it!  And YES, yoga poses are included!

You will want to watch this video along with a few others that help you MOVE and strengthen your BACK and CORE. Then you will have the tools to perform the yoga series provided in this FREE DOWNLOAD: Yoga for People who Sit.

Take a week to watch and learn. And in just 4 short videos and some consistency of performing the yoga series, your back CAN FEEL BETTER.

Namaste,

Stephanie

P.S. If you like my videos and you are ready to take a deep dive into really HEALING your back, check out my online course: Yoga for a Better Back.

Can I do Yoga if I Have Back Pain? 3 Do's and Dont's to get you started.

 

The simple answer is YES! But not all yoga is created equal. Some cues provided by yoga instructors were not meant for people with back pain. YOU need to be the one in control of how your body feels and how you perform each yoga pose. In this video I provide some tips, i.e. Do's and Dont's, whether you are just starting out with yoga or trying to keep your practice going.

The Effects of Stress on Your Pain and How Yoga can Help

Maybe back pain is just one of the many "conditions" you have. Do you also have high blood pressure, insomnia, irritable bowel syndrome, tinnitus (ringing in the ears), and/or pain in other areas of the body like the neck, shoulder and knees?

If so, STRESS may be the root cause.

In this video, you will learn how low levels of chronic stress keeps the nervous system on alert all day and all night long. Over time, stress can take its toll on the body. Yoga is one way to create awareness of your stress triggers. Awareness is the only way that you can take charge of your own health.

To create Awareness you need to start a mindful practice, which can be as simple as taking 3 deep breaths or begin meditating. But you NEED to start today! Watch my YouTube video on how to start meditating, even when you have pain.

Namaste,

Stephanie

How your Aging Spine is Like an Oreo Cookie

We see how our bodies are changing when we look in the mirror.  You know what I mean…yes, those wrinkles are evidence that we are aging…normally.

Our spines are no different, we just don’t see how time and stress is affecting our joints and discs every day because we can’t see them…until…

…one day, you wake up with back pain and your doctor sends you for an X-Ray. With that picture (or an MRI which is an even better picture) you can see the changes. You now have visual evidence on the INSIDE that you are AGING…NORMALLY!

The X-Ray or MRI shows your wrinkles on the inside.

But we call those wrinkles degenerative discs and joints and these normal age-related changes are treated like a disease.

Your wrinkles don’t hurt, what if you changed how you approach your wrinkles on the inside? 

What if you accepted these changes and thought of yourself as normal rather than broken? 

Education in this video can help you think and believe differently about the changes in your spine.

Degenerative Discs and Joints are NOT a Disease, they are normal changes due to age.  In this video, I explain (WITH  OREO COOKIES) what this looks like and why it is not something to FEAR. 

These aging changes are not something to FEAR and they don’t need to be painful!

These changes do mean that you have to take care of your spine and there are many ways to do that:

  • regular aerobic exercise like walking or swimming

  • frequent mobility practice to use your range of motion or eventually lose it

  • strength training for support of your muscles and joints 

  • stress reduction to stop your brain from creating pain

If this video gets you HUNGRY for more ways to HEAL YOUR BACK (see my pun there!), email me at info@stephaniecarterkelley.com or learn more about my DIY program blending Physical Therapy and Yoga.

Namaste,

Stephanie

How to Begin Meditating, Even When You Have Chronic Pain

Relieve back pain, neck pain, and others types of chronic pain with the physical, mental, and spiritual practices from Yoga and Physical Therapy blended together.

In this video Stephanie Carter Kelley, Physical Therapist and Yoga Teacher shares how people with chronic and persistent pain can start meditating today!

Resources to begin meditating today:

  • Insight Timer App (free): has 12,000 free meditations and some are specifically for people in pain.

  • Center for Mindfulness at UCSD has free guided meditations of various lengths. As suggested in this video, start with 10 or 15 minutes and build your tolerance to longer sessions. https://health.ucsd.edu/specialties/m...

  • This book by Penman and Burch gave me a path to meditation when I was in pain: "You are not Your Pain". It comes with 8 guided meditations on a CD.

Visit www.stephaniecarterkelley.com for more resources on how Yoga blended with Physical Therapy can help you relieve pain today!

My 1st PT Lesson: Create Natural Movement to Ease Your Back Pain

YOUR SPINE WAS MEANT TO MOVE!

Pelvic tilts from Physical Therapy are the same movements as Cat/Cow in Yoga. You get to take control of these movements to perform a little or a lot. These movements nourish your spine and re-create natural motions to remind your spine it can move without pain.

Stephanie Carter Kelley, PT, PhD and Certified Yoga Teacher shares physical, mental, and spiritual practices to relieve chronic and persistent pain.

See www.stephaniecarterkelley.com to learn more.

If you like this video please give it a THUMBS UP and SUBSCRIBE to the channel. Also tap on the bell to receive an alert each week when I post a new video.

If you want a longer practice to use each day to reclaim the mobility of ALL your joints, sign up at: www.stephaniecarterkelley.com/youtube-mobility-video

What's really hurting your low back is a stiff upper back

Grab your foam roller and learn how to create more movement in your aching back by addressing the stiffness in your mid- and upper back.

You can get foam rollers on Amazon. You need 36" long and 6" diameter. You don't need fancy, cheap will do! The brand used often by PT's is the OPTP Axis. They also have softer rollers for sensitive spines (https://smile.amazon.com/OPTP-PRO-ROL...) As a warning, the black "high density" rollers are really hard.

Our hunched sitting posture each day over many years results in mid- and upper back stiffness. This results in "overuse" of the low back (and neck!) which is one of many reasons you may hurt.

For more information about how to heal your pain, see my website: www.stephaniecarterkelley.com