A barking back can do more than derail your gym plans—it can make even everyday activities feel insurmountable. But popping pills for back pain can do more harm than good, as we reported. So what can you do to feel better?
You might want to incorporate a new kind of workout into your routine, a new study in the Annals of Internal Medicine suggests. Yoga might be just as effective at treating chronic low back pain as physical therapy is, the researchers discovered.
Researchers split 320 people with chronic low back pain into three groups: The first did 12 weeks of weekly yoga classes, the second had 15 physical therapy visits, and the third simply read through educational books and leaflets on back pain.
The yoga classes included gentle poses, like knees to chest, cat/cow, child’s pose, and sphinx pose. (For more health news delivered right to your inbox, sign up for our Daily Dose newsletter.)
After 12 weeks, the people who did yoga and those who went to physical therapy showed greater improvement in back-related function than those given educational materials. And there was no different in function or pain between the yoga group and the physical therapy group.
What’s more, yoga participants and physical therapy participants were 21 and 22 percent less likely, respectively, than the education group to use pain kills after 12 weeks. (Here are 7 ways to knock out back pain without a pill.)
The improvements seen in both the yoga and physical therapy group were maintained after one year, too.
The findings suggest that a structured yoga program may be a reasonable alternative to going to physical therapy, the study authors say. But don’t join any yoga class blindly—researchers and experts specifically chose the poses for this experiment for safety and efficacy. So talk to your doctor first about what kinds to stick with. (You can also show him the guidebook that the classes in this study used.)
(Here's how to plank without back pain.)
