Rolling up from a standing forward bend can damage your spine
Rolling up from a standing forward bend can damage your spine BY OLGA KABEL Recently I’ve watched a video on YouTube by a popular yoga teacher and couldn’t help but wince every time she instructed her students to “roll up to stand one notch at a time”. Why was I wincing? Because every time I heard that I was imaging what was happening to the student’s lumbar spine and it wasn’t pretty. This “roll up move” is so popular in yoga classes; it can’t be bad if everybody is doing it, right? Hmm, let’s take a look. Here is your spine. Your lumbar spine curves in to accommodate for the weight of the structures above it (cervical and thoracic spine; ribcage, head and their contents). Between the bony vertebral bodies you have spinal discs. The nucleus of the disc acts as a shock absorber, absorbing the impact of the body’s daily activities and keeping the two vertebrae separated. The disc is like a jelly doughnut: the strong outer layer ( annulus fibrosis ) is similar to the do...