3 Unique Upper Back Mobilizers to Improve Your Backbends
Backbends feature prominently in most yoga classes. They offer a host of benefits: they’re energizing, they open your chest to counter your habitual slump over your favorite devices, and they encourage spinal suppleness. The list goes on. However, many find backbend poses challenging, and lower back gripes are common in these deep yoga stretches. So, how do you improve your backbends in yoga to create less discomfort and reap the benefits of these frequently taught postures? Let’s dive into the anatomy of the spine in a backbend to understand the challenges and then explore some fun and unusual yoga pose variations to make these big poses more accessible.
Backbend Anatomy: Meet Your Spine
When you do a backbend in yoga, your spine arches backward. Anatomically speaking, this is spinal extension. Your spine is divided into regions, and because the shapes of the individual bones in each region vary, some spinal regions extend willingly, and others do not.
For our purposes in understanding spinal extension in backbends, we’ll investigate two of the four spinal regions: your upper/middle back, called the thoracic spine, and your lower back, called the lumbar spine.
The lumbar extends fairly willingly; the thoracic, not so much. As a result, many feel an unpleasant crunching sensation in the lower back in backbending poses. The challenge is to encourage your upper back to participate as fully as possible in arching backward. So, why, exactly, is thoracic extension limited? Two major factors impact thoracic vs lumbar extensibility.
Two Anatomical Reasons Your Upper Spine Resists Backbends
The first important difference between your lower and upper spine is their natural curvatures. Your spine is not a straight rod. Instead, it curves forward and back. These curves distribute weight for better balance and shock absorption.
Your thoracic spine naturally rounds forward, curling in the direction of a forward bend. This means it has farther to go to extend backward when you do a yoga pose like Bow Pose (Dhanurasana) or Camel Pose (Ustrasana). Your lumbar spine’s natural curve is a backbend. That innate arc backward gets exaggerated in backbending postures, sometimes creating pressure in the lower back.
The second reason the range of motion differs in these two regions has to do with the shapes of the individual bones, called vertebrae, that make up each section. You know those bumps you feel when you run your hand down a friend’s spine? Those are called spinous processes; their shape and orientation vary between spinal regions.
Spinal Mobility is All in the Bones
In your upper back, the spinous processes are longer and oriented downward. They abut each other during spinal extension and limit the range of motion. In your lower back, the bumps are shorter and stubbier, allowing you to arch farther before they knock into each other.
The key to a more easeful backbend is to mobilize the thoracic spine to encourage upper back participation in the posture. How to do that? If you’ve been wondering how to improve your backbends, read on for some novel riffs on familiar yoga poses that target thoracic awareness and mobility.
3 Unique Upper Back Mobilizers for More Comfortable Backbends
Fish Pose (Matsyasana) Variation: The World’s Tiniest Sit-Up
You’ve likely experienced the Fish Pose variation, where you place a rolled-up yoga mat underneath your upper back to create gentle, supported thoracic extension. Here’s a variation that targets awareness of blind spots in your upper back and facilitates movement between individual pairs of vertebrae.
- Sit on the floor with your knees bent and your feet planted flat. Position a rolled-up yoga mat underneath your upper back, around the bottom tips of your shoulder blades. Lie back over the roll so your head and the tops of your shoulders come to the floor.
- Interlace your hands behind your head and curl your head and shoulders into a sit-up. Do a few full-range sit-ups, keeping your shoulders on the roll, to get a feel for this big movement. Our variation will be way, way smaller.
- It’s time now for the world’s tiniest sit-up. Lift your head and shoulders off the floor, keeping the upper back on the mat. Rock your head and shoulders down and up a truly minuscule amount. Your objective is to sense movement between the bones in contact with the mat. Attempt to restrict movement in other segments of your spine. Notice, especially if your ribs are flaring open and closed. That’s a sign that your range is too great. Can you sense movement only at the points in contact with the mat?
Cat-Cow Pose (Marjaryasana/Bitiliasana) Variation: Moving Only Your Upper Back
When you do Cat-Cow in a yoga class, you move all segments of your spine, plus your pelvis. Here’s a variation that largely restricts movement to the thoracic region. You may be surprised at how much smaller the range of your movement becomes.
- Start on all fours, as you usually would for Cat-Cow. Then, sit your hips back toward your heels as if coming into a Child’s Pose (Balasana). This will minimize pelvis and lumbar participation.
- Next, straighten your arms in front of you and come onto your fingertips as if you’re playing a piano. The extra height will give you just a bit more room to move.
- Place a block underneath your forehead on its medium height. The block will limit your ability to move your neck and head.
- Now try arching and rounding your spine, as you would in Cat-Cow. The undulation happens mostly in your thoracic spine, facilitating mobility in that region.
Princess Leia Seated Twist: Emphasizing Thoracic Rotation
Twists are great thoracic mobilizers. While this part of your spine is limited in extension, it does twist fairly freely. However, when you do a regular seated twist, a good part of the range you achieve comes from moving your neck and shoulders. Here’s a variation that takes those movable pieces out of the equation and highlights upper back rotation. (We should note that your lumbar spine allows only about five degrees of rotation, so we won’t be concerned about restricting movement there—it’s already quite limited!)
- Come into any comfortable cross-legged seat.
- Find two blocks. Hold the short edge of a block in each hand. Brace the other short edges against the sides of your head: the blocks should resemble Princess Leia’s iconic side buns.
- Now, twist in one direction. The blocks will solidify your shoulders and neck into one unit so that you can’t turn your head or move your upper arms separately from your torso. The bulk of the rotation is coming from your thoracic spine.
- Repeat on the other side.
Anatomical Keys to Improve Your Backbends
The shape of the individual bones that make up your thoracic spine limits that region’s ability to backbend, often resulting in lower back compression. Explore these three unusual thoracic spine mobilizers to invite your upper back to fully participate in your yoga backbends, creating greater ease and comfort in these common yoga stretches.
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