Body and Breath - Yoga Shop Talk

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Yoga shoptalk, May, 2003

Yoga shoptalk, May, 2003

Thank you for your thoughts and advice in the Body and Breath website’s April 2003 shoptalk regarding my aching back. Regarding swimming, I have heard in the past that it is helpful for back problems, but I have not started swimming because the only places to swim nearby are at nasty spas with too much and too many chemicals in their pools. I and my husband live in the country with assorted animals and a big garden, and we are well enough fixed financially to invest in a lap pool, but we are reluctant to take this step because we are thinking of moving to a different house in our community and a pool generally has to be written off as a substantial loss when a house is sold. How about walking? I could walk outside or use a treadmill. Would that help or hinder? With no exercise, I feel as though I am crystallizing, and this is exacerbated by menopause as well. Please advise.

Answer:

My personal story is similar and may help you make decisions. After several years of neglecting chronic and acute back pain, I finally went to a chiropractor, who as best as I can describe took me partially to pieces and stuck me back together again. His treatment held for a couple of weeks and then I fell apart again with the same acute and chronic symptoms. The next treatment lasted only a week, and the third until the next day. I routinely asked him what I could do for myself, and he would invariably say to swim. I would object that I didn’t like to get my nose in the water, and he would shrug his shoulders. Finally in desperation I gave it a try, and amazingly, when I started swimming three to four times a week (using a backstroke crawl in order to keep my nose out of the water), his treatments gradually began to hold. In my case it took almost fifteen years of regular swimming before I could drop it and keep my back in health with hatha yoga. Combing swimming with chiropractic treatments (once a month for a year, then several times a year for six years, then once a year for maintenance) from a succession of talented chiropractors who were trained in applied kinesiology, my back problems finally became history.

So my advice is still to swim. If you do not want to put up with the chemicals in public pools, here is an idea for a lap pool that I’ve always wanted to try and that might fit your life circumstances. Procure a semi-trailer with a welded watertight iron bed measuring perhaps 5 feet by 8 feet by 50 feet, park it in an insulated steel building, heat it with solar heat (you have plenty of sunshine in your part of the country), and supply it with four feet of water of your own choosing. Relatively bland purification treatments are available for privately owned pools, and in the summer you could avoid even those treatments by replenishing the water on a weekly basis, using the excess water to irrigate your garden. The pool would be entirely portable in case you ever wanted to get rid of it, and it might even make a profit if you advertised it on E-bay as a portable lap pool. I think people would visit you from all over just to see it as a novelty and some of them might bid on it. Or the trailer could also be put back on the market as a commercial item for ordinary use as a semi. And finally, I am guessing that an insulated and solar-heated steel building in the country could generally be expected to return most of its investment when the property is sold.

Walking is OK after you are well on the mend, but gravity is inexorable and walking is likely to cause problems if you approach it at all aggressively. Another possibility, however, is crawling. Crawling on a soft surface (or with knee pads) using a cross-patterning motion (right hand forward followed by left knee forward, next the left hand and then right knee forward) is more helpful than walking (see the comments in script at the beginning and end of chapter four of Anatomy of Hatha Yoga), but crawling is not very appealing after a few minutes unless you spend an hour or so crawling around in your garden, which is great when it happens but which is too seasonal to be helpful year around. By contrast you can swim for 20 to 60 minutes as a regular practice 365 days a year.

Good luck, and please let me know if you find a way to set up a portable lap pool.