Mobile Spine = Less Pain

For this week’s blog, I wanted to talk about the cat-cow pose in yoga. It seems like a pretty easy exercise as we see it a lot in yoga classes or exercise classes. It feels good and it’s easy to do. Most people can do it as long as they can be on their knees. There's nothing wrong with a stretch that simply feels good.

But I just filmed an exercise for my YouTube channel called Segmental Cat Cow. I hesitate to even call it that because it's so vastly different than Cat Cow that we know of traditionally. So traditionally, Cat Cow is much faster and you do it with breath. So when you inhale, it's that nice, beautiful, arching open and then on the exhale, you're rounding out and you're stretching out the backside of the body and it feels good.

But the body is super adept at taking the path of least resistance, conserving energy, and doing what's easiest. So when you do Cat Cow and you stretch things, you're going to stretch at the bendiest parts. And a lot of times, we want to make each joint move to its fullest capacity. But if your body likes to take the path of least resistance, those areas that might be more restricted have less movement, are not going to get the benefit of that movement because the bendy spots are taking the lion’s share of the work.

What I Am Checking When I Ask My Patients To Touch The Floor

That's often when I ask people to bend over and touch the floor in an exam, I think most of the time they're thinking I'm checking to see if they can touch the floor. And that's sort of helpful to know. But what I'm really looking at is the symmetry of the curve of their spine as they go down. I'm not really looking at can they touch the floor. I'm looking at when they've bend forward, do their hamstrings stay straight and then they just bend with a completely flat spine, because that's one thing. And sometimes I found that especially people who do a lot of yoga and a lot of sun- salutations where your anteriorly tilting at the pelvis and doing that tinge forward with a flat back, kind of condition themselves into away from that nice even curve of the spine as they've been forward and they've conditioned themselves into that flat back posture of hinging forward. So that's one thing to look at.

But then if we're looking at the symmetry of that curve, if they are rounding, are they flat in the lumbar spine and then have a super big drop off in the thoracic spine, they're mid-back, or is it that evenly spaced curve? So that's really what I'm looking at.

I think people just think they've passed the test if they can touch the floor and that's really not exactly what we're looking at.

The Cat Cow Pose And What We Check

The same goes for Cat Cow. And if you're looking at somebody in a yoga class or a kid who is in gymnastics or acro, if you see them doing a bridge, which would be that wheel pose where your feet and hands are on the ground and your belly's up towards the ceiling and you're trying to hold yourself up in a rainbow kind of shape, what we're looking for is a nice evenly spaced symmetrical rainbow.

If you see somebody in class who has a ton of flexion or extension at their upper back and then the lower back is flat and it's bent very much at the knees, or the opposite, if they have a ton of extension at their lumbar spine and then nothing happening at the upper back, that's what we're looking at. Even load share of that bridge. So that would be like my husband's bridge engineer. It would be like a very bad engineering of our body bridge of not equally sharing the load of the weight.

The Segmental Cat Cow Pose – When Is It For You And Why Is It Good For You?

So if you have a bridge and you have somebody who's taken a picture of you in yoga class or your kids when they're in acro, if you notice this in them, you can take a picture, show it to them and you're like, “Wow, my bridge is not symmetrical. I bend much more here instead of over here.” Then, this Segmental Cat Cow is for you. And it's basically good for anybody, especially like it's good for me. I'm kind of a very flexible person, but the nature of my job, I'm bent forward over people all day.

I have a really difficult time maintaining my extension, a good extension, evenly spaced throughout my thoracic spine. And then flexion at my lumbar spine because my hamstrings are so flexible, I can rely on hamstring flexibility all day long and I can still touch my toes until the cows come home. I don't really have to do any flexion of my low back because I don't have to. And my body likes to conserve energy so it doesn't bother with that.

So forcing yourself to do segmental Cat Cow really makes you use each joint to its fullest and get that full range of motion so that you don't have bad lubrication of the joints, quick degeneration of the joints, and those kinds of things. So definitely it’s good to put into practice even though it's kind of annoying exercise because it's slow and it's hard and it feels like you are not moving much at all.  The slower you make it and the more annoying that seems, the more benefit you're going to get out of it.

The Difference Between Cat Cow And Segmental Cat Cow – How To Do Them

Now with Cat Cow in a yoga class, it feels like a stretch and it feels like a great opener. For segmental Cat cow, you are mentally thinking of each segment, flexing one piece at a time. And to be able to do that, you have to use a lot of muscular control.

So if you're just in tabletops, so that would be hands under your shoulders and knees under your hips, and you're starting that flexion and you're going to start at the tailbone and you tuck just the tailbone under and you're trying to flex, just think of it as L five. That first one, you want to flex just that piece away from the tailbone. You have to use your abs to draw the belly button in and create that flexion just at that segment. Even if it's like the world's one millimeter flexion, that is still good for your brain to connect to that area, good for the muscles to segmentally be connected to each space in your body. And then you're using more core to separate L four, L five, and then flex L four on L three and all the way up.

So, you're taking that naturally extended low back and using your core to segmentally open up each vertebra from the next one, and that disc is in between. You're getting that opening at each individual spot in the spine. And then once you shift to the thoracic spine, so you've got your five lumbar vertebrae, then you're hitting the thoracic spine. The thoracic spine is a little bit more difficult to move because each thoracic vertebra has ribs attached to it so it makes it more complex.

But with the lumbar spine, it puts the spine more into extension. So creating flexion in the lumbar spine is more difficult than creating flexion in the thoracic spine because there's a kyphosis, which is a flexion already happening in the thoracic spine.

What's difficult for people like me with the thoracic spine is there are 12 of them. That's quite a bit and we want to create a little more flexion at each level and a lot of times, depending on your posture throughout the day, that kind of thing, you might have a lot more flexion at one point of your mid-back than the other. So getting the lowest thoracic spine to flex right where they meet the lumbar spine might be much harder and our body's naturally going to be like, “Oh, we're flexing this area, let's do it at the upper part like T3, T4, we got this, no problem.” Keepingthat from flexing and having the lower ones open up - T12 and 11, T11, T10 - and slowly opening those up until you get to the top of the thoracic spine is difficult. And then once you get to the cervical spine or your neck where you have those vertebrae, then that naturally is in extension. So it is trying to slowly articulate the next one.

Now those ones don't have ribs attached so they're not as restricted with that. And then your head is the last thing to flex and you're simply going to reverse that on the way back. So the neck comes up and the head tips first, so just the head and then the next one and you can put your fingers at the back of your spine. So feel the top of your head extend over your fingers, and then move your fingers down a little bit lower and that's the next level, the next level, the next level, the next level.

The neck is the same way. You're going to have a space in your neck that is going to be more movable than other areas and that's going to be where you're going to extend or flex and you have to slow it down and move one set at a time.

That’s often what happens with people who like to crack their back and their necks. The body likes the path at least resistance and it's going to usually mobilize that easily moved area anyways.

So when you go to get adjusted by a chiropractor, PT, or anyone who does manipulations of joints, we're more so looking for those areas that are restricted that our body doesn't want to move and that's where we're trying to get movement to happen. So we're not looking for those areas that are already bendy. We want the areas that are restricted.

And then to reverse that movement, it would do the extension - so tipping the head up and everything comes into extension the exact same way you came into it. And sometimes, I didn't do this in the video, but a good way to see if you're slowly segmentally moving in the right way, is to wear a thin and really movable t-shirt - so not a tight, super tight t-shirt that you can wear - and if you have someone film you as you're extending, you'll see wrinkles happen in the T-shirt and you want to see the wrinkles slowly gather here and then here and then here and then here so that you can see that you're flexing or extending at certain levels rather than just everything goes and everything extends and it should take quite a while. I would say give it a minute at least to complete the flexion and then extension of the spine.

Why The Spine Is A Great Place To Start With Mobility

There are these different exercises that you can do to hone in on full range of motion of all your different joints, not just your spine. And we can go over those later. I love that kind of stuff. But, the spine is a great place to start because it is often very restricted with just the lack of movement that we do throughout the day. And even for someone like myself who doesn't sit while I'm working with patients, it's all very similar movements throughout the day so that I don't get a variety of movement and I have to really be vigilant with myself to take the time to get some segmental extension of my upper back and make sure that I isolate it and not use my lower back to extend.

I have a yoga wheel that I use after treating people and it's really easy to get on a yoga wheel or something like that and it feels great, you feel really extended and opened up, but it's a lot of just your low back extending because that's the way the low back likes to move. And I have to be conscious of taking the extension out of my low back and focusing it in on my upper back where I tend to struggle.

Conclusion

So, to wrap things up, Segmental Cat Cow is not super fun to do, but I think it's something that everybody should do, especially if they have a low back issues or chronic neck issues, those kinds of things because you want those transition areas where the thoracic spine meets the cervical spine or the lumbar spine meets the thoracic spine, those areas are often places where we hold a lot of tension and get restricted and we want to be able to flex and extend at each space there to have the healthiest longevity of our spine.

Arthritis is coming for you and you got to stay mobile and keep the joints lubricated through movement and not being too stagnant throughout our day.

So if you have any questions, check out the video for the exercise itself. It's not much to watch because it's such small movements, but just know that it will get easier as you practice it and that's why they call it practice. You just have to keep, keep at it. Have a good one and I will talk to you soon!

If you have any questions, you can drop it in the comment section or you can send me a message through Facebook or Instagram. I’d be happy to do another blog about your questions. Also, if you want me to talk about something specific, let me know!

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