I'm A Yoga Teacher & These Are The 3 Best Things I Did For My Back Pain In 2023

Amazing things happen when you cultivate more awareness in your body in order to figure out where you need to stretch and where you need to strengthen. And this past year, as I completed my second yoga teacher training over the course of 11 months, I had plenty of time to do just that.

If you've never heard of rib flare, it's essentially a postural issue where the spine is overly arched, causing the chest to come forward, the ribs to expand outward, and the bum to stick out behind you.

It winds up making you look like you're perpetually leaning forward and that your ribs are wider than they could be. And if that wasn't enough, it can also be a big contributor to back pain.

My entire life, I thought I just had a wider than average rib cage, so imagine my surprise when I discovered you can actually rectify your rib flare by learning to properly pull your ribs down and engage your core!

Once I realized my rib flare could be fixed, this led me to strengthening my core. It seems, at least for me, not knowing how to properly engage my core was part of how I wound up with the rib flare in the first place.

Once I knew how to pull my ribs down, I applied that in all of my core workouts. I was unwittingly rib flaring in planks, crunches, and a number of yoga postures, and pulling the ribs down is one big component of properly targeting your abs, and specifically, your transverse abdominis (the deepest layer of your ab muscles).

In other words, engaging your core is not just sucking your belly in. One of my teachers describes it more as bracing for impact, as if someone was about to punch you in the gut. You wouldn't suck your belly in, you would compress it inward to solidify.

Finally, as I strengthened my core and fixed that rib flare, I noticed I was able to stand a bit taller—but only if my hip flexors would loosen up. This led to the cherry-on-top of my rib flare journey, which was stretching my hip flexors to completely open up the front side of my body.

So often we think back pain is a problem in the back, when it's actually (at least in part) due to tightness in the front of the body putting undue strain on the back. Considering most of us spend hours a time sitting down, it's no wonder the fronts of our hips get closed off; They're stuck in flexion all the time!