Your spine is a team. A very talented team, with some serious communication and boundary issues.
In this episode, the first of a three-part anatomy series, we’re looking at the different curves of your spine. Not as a boring anatomy lesson, but as the dysfunctional workplace happening inside your body.
Because every section of your spine has its own résumé. There are movements it’s naturally great at, movements it struggles with, and jobs it will happily take over even when it absolutely should not be in charge.
In this episode:
🔹 Meet the workplace characters living inside your spine, from the people-pleasing lumbar spine to the creative director running wild in your neck
🔹 Why more mobility isn’t always better, and how yoga can strengthen what’s weak while creating boundaries around what already moves too much
🔹 How common poses like Upward Dog, Warrior I, Triangle, Camel, and even Cat-Cow can place the wrong part of your spine in charge
🔹 The cues and simple adjustments that help your core, sacrum, low back, thoracic spine, and neck actually work together
Good alignment isn’t about making a pose look perfect. It’s about understanding who is doing the work.
What part of your body is overworking? What part is avoiding the work? And who has apparently been working remotely from the Bahamas since 2017?
This is the kind of anatomy we dive into inside Uplifted Yoga Teacher Training, so you can move and teach with more intelligence, confidence, and compassion.
✅ If this episode makes you think, I want to understand the body this way, come study with us inside Uplifted → https://www.brettlarkin.com/online-yoga-teacher-training/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=200ytt
FREE Practice: Gentle Beginner Yoga for Back Pain | LOW BACK STRETCHING TUTORIALS
Relevant Blog: The Nervous System, Not the Poses: What a Modern Yoga Teacher Training Actually Teaches You About Your Body
Relevant to Today’s Episode:
✅ 200-hour Online Yoga Teacher Training
🔮 300-hour Online Yoga Teacher Training
🎧 Also Listen to:
#280 – The Pelvis: Your Seat of Power & Embodiment with Lara Heimann
#369 – Nervous System Masterclass with Kristin Leal
© 2026 Uplifted Yoga | BrettLarkin.com
Transcript:
Brett Larkin:
you’ve ever taken yoga teacher training or even just been around yoga teachers long enough to hear us say things like, a nice tall neutral spine or lengthen through the crown of your head or draw your ribs in, well, then you probably know that the spine has different sections.
You’ve got your cervical spine, your neck, your thoracic spine, your upper and mid back, your lumbar spine, your low back, and then your sacrum and coccyx down at the base.
And maybe in yoga teacher training, you learn that these sections don’t just have different names. They actually look different. The bones are shaped differently. They move differently and they have different jobs. But here is what I think we don’t talk about enough is that each part of your spine also has a different resume. Each section has things it is naturally good at. It also has things
it is not naturally good at things. It tends to overdo movements. It tends to avoid and also movements that it will happily volunteer to do even when it absolutely should not be in charge of that movement. And this is where yoga is so brilliant because yoga is not just about asking your body to do more of what it already naturally does well. In fact, that’s often where we get into trouble and injury occurs. For example,
your lumbar spine already loves to backbend. So the answer is not necessarily, great, let’s make this lumbar spine do more backbending.
We actually want to recruit other parts of the spine that don’t backbend as well to increase their range of motion, their mobility and backbends, and instead create some stability in the lumbar for backbends.
Your cervical curve already loves to move around and look around and be dramatic. That’s your neck, right? However, the answer is not necessarily, great, let’s cue everyone to look up in every pose because, your cervical curve, your neck has a lot of mobility already based on the way that it’s designed. It actually has the most range of motion of any part of your spine. Mobility and be able to look up if you just put your chin up and look down if you just put your chin down are things
that the cervical spine already does well. So we actually don’t want to do more of moving our head and neck around. We want to actually create stability in the cervical spine because it already does mobility very, very well.
your thoracic spine, think about the space between your shoulder blades. For most of us, that area of the spine is already a little bit rounded forward, if we’re being honest, from just like slouching at our desks and being over phones and laptops and dishes and holding steering wheels in our car and leaning forward all the time to pick up our kids or pick up Amazon packages at our front door. So the answer is really not, okay, let’s keep rounding in our upper back. The brilliance of yoga is that it’s actually helping
the body and each section of the spine to become more balanced by asking it to do things that it doesn’t normally do in your daily life.
A sophisticated yoga practice is going to put a lens on every single yoga pose so that it strengthens the section of the spine where it’s weak, it mobilizes where it’s…
often stiff or stuck, it stabilizes the parts that are hypermobile and it reigns in the overachievers. And then ideally it’s also waking up the sleepy support staff, all the different parts of the body that are supposed to be supporting our beautiful tall spine. So our tall spine is not straight, it is beautifully curved, but we want to support these curves of the spine. And in order for that to happen, these curves of the spine have to work together.
Every part of the body and every part of your spine has a job. And today we’re really going to dive into the curves of the spine, but not in a boring anatomy lecture. No, no, no, no, no. Today we are going to pretend that we are walking in to a dysfunctional workplace. The dysfunctional workplace inside your body, inside your spine, because your spine is a team. These different sections of the spine need to work together.
So your spine is a very talented team. It’s an incredibly important team, but it is a team with some communication issues and also some boundary issues.
and one employee who definitely thinks she’s the CEO. So today I am bringing you into the staff meeting. We are going to meet the major players in your spine. We’re going to talk about what each part of the spine looks like anatomically, what is on its resume, what is not on its resume, where it tends to get in trouble in yoga poses, and what cues can help you or your students move through these yoga poses.
with more intelligence, less drama, and less risk of injury. Because once you understand the personalities of each section of your spine, you are never going to think about just like standing tall or coming into a neutral spine the same way ever again.
Let’s dive in.
All right, so welcome to the office park that is your body and the department that is your spine. So before we go into each person, each personnel, each section of the spine of this office department, let’s just do like a quick office tour. All right. So at the very bottom of your spine, we have what’s called the sacrum and the coccyx. This is the very, very bottom of your spine.
So your sacrum is a triangular bone. It’s a fused bone that sits at the back of your pelvis, like a wedge between your two hip bones. It is not a stack of separate mobile vertebra like you have on your neck or your low back. It is fused. It is solid. It is old. It is foundational. And in our workplace metaphor today, your sacrum, the sacral coxagial is
like the invisible founder of the company.
Think of your sacrum and coccyx, this is like the very, very, very bottom of your spine, right? Sometimes we call this the tailbone, right? Think of it as the founder who like built the company, still owns the building, but now like sits in a corner office that no one visits or they’re like…
grumpy and off in a basement somewhere wearing like a gray suit. The sacrum is not flashy. It’s not posting on LinkedIn. It’s not giving a TED talk. However, if the sacrum is happy, it really empowers the whole company. Like the whole company feels.
that things are in alignment. Next, let’s move up to the lumbar spine. The lumbar spine is your low back. So if you just took your hand to like above where your booty is curving, right, that’s your lumbar spine. And we often refer to it as the low back. These vertebra are big. So the vertebra in your low back, unlike the few sacral coxagial, are big individual vertebra.
They are chunky. are designed for weight bearing. They are built like the part of the company that actually has to carry the load and do the work. And your lumbar spine has this natural inward curve. Okay. This is what we call lordosis in yoga teacher training. if you put your hand on your low back, for most of us will sense this kind of like inward, meaning going towards our belly button curve of the low back, right? Like our booty kind of curves inward and then our low back starts.
and it has this natural inward curve in towards our belly button.
And because of that, the low back is very good at extension, which is the anatomical word for back bending.
So I want you to think of the lumbar spine for today’s conversation as like the people pleasing middle manager, because it’s really in the middle. It’s in the middle of a lot of stuff.
More to be revealed on that. So the people pleasing middle manager of your low back is the one who’s always saying like, yeah, sure, I can do that. I can help you do that. Sure, no problem. And then is like secretly crying in the supply closet because it’s so overworked and no one is helping it. The reality is this part of your spine, your low back, the lumbar spine can do a lot, but just cause it can do a lot doesn’t mean it should do a lot. And we often ask it to do too much.
In front of it, okay, in front of your low back, we have what? The core. The core. Now the core is not technically one of the curves of the spine. I realize that. It is not a spinal section, but it is so important to this workplace environment that we have to include it in the conversation.
Your core, so now we’re talking about like the area in your belly, your belly button, this area here, your core is the deep support system of the whole trunk of your…
body. So when I say core, I’m talking about your abdominals, your deep stabilizers, also your back body, like the muscles on your back body, like the erectile spinoset, your diaphragm, your pelvic floor. All of these are structures that help organize your center. And in our company analogy, your core is supposed to be the CEO. The core is supposed to provide leadership. The core is supposed to help stabilize the lumbar spine. The lumbar spine
has a lot of mobility the way it’s designed. It’s these big vertebrae.
that are good at weight bearing but can also like move quite a bit. So it’s hard for the lumbar spine to stay in neutral unless the core helps it by like shoring up the front of your body.
So the core is actually supposed to help stabilize the lumbar spine in neutral so the rest of the body can stack upwards and flow from there. However, for many of us, the CEO, our core, has been, it’s like a CEO who’s been working remotely from the Bahamas since 2017. Like no one’s seen her. She might occasionally reply to an email with something like, sounds great, I’ll circle back next quarter. And meanwhile, the lumbar spine, your middle management,
is like running payroll, doing all the HR, doing all the customer service, being the emotional support for the entire body and all the other parts of the spine.
Then we move up to the thoracic spine. So now I want you to think about the area between your shoulder blades. This is your upper and mid back.
We talked about how your lumbar spine has quite a bit of mobility, even though the vertebra here are quite big and designed for weight bearing. You know, you can fold forward and backbend like from your low back pretty well. The thoracic vertebra, on the other hand, are designed in such a way that they have less mobility and they’re actually connected to your ribs in the front of your body. So this
part of the spine is not just about movement, it’s actually part of your rib cage and it’s protecting your heart and your lungs. And unlike your low back, which we talked about is kind of curving inward towards your belly button, your thoracic spine is actually gently curving outward. It’s like arched outward towards the wall behind you. And this is called kyphosis.
So if you imagine me putting the heels of my hands at your bra clasp, like where your bra clasps together in the back and then reaching around forward, that’s your thoracic vertebra. That’s what they’re like. They’re reaching around forward to actually connect to your rib cage. So in our workplace analogy, the thoracic spine is kind of like the operations manager who won’t budge. Like she doesn’t have a lot of mobility. She does everything by the book. She has a policy binder. She has a spreadsheet.
She has compliance concerns. She’s forward thinking technically because the thoracic curve, it’s like rounding forward.
but she’s also very bogged down. And because she’s attached to the ribs, she has a legitimate reason for being less mobile. She’s not just being difficult. It’s like she has actual responsibilities where she’s like attached to the rib cage and is saying I don’t have as much mobility as the lumbar spine down below me. And then finally we have the cervical curve.
This is your neck and these vertebrae are much smaller, much more delicate than the lumbar, for example. And unlike the sacral coxagial, which we talked about is fused, your vertebrae in your neck are like highly, highly mobile. Your cervical spine holds your head up. Your head is very, very heavy. Your cervical spine orients you to the world. It helps you look, listen, speak, scan, respond. And in our workplace, the cervical spine is like the creative director.
She’s brilliant, expressive, visionary, always looking forward into the future, always turning towards whatever shiny object, always saying like, what if we looked up? What if we move forward? What if we did more? So the cervical spine is very, very talented. She has so much range of motion available to her. Like you can even just play lifting your chin up, taking it to the left and the right. It’s actually formulated in a different way than every other part of the spine.
through the vertebra called atlas and axis, which gives it this huge range of motion. But ultimately your cervical spine is not the CEO. And this is where a lot of our problems begin. Okay, so this is our team. Let’s just review. We have like the invisible founder of your sacral coxagial, way down to the bottom. We have the people pleasing middle manager of your lumbar. We have the CEO of your core, who’s like in the Bahamas missing.
We have the operations manager in your thoracic spine who like won’t budge, like doesn’t have a lot of mobility. And then we have this like super like free floating, free thinking creative director who thinks she’s running the company in your cervical spine. So now that we have this lay of the land, let’s go deeper into each of these pieces and really start mapping it to yoga poses, cues, injury prevention ideas, all of that kind of thing.
Let’s start with the core because even though it’s not technically a spinal curve, it’s explains really so much of what’s going wrong in this workplace. And when I say core, I don’t mean six pack abs. I do not mean sucking your belly in. Actually, you do not want to do that. I talk a lot about that specifically in my book, Yoga Life. We have a whole chapter about reciprocal inhibited breathing and how to breathe in such a way that you’re still activating your deep.
So check out my book, Yoga Life, if you have not already. When I say core, I don’t mean you need to grip your abdomen so hard that you can’t breathe, but we do need leadership in the center of your body. Your core is the part of your body that helps organize the spine. So the spine doesn’t have to solve every problem through collapsing or gripping or overcompensation. So a functional core is going to help
hold your lumbar spine in neutral. I’m going to say it again because this is so important. A functional core helps hold your low back, the lumbar spine, in neutral. And somehow when we say the word neutral, we’re like, okay, neutral, so that’s easy to do. No, neutral is so hard. You really need a strong core in order to hold your lumbar spine in neutral. This is way harder than most people think.
Having a nice long supported low back, meaning you’re holding your low back in its neutral curve is not passive, it is work. And if you have ever sat on one of those big exercise balls at a desk and thought like, this will be so good for my posture. And then by day two, your abs are on fire and your low back is on fire. You know exactly what I mean. Neutral is not work.
Most of us tend to just…
hyper-extend our knees, let our booty pop out, and have our low back kind of overarching.
meaning like our belly button is forward, our belly’s like splaying out, even if it’s really, really subtle. Or we tend to be like rounded in Netflix position where we’re just like a slug on the sofa.
remote in hand and our lumbar spine is completely arched in towards the sofa cushions.
We do not want either of these things. We want your lumbar spine in neutral in pretty much every single yoga pose, which is why every pose is a core pose. And I know you’re like, well, what about backbends, Brett? What about backbends? Well, we’ll get there. You actually don’t want to backbend from your lumbar spine. There might be a little bit of backbending happening, but we actually want to recruit other parts of the spine, the thoracic, which doesn’t backbend well.
to bring in range of motion in backbending, not to rely on the lumbar, which is already naturally good at backbending.
So our goal with the lumbar is to actually just hold it in neutral. It’s the part of the spine that has the most mobility. It’s the area of the spine where most injuries occur along with the cervical. So wherever we have more mobility in the body, we have less stability. And wherever we have more mobility is where we’re more prone to injury. So we really wanna strengthen those areas.
So when your core is offline, the lumbar spine tends to overextend, like over arch, meaning like your knees are locked. There’s no engagement in the front of your body. Your belly button’s a little bit too much forward.
your ribs are flaring out, your pelvis is in an anterior pelvic tilt, meaning forward.
or it might be overly rounded towards the back.
So think of us like on the sofa again with our low back, super rounded and in these two extremes is how this whole workplace dysfunction begins. The CEO of your core is in the Bahamas and this middle manager of your lumbar spine is overwhelmed and getting recruited to do way too much in your yoga practice. Instead of just being in neutral, it’s getting recruited to backbend. It’s getting recruited to forward fold. It’s getting recruited to twist.
So how do we bring the CEO back? How do we bring the Cora back online? Well, we have to understand that Cora work is not just crunches, although it’s great to do crunches. It’s not just planks, although it’s wonderful to do planks, assuming it doesn’t hurt your wrist. It’s not just like pull your belly button to your spine, although that cue can be useful, but it’s actually learning how to create gentle, intelligent support around your center while still breathing.
So here are some poses to look out for where the core tends to be in the Bahamas and not online, not functioning, not part of the team. High lunge. So when you’re in high lunge, you know, have one foot behind you. Notice, do your ribs flare out? Is your low back super arched in your high lunge? If so, you need to engage, pull belly button to spine, maybe even bend the back knee in your high lunge so that you can lengthen your tailbone and bring your low back.
more into neutral so it’s not so arched. Warrior I is also a danger zone. Sometimes we try to force a square of the hips and then it causes the lumbar spine to over arch. Again, it’s like in a mini back bend. And instead, I’d encourage you to take high lunge instead or widen your Warrior I stance.
Upward dog, do you press yourself with your arms and then your belly is just like open, dropping towards the floor like a hammock? Guess who’s suffering in that position? Yes, your low back. Your low back is back bending way more than it needs to. It needs the core to actually hug up and in in that upward dog to prevent it from having to backbend so heavily.
Chair pose is another moment where often the booty is back and the low back is super arched and our belly is displayed open or on our thighs. That’s another place where we need to recruit the abs to hold the low back in neutral in our chair pose. So all of these are moments where the CEO of your core needs to come back from the Bahamas. And helpful practices here would be forearm plank. I love forearm plank because it’s activating.
all the deep core muscles, but it’s not putting pressure on your wrists. Plank variations are great. Dead bug style core work. Bird dogs, bird dogs all day long. Bird dogs are like the best pose in the world for just like injury prevention, aging. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, a bird dog is simply just like being on all fours in a, in a table pose. And then you’re reaching the opposite arm and leg out doing very slow, mindful transitions.
and any pose where you’re asked to keep the pelvis and ribs organized while the limbs move elsewhere, all of those are going to help your core strength.
So really focus on your transitions. Like, can you move your arms, for example, without flaring your ribs? That’s light core engagement. Can you step from down dog to low lunge without throwing your pelvis and hips all around? Okay. That again is going to be that core engagement. Can you lift one leg and tabletop like coming out into that bird dog position without your low back?
arching and your belly button dropping to the floor. Can you breathe while maintaining core support? So for teachers, instead of saying things like engage your core, which doesn’t really mean anything, one knows how to do that, right? Engage your core is meaningless. It could mean 12 different things to 12 different students. Instead, you know, try really specific cues, like draw your hip points up towards your ribs or imagine a belt buckle moving up towards your nose.
And then it’s always great to cue the front and the back of the body at the same time. So it could be like lift your hips gently towards your ribs, lengthen your tailbone down to the space between your heels.
often squeezing the inner thighs together or cueing directionality with the navel. Like if you’re on a table pose, like draw the navel up towards the ceiling.
All of these things can help the core come back online.
Let’s go down to the base of the spine and talk about the sacrum again. So remember the sacrum is a triangular bone at the back of the pelvis. It forms a fused vertebra, which means it’s not designed to move like the vertebra in your neck or your low back. It’s more like a wedge, a strong wedge. And it sits between the two pelvic halves connecting with the ilium bones and the sacroiliac joints. And below is the coccyx, your tailbone.
So together, this sacro-coxagial region is like ancient and foundational and not especially interested in like crazy movements and nonsense that you want to do with your body. And in the developmental story of the spine, which is actually quite beautiful, the sacro-coxagial area is one of what’s called your primary curves, meaning it was one of the very first curves to develop. So when you imagine a baby like curled up in the womb,
That rounded shape is the original rounded kyphotic pattern that this same part of the spine has.
So as we talked about in our workplace, the sacrum is like the invisible founder, the founder who built the company. It’s the oldest of all your spinal curves, like it was in utero. So it’s been there.
from the jump, it does not appreciate being ignored. And its resume includes stability, grounding, load transfer, and focusing on the relationship between the pelvis and the legs. Here is what is not on the sacrum’s resume. Mobility has very little mobility. It does not like being yanked around by every dramatic transition. It does not like being forced into square hips.
It does not like being asked to compensate for a core that has gone missing and a lumbar spine that’s already totally overwhelmed.
So the sacrum gets irritated when your foundation is chaotic. It wants firm legs. And I want to be careful here. I’m not saying one yoga pose automatically causes sacroiliac pain or SI joint dysfunction. Bodies are complex. Pain is complex. And if you have persistent pain, please work with a qualified medical profession. But in yoga.
the sacral and SI region can get cranky when we tend to repeatedly force asymmetrical shapes, meaning we twist too aggressively from an unstable pelvis or unstable legs, or when we try to impose square hips or rigid alignment on a body that actually needs a wider stance or more support. It doesn’t love the transition between Warrior I and Warrior II.
So many yoga schools ask us to like square our hips forwards, where our hips are like headlights pointing towards the front of the room in Warrior 1, and then to kind of like scoochie and do this weird thing with our legs where it’s like scooch, scooch, scooch, scooch, and like somehow come into Warrior 2, where the pelvis is now open and we have the hips, you know, more facing like the side of the classroom. So if you’re moving quickly between those two shapes, which we don’t in uplifted yoga for this exact reason,
But a lot of traditions teach this. This is an example of where your sacrum might be saying, like, wait, who approved this? Who approved this transition?
It’s not the best for that sacroiliac joint, which has very little mobility. So this is especially relevant if you’re someone who’s hypermobile, postpartum, has a history of pelvic instability, or just simply…
does not love a lot of like complex sequencing where we do a ton of poses on one side. We want to respect the founder. We want to respect the sacroiliac joint by not asking it to move. Like, so for example, in warrior one to warrior two, rather than kind of yanking that transition from a neutral pose that’s facing forward.
to a externally rotated pose that’s facing towards the side, like I would have students step back up to Tadasana after Warrior 1 and then step all the way back and set up in a totally wider stance facing the side of the room for Warrior 2. Or to come back to down dog between those poses.
So having that stable stance is really what’s going to make your sacroiliac joint, your sacrum, this part of the spine happy. It’s very much needs the relationship between your legs and the pelvis to be incredibly stable. And when it’s not, because you’re getting tired from doing too many poses on one side, or you’re shuffling the feet around between externally rotated and neutral poses, foundation gets off.
And then you’re putting yourself more prone, more at risk for sacroiliac dysfunction.
So one of the best ways to keep the sacral iliac joint happy is to just widen your stance in a lot of these poses. So you’re more stable because remember when the legs are stable, this first curve of your spine is going to be happy. So in warrior one, instead of doing like heel to heel alignment, take your, take your feet a lot wider. Like in uplifted yoga, we teach warrior one on train tracks instead of a tight rope, meaning that you can have your feet hip width apart or even a little bit more. And instead of demanding square hips,
We might say something like, your pelvis turn gently toward the front of the map, but don’t force it. Or we might say widen your stance.
So you feel fully supported on both legs. Not like you’re trying to balance on a tightrope in your Warrior I.
In twists, instead of yanking from the arms or forcing the pelvis to stay frozen, we might just say something like, keep your pelvis steady, but not clenched. You start the twist from your breath and from your ribs, or let the twist be distributed through the spine.
back out if you feel any pinching at the base of your spine.
So a great pose that’s going to make your sacrum happy is bridge pose with a lot of awareness on your feet and your pelvis. Constructive rest where you have your feet as wide as the mat and dip your knees into touch. That’s another like making love to your sacroiliac joint pose. Gentle pelvic tilts, supported lunges.
really slow transitions between standing poses that work the glutes and the deep core without gripping the low back.
All of those things are gonna help you respect your sacrum, respect the founder.
This is the ancient oldest part of your spine. So we want to give it a lot of respect.
and making sure you have a really nice, secure, wide base on your legs, adjusting the stance however you need in whatever pose to make that happen.
is going to be one of the best ways to ensure that. Now, let’s talk about the lumbar spine. We talked about your lumbar spine as like this people pleasing middle manager. So the lumbar spine is your low back. It usually has five vertebrae and these vertebrae are large, thick, built to bear weight.
Compared to the thoracic vertebra above, the lumbar vertebra are more robust. They have bigger vertebral bodies because they’re carrying more load. They have thick intervertebral discs between them. They’re designed for support, but they also allow movement, especially flexion and extension, meaning back bending and forward bending.
So backbending is on its resume. The problem is that everyone notices this and thinks, great, let’s give the lumbar spine every backbend in the company. So in our workplace, this people pleasing middle manager lumbar spine is reliable and capable and hardworking and always available. But remember like secretly crying in the supply closet, the lumbar spine will be like, sure, I can do Cobra, sure, I can do Upward Dog, no problem. I can do camel, totally.
I can do wheel. Sure, I can compensate for the thoracic spine that won’t move and the core that’s in the Bahamas and the hips that did not RSVP and because it can do it, it just does. But again, just because a part of the body can do something, it doesn’t mean we should ask it to do more and more of that thing. In fact, that’s what’s going to lead to injury. So this is one of the most important teaching points I hope to make today. Yoga is not about doing more of what you already do well.
It’s about bringing the body back into balance. So if your lumbar spine already has a lot of mobility, it already back bends easily, you
Don’t need more lumbar back bending. You need more stability in your lumbar. You need more core support. It’s likely your thoracic, your upper back, that needs more mobility. And you may need to strengthen your glutes. Your lumbar spine really needs the rest of the team of your body to show up. Otherwise, it’s going to get injured trying to do everything for everyone.
Here’s the bad news. The poses that strengthen the low back are not often the big photogenic shapes we see on Instagram or the cover of Yoga Journal. These are the poses where you’re lying on your belly and doing things like locust or baby cobra, where you lift your hands off the mat to strengthen your back body and the lumbar area is just stabilized by the floor.
So your lumbar spine is going to tend to overwork in your back bends like a king cobra where you’re pressing your hands hard into the mat and then pushing the chest up. It’s going to tend to overwork an upward dog when the thighs and core are not supporting the shape and the low back basically becomes the hinge. It’s going to overwork and you’re increasing your risk of injury. In camel pose, when you throw your head back and push your hips forward without creating stability,
In the pelvis and the ribs, the low back has the potential for injury and bow pose. When we yank the legs and the lumbar spine ends up taking the whole back bend. And of course in wheel, especially for flexible students who can access a big shape, but may not have that back bend distributed across all the curves of the spine. It’s really just the lumbar that’s back bending. And then high lunge and warrior one are dangerous as well.
when the pelvis dumps forward and the front ribs are open. And again, we have that sort of back bend happening in the low back. And then of course we have like everyday life stuff where we’re sitting in a claps position or carrying a child on one hip or working at a desk or like leaning back in that Netflix position
where the lumbar spine is not supported, nor is anyone helping it strengthen itself or doing what’s needed so it can stay in neutral.
And we’re talking a lot about backbending, but remember, the lumbar spine will also take on a lot of forward fold, which is why it’s so important to bend the knees when you fold forward into Uttanasana. So you can relieve pressure on the lumbar, so the lumbar is not doing all that forward folding as well. So we need to bring the core back online, which we already talked about. We need to strengthen the back body by doing all the unsexy backbends. That’s where you’re lifting.
yourself away from the floor, lying on your belly doing things like baby cobra and locust.
Bird dog, bridge pose, keeping things slow and controlled, therapeutic low back strengthening, the goal is not like a bigger shape or a cool looking back bend, but actually a more capable spine. So for locust, for example, you could alternate reaching one arm and the opposite leg forward and back. We want to be doing things that are helping the erector spin. set the muscles in your back. Wake up.
We want to wake up the glutes. We want to wake up the hamstrings. We want to wake up the whole posterior chain of the body to remind all of those muscles like, Hey, I work here too. So if you’re teaching, think about cues that
encourage people to stabilize this area of the body rather than go into their deepest backbend.
Lengthen your tailbone to between your heels is a great one because that’s counteracting the backbend. Bend your knees, inhale.
Reach up, exhale, bend your knees to fold forward. That’s protecting the low back.
Saying things like, you feel this backbend in your upper spine, in the space between your shoulder blades? Lengthen your tailbone down, draw your navel in, those are stabilizing the lumbar cues. Take your shoulder heads back, right? That’s like, you know, take your shoulder heads back is helping people backbend in the thoracic, the upper back, as opposed to the lower back. So your lumbar spine needs boundaries. It needs support. It needs you to tell it like you’re valued here, you’re valued.
member of this company, but you don’t have to do everyone’s job. And that leads us to the thoracic spine, this operations manager who kind of like won’t budge. So remember your thoracic is your upper and mid back. It has 12 vertebrae and each thoracic vertebra relates to the rib cage. And that’s a huge part of why your thoracic spine, your upper back behaves so differently than your lower back or your neck, which has so much range of motion.
Because this area of your spine, the thoracic, is not just a free-floating stack of vertebra. It’s part of a protective cage. Your ribs attach here, your heart and lungs live here, your breath moves here. It’s protecting the heart.
it does have this kyphotic curve, which means the vertebrae are more arched towards the wall behind you. The issue is that when that curve becomes exaggerated, right? So if we are constantly rounding forward, constantly pushing our head and neck forward,
then the thoracic spine is not in its neutral curve and it loses its ability to really participate functionally in movement. And unfortunately modern life tends to push us into a lot of thoracic rounding by hunching over our phones, computers, driving, holding steering wheels, reaching forward you cook, washing the dishes, nursing babies, carrying kids, texting, reading, working, scrolling, basically being human.
I always tell my students in yoga teacher training, like how many activities did you do today that required you to backbend or reach your arms behind you? It’s usually like zero. And then it’s like, how many activities required you to reach your arms forward? Like give someone a hug or pick a package up off the floor or wash dishes, right? It’s like everything, everything. So in our workplace analogy, this thoracic spine is like the operations manager.
who literally won’t budge because she can’t budge. She doesn’t have a lot of mobility. She’s not trying to be difficult. She has the ribs attached to her. She’s protecting the heart. She’s protecting the lungs so you can breathe. So she’s super responsible. She has a laminated policy binder. She’s like saying things like, per my last email, the rib cage does not approve this back bend, right? the thoracic spine’s resume is all about like, I want to protect, I want to provide structure.
I want to make sure that this person can breathe.
So obviously, like thinking about how this part of your spine is like connected to the rib cage, it can’t do any kind of big dramatic back bending.
The thoracic spine doesn’t backbend very well at all, but that’s what she needs to practice. She needs to practice being a little bit flexible. And so when we ask the whole spine to backbend, guess who ends up doing the brunt of the work? The lumbar, right? The people pleasing middle manager. The thoracic is like, I have no flexibility. I’m in a meeting. And the lumbar says, okay, well I’ll do it. And then your low back is doing all of this backbending. And this is where you’re going to end up with injury.
herniated disc, bulging disc, or just low back pain.
So here I like to encourage simple postural cues like open your heart, shoulder heads back, imagine your collarbones moving to the left and right of the room. All of these cues are going to help your students bring their thoracic spine.
into neutral, right? So to be less rounded forward and to come more.
into ideally its neutral curve beautifully stacked above the sacrum and the thoracic. So a great pose would be like Sphinx pose, right? Sphinx pose with awareness of the breastbone moving forward, drawing your abs in so the low back doesn’t collapse in your Sphinx and sending the collarbones to the left and right. Cactus arms or goalpost arms, like these are great ways to awaken the upper back.
thread the needle is great for gentle thoracic rotation. Lying on a foam roller, like having the foam roller be the length of your spine.
and then opening your arms in a T shape or doing like side lying open book twists. All of these things are really going to help. And especially in your cat cow, see if you can encourage your students like micro bend their elbows and really get the upper back to participate in that cow pose instead of letting the low back and neck steal the show.
So that’s you being an executive coach. That’s you being a sophisticated yoga practitioner. When you do something like a cow pose in yoga and you micro bend the elbows, you really think about how can I find the backbend in my upper back, which doesn’t do backbending well and instead, like pull my abs in and actually lower my chin to rein in this attempt to backbend too much in my cervical and lumbar.
Open the heart, broaden across your collarbones.
These are great cues that can help unlock the thoracic spine so you have a little bit more mobility there.
Now we arrive at the cervical spine, your neck, which we’re calling the creative director. The cervical spine is made of seven vertebrae and these vertebrae are very teeny tiny, like delicate little bird bones compared to the rest of your spine. Much more delicate than the lumbar vertebra. And these seven vertebrae are like designed for mobility. They help your head nod and turn and tilt and orient and scan and swallow. And we just have so much range of motion here.
And at the very top, have the atlas and axis bones, the first two cervical vertebrae, which I mentioned earlier, which are uniquely shaped and allow for the head to have so much movement. But your head is heavy and your cervical spine, if the other parts of the spine aren’t helping it, it’s carrying this heavy bowling ball of your head all by itself.
and because of our phones, like techs neck is a thing, and our head gets pulled forward, and that is very, very hard for your cervical spine because your cervical vertebra are teeny tiny. They’re not designed to hold your heavy head.
So the cervical spine kind of like as the creative director like thinks she’s in charge, thinks she’s the CEO, and she wants to try to lead every yoga pose. So if you’re a teacher, you know this. Like when you tell your class, let’s twist, like what does everyone do? They look, they do it with their head first just because that’s the place that they have the most range of motion. But the neck should not be creating the illusion that a twist is deeper than it is.
The neck should not be making a back bend look dramatic by just like lifting the chin or taking the neck into like a huge extension, hyper extension, especially if the thoracic spine and core have not also shown up to the party. The neck is a place where our students often try to look more advanced or you might try to look more advanced by like lifting the chin or tucking the chin or trying to twist with sort of the head and neck. And this is why I think
A yoga cue that can get us in a lot of trouble is this cue to look up, right? In triangle pose, side angle, twist, upward dog, cobra. We don’t use that cue in uplifted yoga because we want to protect the cervical spine, kind of like the lumbar spine. We want it to be in neutral. We already know that it has a lot of range of motion, so we want to keep it neutral. We want to focus on stabilizing it.
and over-queuing our students to look up, cervical sensitivity.
So our goal is that the head and neck are aligned with the rest of the spine. And this is way easier said than done. Even in something as simple as a sun breath, we need lot like muscular energy in the abs and back body.
do that. So head and neck alignment is not just a neck issue, it’s like a whole company issue. And if your core is in the Bahamas and the ribs are flaring and the thoracic spine is just locked up and the lumbar spine is overwhelmed, well then guess what? In order to try to do the pose, the neck is going to end up attempting something dramatic and that is going to be a danger zone.
So danger zone here, would say triangle with the gaze forced up, side angle cranking the head towards the ceiling, twist where you’re turning the chin farther than the ribs. I would say that’s a no-no. Cobra and up dog where you’re throwing the head back, lifting the chin. All of this is going to put the cervical spine at big risk for injury. Camel where the neck drops back without support from the rest of the spine. And I’m not saying injury instantly. I’m saying injury potentially over time.
Yeah, as well as shoulder stand and headstand, especially when those are practiced without adequate preparation, supervision or props. We really need to respect the cervical spine. Now, I’m not saying never do these poses, but I’m just saying that you need to think about how to protect this very hypermobile, brilliant, chaotic cervical spine. The number one cue that will help you is align the ears over the shoulders.
Think of the back of the neck lengthening, press the head into an imaginary back wall behind you. Let the chin dip slightly.
Bring your skull back over your spine. All of those are golden cues for helping protect the cervical spine. In standing poses, let the gaze be neutral or down.
In triangle pose and side angle pose, you can just look forward or down. In half lift, that Ardha Uttanasana, instead of saying look forward, you can say dip the chin length in the back of the neck, glide your heart forward. That’s gonna activate the back bend in the thoracic spine, the upper back, where we actually want it to be.
In twists, we can say, let your gaze be the last thing to turn. Or a lot of times in uplifted yoga, the way we teach twists, we don’t even teach it in such a way where people can twist with their head first.
We actually get the core involved in the twist as the thing that’s powering the twist, not just whipping the head and neck around.
So if you think of all these parts of your spine in a staff meeting together, it’s a relationship. When one part is overworking, another part is underworking. When one part gets stuck, another part of the spine ends up compensating. And then when one part ends up leading all the time, a different part often pays the price.
So alignment in yoga isn’t about making a pose look perfect. Alignment is about knowing who’s doing the work. What part of my body is doing the work and what part of my body is avoiding the work? Who is compensating and who is leading when they should be supporting and who is supporting when they should be resting and who has been in the Bahamas since 2017. This is also why one pose can be medicine for one person and a problem for another person.
Cobra can be a huge back body strengthener when practiced with awareness. It can also be a place where people just dump and over arch their low back if they’re just pressing like crazy into their hands.
Camel can be this beautiful front body opener and actually core strengthener when done with awareness. It can also become a lumbar compression show and cervical drama if the core glutes, thoracic spine and breath are not properly involved. So the question is often not like is a pose good or bad. The question is like how much body awareness can I bring to myself or to my students to really get them to ask like who’s doing the job? Who’s doing the job here?
That’s what’s going to make you a better yoga teacher. That’s what’s going to make you a more intelligent practitioner.
not just making shapes, but like coaching the workplace. Helping the overworked middle manager of the lumbar spine take a lunch break.
bringing the core, the CEO, back from the Bahamas.
So my invitation for you is like the next time you’re walking around or driving or texting or teaching or even just standing in line at the grocery store or sitting at the computer, think about these characters that we’ve met in your spine and think about is everyone doing their correct job?
Is my sacrum supported by my legs or what I’m sitting on? Is my low back being held in neutral by my core? Is my upper back like yearning towards length and maybe like a little bit of a back bend because I know it has a tendency to hunch forward? Am I pressing my head into an imaginary back wall behind me because I know it has a tendency to lean forward?
It’s not so much about forcing yourself into a perfect posture, but it’s about awareness.
A responsive body is the goal where you…
know what parts of your body are designed to do specific jobs, what’s on their anatomical resume, and how to support them in their weaknesses.
That’s the brilliance of yoga. When done with awareness, with a sophisticated approach, yoga helps the parts of us that are weak become strong. And it helps the parts of us that are rigid become more mobile. And it helps the parts of us that are overworking to learn boundaries.
I hope you enjoyed today’s episode and I really hope you will share it with a friend, either a yoga enthusiast or yoga teacher in your life. This is the kind of teaching we love inside Uplifted because yoga is not about forcing everyone into the same shape. It’s about helping each student understand their own body with more intelligence, compassion, and confidence.
And if this episode made you think, my gosh, I want to understand the body this way. I want to have this more sophisticated approach to my practice or to empower students this way. Please come study with us.
Thank you so much for sharing this episode with yogis in your life who need to hear it.
And until next time, make sure to get on your mat, practice with awareness and take care of you.
