Tips for sitting with Scoliosis

Hi and welcome back to yoga very your yoga for Scoliosis community, my name is christine draghiberi and today i’m going to share with you my tips for sitting with Scoliosis [ Music ]. So i always get asked loads of questions about sitting. Obviously, due to the current situation, we all sit a lot more, so it’s important that we pay attention to our alignment, i’m not going to be talking about different types of chairs today, i just want to talk about what we can do to with our current chair That we have already without paying lots of money for a really expensive chair to make ourselves feel a little bit more supported. So i literally have just a normal yoga chair here at the moment and it’s just called yoga chair, but it’s just basically a normal folding chair. It’S not what i would use sitting at my office, but it’s good to show you um the alignment on this.

So, first of all we’re gon na look at it from the side. I’M gon na turn my chair around and what you want to look out for is when you sit first of all, do you tend to kind of slouch into your lower back now? This is not possible for this chair here because it doesn’t have a back rest, but i know if it had a backrest, that’s what i would be doing. Does it feel in any way uneven and with Scoliosis it probably will so just notice. What do you notice about your current posture at the moment and maybe take a picture of yourself just to see what kind of your default position is and then, when we come to sitting properly, we want to make sure that we have the hips either aligned with The knees or the hips slightly higher than the knees, so for me this feels a little bit like if i’m sitting here too long, i would really feel like i would be sinking into my lower back, which is a sign for me that i probably need to Sit a little bit higher, so i’m going to use a blanket to support myself, so i just folded up a blanket put it underneath.

The sitting bones, which makes me sit a little bit higher, feels a little bit better. You want to make sure that your feet are firmly on the ground, obviously as well. So if you have too much of a too much height, you might not be able to to have the feet flat on the ground. So this is good alignment for me here. The other thing that sometimes happens with Scoliosis is that a lot of us, especially if you have an s-curve Scoliosis, which changes direction.

Obviously some of us have a kind of a weakness in the mid-back, and that makes us kind of come into more for lower doses. So kind of the opposite and arching in the back, when we get tired so again just noticing making sure that you can allow for your ribs to settle that they’re, not poking out at the front and lengthening up through the crown of the head, then we’re going To turn around and look at it from the front good, so we’ve addressed the natural curves of the spine, let’s think about the left and right asymmetries that you might be experiencing. So if you are to relax here in this position, meaning if you’re, if you’re kind of sitting without trying too hard, which side would you kind of collapse towards – and this is always really interesting – because it’s probably the um the convexity of your of your biggest curvature – That you’re, probably wanting to kind of lean towards so notice this first of all, ideally obviously, you want your body to be strong and stable to be able to support you in your in your sitting, position so really think about. Maybe you need to do a little bit more strengthening around those areas to be able to support you for your sitting position. However, quick fix right now, especially if you have a lumbar Scoliosis, and it takes you really into one side.

For example, i have a left lumbar curvature and i notice i have more weight into my left sitting bones. So if i was sitting here for a long time – and i wouldn’t be able to kind of think about drawing in from the convex side and supporting myself here in this good position, but i have quite a stressful day – i have a lot to do. I cannot be thinking about my Scoliosis. What i would do is, i would use a little bit of support underneath the left sitting bones and i’m gon na get a small hand towel for this. So i’ve just folded up a small hand towel here and i’m just going to wedge it here underneath the left side of my sitting bones, and then i notice is this too much.

This was probably a little bit too much, i’m just going to open it up. Have a little bit less so you do have to experiment with these things a little bit make sure it’s not too much underneath the thigh, but more underneath the the back of the of the bottom. So underneath really underneath the sitting bones, do you feel more? Even now does this feel a little bit more supported and again just to say this again. This is this is more of kind of.

If there’s nothing, if you can’t do anything like getting up all the time resetting doing some exercises in between this is kind of a quick fix. If you are stuck in this position for for a long time so notice, if this has helped that also for me, this has made all the difference, so i feel a lot more balanced. Last thing that i want to mention is for those of you who have got maybe a thoracic curvature, so less of a hip imbalance, but maybe your curvature is higher up and you feel like you’re collapsing into one side more than the other. Just think about your setup there, if you are sitting at a desk, do you have a right, thoracic curve and you use your right hand for your mouth all the time? Is it quite forwards?

So look at what is happening with my arm. Does this take you further into your specific Scoliosis, then you might think about how you’re sitting during during the day, can you do anything to bring that mouse a little bit closer in towards you, so that you can still draw that right, shoulder blade down? How do you relax again? What could you do? Could you have something underneath your left side?

I don’t know stack up some books, for example, so that when you just want to hang out for a moment, you can rest but into the opposite part of your curvature that you’re not going into your Scoliosis but you’re kind of moving away from it. If this is really complicated, if you think, like i, don’t know, where’s convex concave, i don’t know what my curvature is check out these videos up here. These are the basics: how to find out your your curve pattern and then you can take it from there. I hope that this was helpful, download my free yoga sequence for Scoliosis, see how you get on with this. Let me know what you discovered.

Let me know if you’ve got any questions, and i will see you soon for the next video