Scoliosis can be a debilitating and painful condition. If you have scoliosis, you may suffer from constant discomfort and back pain, because your spine has a slight curve sideways and the disks put pressure on each other. Additionally, due to this discomfort, you will also have high levels of stress and inflammation in your body. If you are tired of being told to ‘wait and see’ when it comes to your spine, then it is time to act. There are some easy, simple scoliosis exercises that you can do that may help to reduce mild curvatures in your spine. It will help you improve your quality of life, reduce pain, and lower your stress levels. In turn, scoliosis exercises will also benefit your Adrenal Fatigue Syndrome (AFS), as well.
Scoliosis is a spinal disorder that affects around 5 percent of school-aged children and 2 to 3 percent of the general population. It causes the spine to curve abnormally. The spine usually curves at the lumbar, cervical, and thoracic regions. These curves position the head over the pelvis and can absorb most mechanical stress. People who have scoliosis have an abnormally curved spine, often causing pain, severe discomfort and chronic problems.
People who have scoliosis are usually told to wait and see what happens. This can be the start of a long period of limbo involving a cycle of frequent visits to an orthopedic surgeon to monitor the disease and trying different treatment options. One option for addressing this problem is spinal bracing, which can be extremely uncomfortable and painful. Surgery is usually the final option which ideally, should be the last resort due to its serious implications. However, these options do not necessarily remove scoliosis permanently and the problem continues to persist. Scoliosis symptoms worsen with time. A lack of foolproof treatment options, mean that the situation does not always improve. Given that scoliosis is mild when first detected, it is important to consider nonsurgical interventions like scoliosis exercises. This will help to achieve a good quality of life in the long term.
Many scoliosis sufferers are now focusing on a holistic approach to addressing this condition. Scoliosis exercises and other measures have the benefit of improving your overall health as well as that of your spine. It is a proactive approach that will give you control. Often, this approach is more effective than traditional treatment options. Here are the components of this approach:
Targeted stretching is an important component of your scoliosis exercises. With scoliosis, you will experience areas of rigidity, particularly shortened neural tissues that cause your spine to sink and shorten. Targeted stretching will identify these problem areas and focus on them.
Scoliosis is a complicated condition causing a variety of abnormalities like loss of sensation, neuroanatomical abnormalities of the corticospinal tract, poor reflex processing and mechanisms, and disordered postural equilibrium. In other words, your posture and balance are severely affected. Besides, scoliosis exercises, chiropractic interventions can be beneficial. Chiropractors can manipulate the spine very gently to reduce mechanical compression. This will help you to ease the pain and aim to restore normal spinal function.
Isometric scoliosis exercises play a vital role in the management of scoliosis. Doing isometric exercises will contract a group of muscles without really changing the length of the muscle or moving the joints. It helps to maintain and build strength and de-rotate the spine. These exercises are often based on modified yoga exercises. This type of scoliosis exercises targets specific muscles at the core, spine or ligament, and help to strengthen them. Isometric scoliosis exercises are essential, to prevent these tissues from deformation over time. These will help stabilize the scoliosis curve, reduce pain, and improve your posture.
One of the holistic approaches can be neuromuscular re-education. This can be an essential part of your scoliosis exercise program. The human body is designed to align its center of mass with gravity. In scoliosis, this alignment goes wrong and the body's weight is held incorrectly. These type of scoliosis exercises uses the weighting technique in various parts of the body. Weighting is done while standing on an unstable disc. As a result, the spine and posture get adjusted to achieve a more natural alignment. Over time, this regime of scoliosis exercises achieves neuromuscular re-education can potentially reduce the scoliosis curve and encourage the body to see the new alignment as normal.
There is no point in learning all these scoliosis exercises if you cannot apply it to your everyday activities. Part of your scoliosis management program must be to learn to align yourself correctly while doing everyday tasks. Self-correction exercises encourage you to always hold yourself in a corrected posture daily. These exercises are beneficial and can be easily incorporated into your daily routine.
Inflammation is a serious problem when you have scoliosis and a poor diet is a primary cause of body-wide inflammation. This means you need to eat a nutrient-dense diet and eliminate foods that are processed and high in salt and sugar. A diet, rich in plant-based products, organic proteins, healthy fats, whole grains, and probiotics benefits in reducing inflammation. Anti-inflammatory herbs and spices such as ginger, turmeric, green tea, thyme, basil, oregano, and organic coffee can also reduce inflammation.
Besides scoliosis exercises, you need to watch what you are eating if you want to improve your condition and maintain good health. Many unhealthy options are easily available in the market like refined vegetable oils like canola, soybean, and corn as well as non-organic proteins that may contain hormones and antibiotics. Also, refined carbohydrates such as most bread and cereals and pasteurized dairy products are unhealthy. Elimination of these unhealthy options and replacing them with food rich in nutrients and grown organically would help alleviate inflammatory symptoms.
There are also supplements that, combined with scoliosis exercises and a healthy diet, may improve your condition. These include Vitamin D and magnesium, which are both vital for bone density and health. Omega-3 fish oils, turmeric, and methylsulfonylmethane/MSM can also help reduce inflammation and pain. Essential oils like frankincense can also be used topically to ease pain and accelerate healing.
Making these changes and trying scoliosis exercises may help improve your spinal curvature and decrease your pain and discomfort. And this would be of great benefit if you have AFS and need to reduce stress.
Chronic stress can be extremely harmful, especially in the modern world. More and more people are complaining about ongoing stress because of work problems, relationships, environmental factors, and poor lifestyle choices. Stress, however, can do more harm to your body than just make you feel tired. The human body is designed to cope with short term stressors such as a physical threat by using the NeuroEndoMetabolic (NEM) stress response. This system activates organs and systems throughout the body in response to stress. The changes that the activation of this system brings about both protect your body against stress and prepare you to react. The NEM stress response is responsible for your fight or flight instinct.
The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) hormone axis is a big part of the NEM stress response mechanism. This axis is the neuroendocrine highway that activates during stress to deliver hormones that help you deal with it. In this axis, the adrenal glands are the primary stress response control center. They produce more than 50 hormones that help the body cope with stress and its symptoms. The most important hormone produced by the adrenals is cortisol, which is also known as the stress hormone. When the adrenals become overworked and fatigued, the body becomes unable to cope with stress. When this occurs on an ongoing basis, the adrenal hormonal output becomes dysregulated. If stress levels continue to remain high, then the adrenals themselves may start to degrade. And this can cause problems throughout your body, in every system and organ.
Adrenal fatigue can occur at any time. Everybody has their tolerance for stress, and what might barely affect one person may leave the next bedridden. This is often due to a combination of stressors that can overload your adrenal glands. Unfortunately, this disorder is not often recognized by traditionally trained physicians. This means that people with AFS often go without help for months if not years, during which their condition gets progressively worse.
As AFS progresses, it can affect every system and circuit in your body. You may experience symptoms such as depression, anxiety, fatigue, brain fog, hormonal imbalances, digestive and elimination issues and cardiac symptoms to name just a few. Every system and circuit in the body are interdependent with each other to function optimally. So, if one circuit becomes dysregulated, the others will follow, leading to a downward spiral of debilitating symptoms.
Traditional approaches to healing AFS does not typically work. Generally, their treatment focusses on the surface symptoms and not the underlying cause. A holistic approach, on the other hand, can often address the underlying cause. This approach can identify the key sources of stress, and help you eliminate the cause at its source. Scoliosis exercises can play a big part in this process.
Scoliosis is strongly associated with pain, discomfort, worry, and inflammation. The effects of these symptoms are even more dangerous if you have AFS. With AFS, you already have high levels of chronic inflammation because of circuit imbalances, along with general pain and discomfort from other symptoms. So, if some of these symptoms are reduced by scoliosis exercises, then it will contribute to reducing overall stress to some degree. This will ease some of the pressure on your adrenal glands. Your body will gradually start to heal itself and encourage the NEM stress response to power down. This is one of the best ways to return to good health when you have AFS.
When you have AFS, your body will be in an extremely fragile state due to widespread circuit dysfunctions and its associated symptoms. It is therefore very important that you are careful when you introduce any new elements like scoliosis exercises into your daily routine. The different scoliosis exercises, that are designed to improve the condition is not always one-size-fits-all. If you have adrenal fatigue, these exercises may cause further damage as it can lead to an adrenal crash, a very frightening and even life-threatening situation. You should only make changes with the help and guidance of an adrenal fatigue expert, who can guide and help you through this.
Scoliosis exercises are beneficial if you have this condition. It can help to alleviate and even correct mildly abnormal spinal curvatures. This can relieve a lot of the pain and problems that often occur as this issue gets worse over time. If you have AFS, you must alleviate or eliminate extraneous causes of stress to give your adrenal glands time and space to heal themselves. And finding a gentle, nonsurgical way to correct or improve an improperly curved spine is an obvious way to do that.
Too often there’s no help when it comes to scoliosis. You may be told to just ‘wait and see’ and have to helplessly watch as your spine worsens. However, now you can take action and help to strengthen and stretch your spine with safe and effective scoliosis exercises.
