If You Want to Save Your Back, Ignore This Bit of Commonly Dispensed Advice
M. Terrill - Health and Wellness
Does your back hurt? Of course it does. Americans are living in an outright epidemic of back pain. In its most recent National Health Interview Survey, the CDC reported that 39% of American adults suffer from back-related pain or injury, and that’s not counting people who never seek medical diagnosis or treatment. If you are lucky enough to be living without back pain, then you probably know or reside with someone who does.
One of the most frustrating things about healing back injuries or chronic pain is that there are no quick-fixes (no, not even the prescribed pills you might be given). Treatments for back pain vary widely depending on the injury, from physical therapy to muscle relaxants, cortisone injections and even surgery. But there is something else you can do to protect your back and prevent it from hurting in the future. You can ignore these three little words that you have probably heard directed at you in a fitness or yoga class or personal training session. Those words?
Tuck your tail.
My advice? Don’t. Not ever.
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Learning not to tuck your tail is a bit like learning to stand without locking your knees. Once you start paying attention to it, you might realize that you are doing it constantly.
When I was nineteen, I suffered a debilitating spinal injury as the result of a fall during a dance rehearsal in college. I was stuck in bed for several months, and when I was finally able to begin moving again, I had to re-pattern everything about my alignment. The process of “untucking” my tailbone was integral to my long-term healing. This gets into the subtleties of embodiment theory and somatic practice, so let’s break it down.
When you tuck your tailbone, or coccyx, you flatten your lumbar curve. This might not seem like much of a problem, and indeed the action is often recommended as a means of “stabilizing” the spine and engaging the abdominal muscles (spoiler, tucking your tail destabilizes the spine).
Your lumbar vertebrae, the bottom five and largest in your spinal column, have a natural inward curve, or lordosis. Your neck also has an inward curve, while your thorax (ribs) and sacrum (the cup-like bone at the base of your spine above the coccyx) have outward curves, known as kyphosis. The human spine evolved with these beautiful curves for a reason. They balance each other and help to direct force through the body.
Too many people are living with their lumbar curves flattened already. Too much sitting, at computers or in ergonomically incorrect car seats, can shorten the hamstring muscles, causing them to become tight and pull the pelvis into a tucked position, also known as counter-nutation. This rounds the lower back, locking the muscles there in an elongated and weakened position, and forces the discs backwards as the vertebral bodies press together in the front of the spinal column. If this is your starting point, then tucking your tail will only exacerbate any back pain you are already experiencing.
When the discs in your spine are chronically compressed on one side, they will bulge out the opposite side. That cartilage and fluid has to go somewhere. This condition is commonly referred to as a bulging disc. This means that over time, if the tailbone is tucked repeatedly, the vertebral discs could begin to press back painfully into your spinal nerves. If the action persists, further injury could occur.
I teach a method called Embodyoga®, and in that method, we have a saying: “Go back to go back.” Obscure? It seems that way, doesn’t it? But the meaning of these words couldn’t be simpler. In order to move into a back-bend, for example, the entire body has to move backwards, into extension. You would not tuck the tail and then do a back-bend, because the tail would be moving forward, in the opposite direction.
Have you ever been behind a driver who puts on their right turning signal, who then swings out to the left before making their right-hand turn? It is applying that same kind of inefficiency to the body to initiate a back-bend with a forward motion. In order to move the spine into extension, the whole spine must be in agreement about where it is going. Is that not at the very core of what yoga is all about? To “yoke”, or “union”. It is time to get back to a more wholistic view of the spine, one that includes the tailbone. Tucking the coccyx segments it from the rest of the spine, when in fact it is very much part of it.
The teachings of yoga are over 5,000 years old. Somehow, in our modern-day world, we lost sight of the core principles of unification that yoga invites us to embody. The tailbone is as integral a structure as any other in the body. We should stop isolating it, and start including it in our teaching and practice with the rest of the spinal column where it belongs.
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Molly Terrill is an ERYT-500. She has served on the faculty of yoga teacher-training programs and as a contributor to training courses on fascia. Molly has been waging a private guerilla war against tail-tucking for many years. She lives in Western Massachusetts teaches at Amherst College.