Day 38: A Little Upper Back Relief

Not wanting to fail at yet another promise I make to myself during this challenge, before doing my practice tonight I looked up some poses to open up my upper back. I found a good article on yogabycandace.com, a site whose pictures I've featured on this blog before. It's a great post featuring five yoga poses for upper back pain. Incidentally, all but one of them are poses I usually do anyway but tonight I decided to make them the focus of my practice. After doing a brief warm up, I decided to go into bow pose.

Note to self: do not do this pose after having rich food for dinner like New England clam chowder.

This is somehow your fault.
That's right, look away.

I'm sure my form wasn't as pretty as the lovely yogi in the picture and I'm definitely sure my outfit wasn't as cute. I'm wearing yoga pants but they're not cute by any means. They're black and functional and part of my (slightly sad) mom uniform.

With that being said, I felt like I was going to die while doing bow pose. Everything hurt but when I stopped, my upper back actually felt a little looser. I also did several rounds of cat and cow which helped to further loosen the muscles but I kept feeling like my back wanted to pop but it just couldn't which was kind of maddening.

Overall, my upper back does feel a little looser. Not great, but it's definitely an improvement over yesterday. Here's hoping tomorrow my back will feel a little better. If not, I can always do more poses for my back. Or blame Julian Edelman.

Shirtless selfies will not help your case, sir.