Lower Back and Hip Care: A Stretch Therapy Workshop
with Diane Cousineau

Lower back pain is one of the most common complaints yoga teachers hear from their students. 

While a dedicated yoga practice can be helpful for improving pain management, maintaining the health of your spine and joints, and building strength and flexibility, there are other techniques you can add to your self-care skill set to better manage pain and stiffness, and free tension held in muscles that aren’t allowing the pelvis and spine to move as they should. 

This three-hour workshop has been designed to help those of us looking to improve mobility through the spine and hips, and for whom low grade back pain or stiffness has become a part of your daily life.

- Learning how to breathe in order to bring more stability into your lower back and core. We’ll learn how these techniques can bring a sense of strength and lightness into your yoga practice, your exercise regimen, and simple activities of daily living.

- Self-massage, mobility sequences and stretches for the spine and hips that can be used every day to keep your joints health and your body limber.

- Therapeutic stretching using the Stretch Therapy system to release tension, and improve range of motion and quality of movement.

After exploring breathing techniques to build stability and connection through our bodies, we’ll play with some mobility sequences to get the blood flowing, and then release tension from the hips and lower back using massage balls and other props. 

We’ll work our way through muscular and connective tissue tension to prime the body and mind for deeper work, including a range of effective deep stretching techniques for the whole body.

You will leave this workshop with a better understanding of your tension patterns and have some new tricks up your sleeve for improving them.

The Stretch Therapy system is renowned for its ability to help improve range of motion, free up your joints, reduce some of your usual aches and pains, and on top of all that... you'll leave feeling relaxed and you will have one delicious night's sleep.

We will close the session with a yoga nidra (guided meditation) to bring you to a state of deep post-stretch relaxation.