My general stiffness has given me back pain since I was a teenager, which has progressively worsened to where I’ve been on prescription anti-inflammatories since I was twenty-five. I don’t generally like to talk about it much, partly because of the stigma associated with the number of people who fake back problems to get out of all kinds of things, and partly because talking about it doesn’t really accomplish anything. There are the occasional embarrassing moments where you have to ask your family and friends to move your furniture for you while you stand there like an idiot, or when you have to ask your colleagues to carry stuff around for you at industry events, but that’s the way it goes.
But these days, short of turning to prescription pain killers (which I will never, ever do) there’s nothing more I can do medication-wise for my back, and that’s a problem when I have days where I have to spend all day on the computer (hey, it’s what I do for a living) and my back problems make me significantly less productive than I’d like to be. Since I’ve been in Los Angeles I’ve turned to chiropractic work, which has been a nice start. But after spending a fair amount of time at Podcast Expo with my yoga instructor friends, one of them pointed out that yoga could help my back. Okay, where do I sign up?
Little did I know that this was part of a sinister plot to get me to go to yoga class. Hey, it worked.
Tonight was my first class. As with the chiropractic sessions, I walked out of the yoga studio feeling like I’d been on the wrong end of a gang fight, but also knowing that I’d just done something good for myself. My stiffer-than-a-tree-trunk body didn’t seem to be thrilled about what I was doing to it this evening, which I take as a sign that I should keep doing it.
The class was certainly a different experience, way outside of my normal comfort level, but that’s not a bad thing. The fact that I already knew the instructor from outside of the class helped greatly; I wouldn’t have walked into a yoga class cold without knowing anyone. And the fact that her husband was there as a fellow student probably helped a little because it meant that I wasn’t the only guy in the class.
When I interviewed snowboarder Hannah Teter earlier this year about how she used her iPod during her olympic gold medal run, she was trying to convince me to get into yoga right from the first conversation we ever had. I’ll have to let her know that she succeeded 
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