Gentle Seated Twists
Okay. We're still in "backs, folds, and standing up," and today we're doing the last shape before we move on to something new. Seated twists.
If you've ever gotten out of a car and felt your whole spine crack like a bag of chips, this one's for you. Twists are what get the stiffness out of the middle of your back, the part that just sits there all day doing nothing while you hunch over a phone or a steering wheel or a garden bed.
No pretense here. You just sit down and turn.
What you need
A chair, or the floor if your hips let you sit comfortably cross-legged. That's it. I know I keep saying you don't need to buy anything for this stuff, and I mean it every time. My daughter-in-law Jessica bought me a nice mat for my birthday a while back and I loved it, but I felt strange about it too, told her four separate times she shouldn't have spent the money, until she finally told me to hush and just use the thing. Point is, the mat's nice. The mat is not required. A towel on hardwood works fine.
How to do it, seated in a chair
- Sit toward the front edge of the chair, feet flat on the floor, knees about hip width apart.
- Sit up tall. Not stiff, just tall, like someone's got a hand between your shoulder blades reminding you not to slouch.
- Put your right hand on the outside of your left knee, and your left hand on the back of the chair or on your right thigh, whatever you can reach.
- Breathe, and on your next breath out, turn your upper body slowly to the left. Look over your left shoulder if your neck's fine with it, or just turn your ribs and leave your head where it's comfortable.
- Hold there for a few slow breaths. Don't crank it. You're not wringing out a towel, you're just turning gently until you feel it in the middle of your back.
- Come back to center slow, switch sides.
How to do it, seated on the floor
Same idea, cross-legged. Right hand goes behind you on the floor for support, left hand crosses over to rest on your right knee, and you turn toward the right, look where you can, hold, breathe, come back, switch. If cross-legged bugs your hips, sit on a folded blanket or a book to lift you up a little. Raises your hips above your knees and takes the pressure off.
The part I actually want you to hear
Listen. The temptation with twists is to go for the big dramatic turn, crank your shoulders as far as they'll go and hold it there like you're trying to see behind you in a parking lot. Don't. Slow beats hard here, same as everywhere else in this class. A small controlled turn done slow is doing more for your spine than a big yanked turn done fast. You'll feel it in the middle of your back first, sometimes a little in the shoulder too...
And go by feel, not by how far you can see. Ache in the muscles along your spine, totally normal, that's the stretch doing its job. Anything sharp, especially down low in the back or shooting into a leg, stop turning that direction and just sit for a second. Pain's information, not a badge. Nobody's grading how far you can twist.
One more caution, plain and simple: go slow getting into it and slow coming out of it. Twists done fast, especially first thing in the morning before anything's warmed up, are how people tweak something. You've got all morning. There's no rush.
What it's actually doing
This loosens up the muscles that run along either side of your spine, the ones that get tight from sitting, from driving, from bending over a garden bed at 6 a.m., all of it. It also does something nice for your ribs and your breathing, though I'll be honest, I'm not great at explaining the breathing part in any fancy way. I just tell people, keep breathing, don't hold it, and that's about the extent of my expertise there.
Your body, your rules on how far you go. Everybody's twist looks a little different, like fry sauce, everybody's got their own way.
Before next time
Try the seated twist for thirty seconds a side, either in a chair at your desk or on the floor before bed, and see if your back feels any looser the next morning. It's a small thing, but small things done every day beat big things done once.