Scoliosis Exercise:

How Balancing My Muscles
Helped My Spinal Curvature

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Many people write to me to know what exercises or stretches they should do to improve their scoliosis. I'm not sure that there is a single, good answer to this question. "Scoliosis" is a very broad term meaning curvature of the spine. I think the exercises someone with scoliosis needs to do have to be based on their individual areas of weakness and tightness in their muscles. In my case my spine was curved because tight muscles and cramps in one shoulder and one calf were pulling bones and other muscles out of proper alignment.

In order to change my body, I had to use "reverse engineering." I had to figure out where my muscles were tight and where they were stretched out, and then try to strengthen the weak muscles and stretch out the tight muscles. Knowing what I know now, it all seems so obvious, but when you've lived with scoliosis and unbalanced muscles your whole life, they just seem normal. Plus, all of the doctors I saw just told me that scoliosis was incurable and that exercise wouldn't help, so for a lot of years I was discouraged from even trying to change the way I looked and felt.

I realize now that the a big perpetual cramp in my right calf was causing, over time, my right shoulder to be pulled down and stretched out. My higher, left shoulder was also getting pulled down and to the right. Over time, it was getting strengthened and overdeveloped from the constant pull from the cramp in my right leg. My thorax was twisted because the knot in my leg was in the back of my left leg, so it was pulling my left shoulder down and back.

Here's a picture I drew to illustrate what was wrong with my body when my scoliosis was at its worst. The big knotted muscles in my left shoulder and right leg were causing tension across my whole right side and caused my spine to bend. The shaded areas show where I had a lot of tension in my body. After relaxing the knotted muscles at points A and D, and strengthening my right shoulder at point B, I'm slowly getting my body to look more normal and my spine fairly straight.

Here's a detailed description of what was wrong with my alignment and what symptoms it caused:

One time when I went to a hand and arm clinic for physical therapy, they helped raise my right shoulder up with stretching exercises, but they didn't work on my legs at all because they were only a hand and arm clinic. Because they didn't eliminate the knot in my leg, it just made the knot in my leg worse from my shoulder being pulled upwards. So as I went through therapy, my hand and arm got better as my shoulder got higher and my calf got tighter. They had merely shifted the tension point from my upper body to my lower body, but not done anything to actually eliminate the overall tension in my body. So as my arm got more relaxed and my shoulder was raised higher and put back into a "normal" position, my ankle kept spraining. My orthopedist didn't know why my ankle would sprain so frequently. It turned out it was a result of the physical therapy that he had prescribed for me. It took me quite awhile to figure this all out.

In hindsight, they really should have looked at the alignment of my whole body. I would never go to a clinic where they just worked on one part of my body again. As you can see from my "before" drawing above, working on just one part of my body alone would never really have solved anything. I had to finally find someone who could look at the "big picture" to see what was really wrong with me.

What I had to do to balance my muscles was to do trigger point therapy (see The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook for specifics on trigger points) and stretches in the knot in my leg and higher shoulder to get those muscles to relax, and strengthen the muscles in my weak shoulder. I had to do completely different exercises on each side of my body to get it to balance out. I know some yoga teachers say to do the same exercises on each side for scoliosis, but I disagree with that advice for anyone with the type of scoliosis I had. I found it has been very important to me to stretch each part of my body every day, but I hold the stretches in the tight areas for a longer time.

To think about it logically, I compare my spine to a tent pole and my muscles to tethers around the tent pole helping it to stay upright. If I had a tethered tent pole that was leaning to one side and I wanted to straighten it, I would pull tighter on some of the tethers and loosen up on others. If I applied equal force to all of the tethers on a pole that was unbalanced to start out, it would remain unbalanced. It was the same with my body. I had to loosen up the tight muscles (tethers) and tighten up the weak muscles (tethers) supporting my spine (my center pole).

In order to straighten out my body, I had to start thinking about it like an engineer would think about straightening a tilting column. The prevailing medical view about scoliosis seems to be that it is caused by some mysterious, as of yet undiscovered gene. Besides being unproven, I don't think this view takes into account gravity and the laws of physics. People's spinal columns are not exempt from the same laws of physics as other columns.

In thinking about my scoliosis from an engineering point of view, the first thing I did was to make make sure my spine (the column) itself was strong and stable. I think the reason there is such a strong link between osteopenia/osteoporosis and scoliosis is simply that weakened columns have more of a problem staying upright. A spine with lowered bone densities is probably less likely to be able to support its weight and stay upright, and hence will bend, buckle and curve as it tries to bear weight. This is exactly why people with rickets get scoliosis.

Another area to think about is that any small pull or unbalanced force placed on a column over a period of time is going to pull the column off center. Click here for an article on the Leaning Tower of Pisa to start to think logically about how columns can be moved slowly, either off or on center, over time through small, but steady, pulls. The engineers on the Tower are using braces to pull the Tower of Pisa back slowly into position, inch by inch. I think the same thing happens with muscles. My spine got out of balance over time through the constant pull of tight muscles in my calf and shoulder, and now I'm trying to move it back into place by eliminating these muscular pulls and by stretching in the opposite directions

The Leaning Tower of Pisa example is also a good illustration of how it pays to just keep trying different techniques to solve an engineering problem, discarding what fails and sticking with the possible solutions that end up working. Like the engineers on the Leaning Tower of Pisa, I'm always trying different techniques to correct what's left of my scoliosis--acupressure, acupuncture, physical therapy, yoga, different yoga positions, chiropractic, etc. Some techniques and exercises have made me worse and some made me better. But now, years down the line, I know what works and what to avoid, and as a result, my scoliosis is almost gone. 

See my section on Scoliosis Exercises for more information on how I corrected my scoliosis.