Just 60 minutes a week can have a very positive effect.
Back pain is the single leading cause of disability in the world. In the US, four out of every five people experience back pain at some point in their life. In the UK, back pain is one of the most common reasons for visits to the doctor, and missed work. In fact, absence from work due to back problems costs British employers more than £3bn every year.
But there is a potentially easy way to prevent this problem: yoga. Our new research has found that exercises from the ancient Indian practice can have very positive benefits for back problems. Our findings suggest that yoga programmes consisting of stretching, breathing, and relaxation methods can reduce sickness absence due to back pain and musculoskeletal conditions.
Wellness at work
There has already been plenty of research demonstrating the benefits of yoga for NHS patients, showing that patients with chronic back pain who regularly practise yoga take fewer sick days than those who don’t practise yoga. But very little research has been done that looks into the benefits of implementing workplace programmes, as we did.
We worked with 150 NHS employees from three hospitals in North Wales. The staff were randomly assigned to either a yoga group or an education group. The yoga group received a total of eight 60-minute yoga sessions, once a week for eight weeks. In addition to this, the yoga participants were given a DVD and a poster for home practice. They were invited to practise yoga at home for 10 minutes a day for six months. The education group, meanwhile, received two instructional booklets for how to manage back pain and reduce stress at work.
