Photo Gallery of Yoga Tools

Upper left the Spinal roller is massaging and manipulating the middle thoracic area of the back. Lower right is an inversion position with Roller supporting the hips.

Deep pelvic stretch with the Spinal Roller.

Full extension stretch of the back with the Spinal Roller.

The Plough and the Cervical Rocker for the neck(top photo). The Cervical Rocker is being used for massage and manipulation of the cervical vertebrae.

The Cranial Adjustor and Cervical Wedge can apply pressure to the area at the base of the skull (upper photo) and to the cranial joints (sutures) on the top, back and sides of the head.

The Zubo (a length of wooden dowel with rounded ends) applies pressure to trigger points in the back and neck.

Letter on the Roller

A Letter to Yoga Tools on the Spinal Roller
February 23, 1996

Dear Allan,

May thanks, indeed, for the copy of The Yoke; like all the rest of your booklets it is very interesting.

I write to say that - much as I am unable to believe it - I am entirely free of all lower back pain. In the last thirty years I have not been able to say this. Sometimes it has been less than at other times, but it has always been there. Now, it is gone. What's more, the new looseness and strength in my back tells me that it will likely remain absent.

I have very conscientiously followed your exercises, and I have used the roller every day. I have also incorporated other Yoga exercises, and the result is miraculous. At one point I suffered for a few days with a kind of `pins and needles' going down from my right hip all the way down the leg to the foot, but I persevered and that disappeared.

I added a little addendum to your roller exercise. I moved the roller, a few inches at a time, from my neck down my back all the way to the sacrum. At each stop I would rock from side to side and then I would flex the muscles on either side of the spine against the roller - first one side then the other till the muscles got quite tired. I noticed at first that those on the left of the spine (the good side) were considerable stronger than those on the right (the bad side). Very quickly, though. I gained good control of the right side muscles, and it was then that the pain began to diminish, eventually to disappear entirely. I can now get out of bed in the morning the way I did when I was a teenager, and it is marvelous.

Suffice it to say that I am both relieved and delighted, and I thank you. I will continue for all the years to come, to do the exercises that you have shown me; though simple, they are amazingly effective. I think that the roller is particularly effective. I only wish that I had started this years ago, but I was always afraid that I'd do more harm than good: perhaps cause some kind of permanent damage. I suppose that this attitude is very common, considering what the advice of most doctors is.

Thanks again, Allan, and best wishes to you.
A.D.
Puyallup, WA 98374

Twenty Five Years of Yoga Tools

originally written on June 19, 2004

25 YEARS OF YOGA TOOLS

It is almost 25 years to the day since I sold my first yoga tool. I sold a Spinal Roller to a yoga teacher in Brookline, MA., who was surprised and delighted to find someone offering a tool very much like the one her teacher in France had been using and introducing to her students. Her French yoga teacher was herself a student of B.K.S. Iyengar, one of the most well-known hatha yoga teachers in the world. Iyengar employed a number of props and tools in his teachings and probably did more than anyone else in the world of yoga to legitimize such tool use in the practice of yoga.

I came to my tools by my own route. I had discovered yoga while still in my mid teens through an interesting little book I found in a drug store while visiting my grandparents in Brooklyn, NY. Here was a philosophy and a physical practice that I couldn't really understand well, but for some reason I seemed drawn to it-maybe because it was so different from what I knew to be traditional exercise and physical education. What we got back then in the early 1960s was baseball, soccer and basketball and not much else. I probably felt somewhere, deep in my bones and muscles, that there must be another way. Yoga looked like it could be that other way.
By the time I was 18 years old I was studying yoga with a teacher and finding that I had some ability and aptitude for it. Back then it was more about stretching and achieving some precision in the practice of the asanas (the yoga postures) and maybe a little about being competitive with others in my classes. It was an achievement, an ego boost for me, because I had found a physical practice and skill I was moderately good at. I still lifted weights and did the occasional push up and sit up, but by the time I was 24 or 25 years old it all started to change.

I had an awakening of sorts. It dawned on me that after 8 years of practicing yoga and meditation, I was still gripped by a great deal of tension and strain in my body. Where perhaps I had believed, up till then, that I was making real progress in my yoga practice, it had all really just led up to this moment where I could feel clearly, for the first time in my life, how tense, gripped, and strained I actually was. From that point on it all changed. With such a clear awareness of how broken and burdened I was, my practice took a radical new turn, inspired by this depth of feeling and awareness.

A few years after the dawning of this new awareness, I started studying to become a massage therapist. I also began to experiment more with how the floor itself can be a great aide in pressing and loosening the back. Then I experimented with how a rolling pin, cushioned with a small towel or two, can do an even better job. It was amazing to me how such a simple, homemade tool could get into all those areas of strain and misalignment I was feeling in my back and help open them up. My yoga practice was expanding to become a way to alleviate this burden, this sense of being strain, twisted, and distorted. The use of the Spinal Roller was became an integral part of my new practice.

A tool and die designer, showed me how to use a good grade of sponge rubber and a piece of plastic pipe to make a more permanent sort of Spinal Roller. By 1979 I was producing them in my own workshop and selling them through a few small ads in a yoga magazine. I have been selling them ever since-many hundreds of them to yoga teachers and students over the years. Now I often sell the Spinal Roller to people who are discovering this tool at their physical therapist's office or in their Pilates class. It is simple, comfortable, easy to use and very effective, judging by all the appreciative letters I have received over the years.

In the course of my own practice (still inspired by a deep awareness of the tension, strain and distortions in my body), I have designed a line of other tools including The Cervical Wedge and Cranial Adjustor, the Cervical Rocker, the Thoracic Press and the Zubo. All of these tools are sold through my web site and the occasional ad in a magazine. But mostly it is by word of mouth, now, or through yoga teachers, physical therapist, and Pilates instructors who are employing these tools in their classes or therapies. Over the years I have written 30 pamphlets and 3 books detailing my understanding of yoga and how we can all discover for ourselves what yoga really was meant to be and from where it came. My writings are also listed on my web site, www.yogatools.com, and can be purchased there.
Allan Saltzman, President, founder and owner of Yoga Tools

5 Ways to Use and Understand the Spinal Roller

5 WAYS TO USE AND UNDERSTAND THE SPINAL ROLLER

The sympathetic nervous system (See below for details.)

Points on Governing Vessel Meridian in acupressure (see below).

Andrew Taylor Still (the father of Osteopathy) using a rope swing to cure his headache. See details below.

5 WAYS TO USE AND UNDERSTAND
THE SPINAL ROLLER

I've been using this tool I call the Spinal Roller in my yoga practice for almost 30 years now. There are at least 5 separate but related ways to understand what it means to use this therapeutic tool. These 5 ways are:
l. As a yoga tool
2. As an aide to the natural practice of rolling one's back
3. As an osteopathic tool
4. As an acupressure tool
5. As a device that helps tone down the sympathetic nervous system.
All of the above can be viewed as differing perspectives on the same process of rolling out the tension, stiffness and distortion that many of us find in our backs.

A Spinal Roller can be any rolling pin like device with sufficient cushioning to avoid injury. The hardness and firmness of the roller is of equal importance in order to be able to deliver a firm and strong pressure against the spine and between each separate vertebrae. A too soft roller will not apply the focused pressure necessary for the manipulations and adjustments.

1. A YOGA TOOL
The Spinal Roller is a good yoga tool. I've even named my business Yoga Tools with the roller in mind. As a yoga tool it can enhance both forward and backward bending movements. It gives increased focus and direction to spinal stretches and adds a whole new dimension to yoga practice. The Spinal Roller is both a tool and a toy. It adds an element of movement and play to yoga practice. I have found it the ideal yoga tool.

2. SPINAL ROLLING IS NATURAL

One of the many techniques found in the practice of yoga is rolling the back on the floor. Vertebra by vertebra we press the spine down against the floor to loosen and adjust it. Cats and dogs also roll around on their backs. Most of us have probably watched a cat or dog do such things but we never gave it much thought. Sometimes our animals are trying to tell us how to move and how to use our bodies in the only way they can and that is by setting a good example for us.

Cats and dogs roll around on their backs and they do it because they enjoy it. It feels good; it is a perfectly natural thing to do. Too many of us lose touch with the natural, easy and pleasurable ways of moving that our animals always seem in touch with. Spinal rolling is natural.

3. AN OSTEOPATHIC TOOL

Spinal rolling is also a way to give oneself osteopathic and chiropractic adjustments. When you roll your back you discover your need for manipulation and adjustment and you find that you
can give such treatments to yourself. There is no big mystery here. Get down and roll around on the floor long enough and you will feel the tension, stiffness and distortion in your back and you will also find a way to treat it.

In fact, the man who discovered and developed Osteopathy got his inspiration from using a simple tool to cure himself of headaches. After 20 years of using his simple headache tool he realized the importance of the technique and went on to develop the science of Osteopathy. The following is a famous quote from his autobiography:

"One day, when about ten years old, I suffered from a headache. I made a swing of my father' s plow-line between two trees; but my head hurt too much to make swinging comfortable, so I let the rope down to about eight or ten inches off the ground, threw the end of a blanket on it and I lay down on the ground and used the rope for a swinging pillow. Thus I lay stretched on my back with my neck across the rope. Soon I became easy and went to sleep and got up in a little while with the headache gone. As I knew nothing of anatomy at this time [he was ten years old], I took no thought of how a rope could stop a headache and the sick stomach which accompanied it. After the discovery I roped my neck whenever I felt those spells coming on. I followed that treatment for 20 years before the wedge of reason reached my brain and I could see that I had suspended the action of the great occipital nerves, and given harmony to the flow of the arterial blood to and through the veins, and ease was the effect...." (See drawing at beginning of article.)

His name was Andrew Taylor Still; he was a 19th century country doctor who found his inspiration for the whole science of Osteopathy in that simple tool. Dr. Still developed a hands-on manipulative style of treatment that has grown into a worldwide and generally respected branch of medicine. Had he not been a physician his original inspiration may well have led him in a different direction. His founding principle of pressure applied across the back and spine could just have easily led to the invention of a series of tools for individual self-treatment, the kind or treatment he applied to himself for 20 years before the "wedge of reason" reached his brain and he realized what he was doing and why.

4. AN ACUPRESSURE TOOL

By using a Spinal Roller you can give yourself a strong acupressure treatment. This is the 4th way to understand the effects of using a Spinal Roller. A good roller will apply a cushioned but focused pressure directly between the vertebrae. Right between many of our vertebrae are powerful acupressure points that lie on a meridian called the governing vessel meridian.
When you use a roller you eventually discover these points in the spine. They are very often the focal points of distortion and blockage in the back. The Spinal Roller allows you to press open these very specific centers and by so doing release and align the back. The following diagram shows some of the more important of these spinal centers.

SPINAL CENTERS ON THE GOVERNING VESSEL MERIDIAN
Top of head (Gv 20)
Between fifth and sixth thoracic vertebrae (Gv 11)
Between first and second lumbar vertebrae (Gv 5)
Between fourth- and fifth lumbar vertebrae (Gv 3)

(See drawing at beginning of article.)

5. TONING DOWN THE SYMPATHETIC NERVES

I'd like to briefly mention the 5th and last way to understand what it is you do when you roll the tension, stiffness and distortion out of your back.

Rolling the back and giving it massage and manipulation eventually begins to have an effect on our autonomic nervous system, particularly that part called the sympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system consists of two chains of connected ganglia that run down either side of the spinal vertebrae along the entire length of the spine. These ganglia give rise to a multiplicity of nerves that have an effect on almost the entire body. These are the nerves that stress us and throw us off balance. These are the nerves that must be toned down and quieted for the body and mind to ever find rest and peace. By eventually releasing the back of its chronic tension, stiffness and distortion, these sympathetic ganglia and nerves are brought into their proper balance with the rest of the body.

Too many of us are in the constant, unremitting grip of the sympathetic nervous system. It has taken possession of our bodies and won't let go. Using the roller in very specific areas will eventually help us diminish sympathetic nerve action in the body. As long as the sympathetic nerves dominate large areas of our body, those parts will never know the benefits of rest or relaxation. Spinal rolling moves us in the direction of relaxation and release.

See the sympathetic system of nerves drawing at beginning of article.

Much of what I have written and thought about in the last 30 years is a direct result of my experience with the Spinal Roller. I have written a series of pamphlets and compiled some of those articles into three books that express my attempt to understand some of the hidden principles behind the practice of yoga, self-massage, and the use of tools.

ACHE

Descartes said something like "I think therefore I am”. I would change that to "I ache therefore I am". The greatest indication that I am alive and feeling something is the aches and pains I experience. Sure, we can take aspirin to dull them away or keep so busy and on the move that we don't often become aware of the aches, but they are always there, waiting to enter consciousness in some unguarded moment, or during those moments of quiet, stillness, and rest. I often wonder what life would be like without ache.

Aches tell us something about ourselves that is basic and fundamental. When we ache and know it, we are experiencing our kinesthetic sense. Kinesthesia is our sense of the inner body; it tells us where we are tense, stiff, strained, and distorted. This is the physics of our selves. This is our view of biological energy and where it is healthy and flowing or where it is blocked. And where it is blocked is where we ache.

Ache can be our guide. When we exercise we usually impose some predetermined pattern of movement on our bodies. Muscles are worked as if they were part of a machine; to watch someone exercise does look, too often, like a machine at work. Letting the ache, the kinesthetic sense, guide you is a creative and therapeutic process. How you move is prompted, then, by how you feel. You are attempting to relieve the ache, tension, and stiffness you feel in your body.

For years I have thought, and taught, that this was the essence of a yoga practice, the more physical component of a practice. Yoga can start like an exercise but, if it can evolve, it becomes a creative and therapeutic process of discovering where we ache and inventing ways to relieve it.