A registered yoga teacher and corrective holistic exercise kinesiologist was in Kitimat recently to teach people how to reconnect with their core.

The course was hosted by Michele Murdoch of Salveo Products and Spas.

The course, explained Jacques, was developed by Diane Lee and Linda Joy Lee, world renowned physiotherapists who teach and do an international lecture tour on stabilizing the deep core.

“This is really important for people who have any kind of chronic back pain, who’ve had surgery, who’ve had injuries, anything that gives them a back ache,” said Jacques.

Poor posture is another common source of back problems for people.

She notes that 85 per cent of the population of North America suffers from at least one episode of back pain in their lives.

Jacques has been training and working on these core exercises for the past seven years.

The course runs a total of eight hours and said it’s not what most people expect.

“It involves quite a lot of education as well as quite a lot of practical exercises,” she said. “It’s much more of an educational system that teaches you how to reconnect to the deep muscles of your core.”

She said the connection to those core muscles is lost when there’s a disruption such as surgery or injuries.

She compares the disruption of core muscles to something like a sprained ankle.

“Because we want to become mobile ... we start to weight bear on the ankles slowly - it forces it to become functional much more quickly,” she said. “Whereas with back injuries, people tend to just stop.”

And that reaction doesn’t encourage those muscles to come back to functionality.

People also, of course, have to take what they’ve learned back home to keep developing their muscles.

She said there’s also the possibility of further courses in Kitimat to progress on things she started last weekend.

“If you ask me back I will certainly come.”