Help me find useful yoga and/or pilates DVDs.

I strongly encourage you to attend a yoga class, specifically one where the instructors spend a great deal of time walking around checking everyone's alignment. Yoga performed without improper instruction is a great way to injure oneself. DVDs are nice, but there is NO replacement for a good teacher who is actually looking at your body and determining if you are doing a pose right or hurting yourself.

If you are not very flexible and you have chronic back pain, I would recommend being particularly careful of any forward-bend postures that you do. In my experience, a lot of teachers fail to emphasize the need for care in forward bends. You basically want to avoid over-rounding your spine, let the bend come from your hips, even if it's frustrating how far you're NOT bending. I've seen yoga teachers push people into forward bends in such a way that it can injure the back. The erector spinae muscles that run along the length of your spinal column are extremely prone to strain from over-stretching. "Lower back pain" doesn't reveal much. Can you give more information? Have you seen a doctor for this and have they identified the source of the pain? Is the pain down near your coccyx or your lower ribs? is it dull or sharp? does it feel like it's in the spinal column or in the muscles? is it more pronounced on one side than the other? do you feel pain radiating down into your buttocks or legs? It's difficult to recommend something that's just good for the back. Your spinal column moves in many different directions. If your pain is due to a slipped disc, you're going to want to treat it differently than if it's due to over strain of your back muscles or weak back muscles due to poor posture. I've been using http://myyogaonline.com for several months now. I think they're great. I don't want to sound like an advertisement in the comments thread, but I really like the way they're set up. Well worth checking out.

I have practiced yoga for 16 years and Pilates for 7, all the while dealing with a bad lower back. Like Vaike I'm hyperflexible, and love getting all twistybendy in yoga. However, it is very easy to do damage in yoga; to the lower back, neck and shoulders in particular. I started practicing pilates to strengthen my core and to allow me to practice yoga without hurting myself. Pilates has helped tremendously in this regard, and a stronger core has allowed me to start running again, too. I take a couple of yoga classes a week (Iyengar and Astanga) but took basic Hatha classes at the Sivananda centers for years. I love all the classes, but in my experience Iyengar breaks down poses in the most back-friendly manner. You can find good detail on the poses in the B.K.S. Iyengar book http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805210318/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/. I wouldn't trade my Pilates tower classes for anything -- I really get the most benefit from them -- but an ok substitute when I'm traveling is my http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005NRNG/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/ DVD.

If you're open to non-yoga, non-Pilates options, I would highly recommend the book http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553379887/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/ by Pete Egoscue. It's based on a series of gentle, non-impact exercises (some similar to certain yoga poses or Pilates exercises) that work to strengthen your muscles and realign your body. http://www.shareguide.com/Egoscue.html with Pete gives a pretty good introduction to his ideas. I had been dealing with a chronic bad back for 15+ years following an injury. Then I got a bookcase dropped on my foot and spent three weeks on crutches and four more on a cane, which torqued me thoroughly out of alignment and put me into six months of continuous pain. Six months after the injury, and six weeks into the most intense, longest-lasting, most immobilizing sciatica attack of my life (and really wanting to get off the opiate painkillers), I got Pain Free out of the library. Four days later, I looked at the clock late afternoon and realized I had gone all day without taking a single painkiller. Not because I was toughing through the pain, but because I had forgotten about them. They have a network of clinics around the world, which you might eventually want to check out if there's one near you. (Or you might not. Lots of people have gotten relief from their pain just through the exercises in the books.) Several of the clinics have blogs where they post videos and exercise menus for various conditions (back pain, neck pain, hip pain, you name it). I recommend the Egoscue Method and his books http://www.metafilter.com/contribute/activity/90887/search?q=egoscue&sa=search+activity and sometimes worry about being a Johnny One-Note, but seriously, it changed my life. These days, I have no more back pain and no more foot pain. I can walk comfortably for miles, I can change the bottle on the water cooler at work without a second thought, and I'm 9 weeks into training for the 2010 Oakland Marathon. I love what it's done for me and if I ever meet Pete Egoscue, I'm going to have a hard time resisting the urge to give him a great big kiss.

Re http://www.metafilter.com/user/82641 - I recently hurt my back (it was pretty minor compared to most back problems; I just wrenched it a bit and was sore for a couple of weeks, and had trouble standing up straight sometimes). The only thing I really tried to improve things was lying on my back with my knees up, either resting on the seat of a chair or a couple of really thick pillows. It made a huge difference and made me feel a lot better. I hope you find something that makes you feel better!

Quick fixes for lower back pain:Stop sitting in chairs all day. Try stools or backless seats. This will be annoying until your back strengthens up - YOU have to decide if the annoyance is worth itDo some "Supermans" - lay on your stomach on the floor. Put your arms in front of you like you're flying like superman. Lift arms, legs, and head off the ground, towards the ceiling. Hold for as long as you're comfortable. RepeatWork out your "core" by doing pullups/deadlifts/etcHang out in the http://images.google.com/images?q=yoga+child+pose when you're all done, to help relax the work you did

Pahool - according to the chiropractors I've seen over the years my pain is related to a combination of intensely flat feet (for which I wear inserts), weak abdominal muscles, and this tiny bone in my back that is flipped slightly the wrong way, which is no big deal usually, but means that my back is prone to weakness. The bone is actually in my mid back, but for some reason it radiates down and I experience most of my pain in my lower back. In the past, I only had occasional flare ups that were dealt with by seeing a chiropractor multiple times a week for a few weeks, but since I lost health insurance and employment, I've been unable to do this and it has translated into daily pain. Thanks for all the thoughts so far. I'm starting to re-evaluate whether this is really the best strategy for handling my lower back pain until my situation improves and I can do something about it. I just remembered my pilates instructor saying something about using pilates to treat lower back pain and, well, hurting every day makes me jump at anything that could provide relief. I'll be checking out all the suggestions, though, and any others that make their way in.

There are a lot of strong suggestions here. My personal experience with each? Yoga loosened my hamstrings and lessened the strain on my lower back, while pilates made me more intensely aware of the benefits of a strong core than a lifetime of competitive sports had ever managed. A combination of the two would be ideal, but after my first six weeks of 1xweek pilates classes I felt that my core was supporting my spine - and not vice versa - for the first time. It was something short of an 'Aha!' moment, but revelatory nonetheless. The only DVDs I've sampled are from Stott Pilates based in Toronto; they're excellent. Good luck!

IMNAY(oga)I(nstructor) qualifer here. But I have taken yoga for 4 years (off and on, mostly on) at a anusara yoga studio and two or three pilates mat classes. I actually took Yoga I a record 6 times before I felt that I'd mastered the basics enough to move on to Yoga I/II and I learned something new each time I repeated it. I'm actually pretty flexible; for me it was more a problem with strength, but I'm not some 80 y.o weakling either. I probably could have moved on sooner, but for me it was really important to get a strong foundation. To answer your actual question, although I think that pilates is great, I actually think there is more potential to hurt yourself doing it incorrectly on your own. It might make your lower back feel good at the expense of your neck and shoulders (even the most basic exercises like "the hundred" require keeping your neck and shoulders off of the floor and people who are both inexperienced and who have yet to develop the proper core strength tend to hitch their shoulders up and hold a lot of tension in their neck). For yoga DVDs I'd suggest the http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000R3PDCU/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/. It is a good, through DVD that gives lots of pointers about proper alignment and breaks the poses down. In the dvds, the male (whose name I forget) demonstrates alternate poses and the use of props (mainly blocks) for those who are less flexible. It is far more important to keep your back in proper alignment than to contort yourself. There is no shame in piling up two blocks if you can't get your hands more than a foot from the floor for example. It shouldn't hurt; if you feel a sharp pain stop immediately. You'll be surprised that even a gentle but properly done, fully engaged session, can create some definite "I didn't even know that I HAD muscles there soreness" the next day though. In fact thehttp://www.yogajournal.com/ is a good source of information. You can get information on individual asanas, creating a sequence, as well as by which poses are best for which parts of the body and/or medical conditions. I know that you don't want to take a class now but I'd feel remiss if I didn't add that the difference between improper alignment and proper alignment can be millimeters. A simple adjustment or suggestion by a qualified instructor can make all the difference, and that's just not something that you're going to get from even the best DVD. Until you know how it feels to do a certain pose correctly, you won't be able to tell if you're doing it incorrectly, potentially doing more harm than good and learning "bad habits" that will take you that much longer to "unlearn" when you can get to a regular class.