Ouch. Another morning crawling out of bed with lower back pain. Is it your mattress? Your work chair? At some point in our lives, most of us experience some sort of lower back pain that is so bad it prevents us from working or enjoying life. In this blog, I am going to tell you why you have lower back pain and how to get rid of it.
Why do I have lower back pain?
Your spine can get stuck in rotation causing muscles to seize up.
Reason 1: For me, it was falling off a roof when I was 19 years old, working as a painter to pay my way through university. Sometimes we take a hard bump on our spines causing a chink in the armor. That could be from sports – football, rugby, gymnastics – or from a car accident. In the end this weak spot is always a little vulnerable to re-injury.
Reason 2: For most people, lower back pain has a more gradual onset. Poor posture and sitting positions cause our hips and spine to shift off balance. You can often see this just by looking at people’s belt lines from behind. Notice how many people do not have level waistlines. When the hips get stuck in innominate rotations or up shears (explained below) the muscles get aggravated on the side of our spine or worse yet, damage develops in the discs of the spine itself.
Did you know that during adolescence, the prevalence of spinal scoliosis is 3-5%; however, by age 70, nearly 70% of adults have some scoliosis? The reason for this is likely how we habitually hold ourselves.
Here is an exercise to illustrate this point. Put a note on your phone today. Every time you see the note, notice how you are holding your body. Are you standing more on your right foot or your left? If you are sitting, do you have more weight on your right or left buttock? Are your legs crossed? Years of poor posture and unconscious habits like crossing our legs or sitting favoring one butt cheek cause us to form permanent changes in our bodies. This does NOT have to be the case.
How do I fix my lower back pain?
In many cases you can feel better by stretching out your hamstrings, glutes, quadriceps and hip flexors. Check out this video for how to do them properly. However, to truly fix your lower back pain, you need individualized exercise training with an expert in lower back pain. Any good physical therapist or physio can help you get out of pain, but to stay out of pain long-term you need to align your body AND strengthen your muscles to hold your alignment. You need to learn how to hold your posture and contract your muscles in a way that preserves your body.
You can fix your lower back pain by learning about your body.
At Better Living we teach you about:
- Innominate rotation – your pelvic bones rotate with each step you take. However, they can become stuck rotated forward or backward. When this happens, it looks like your legs are different lengths. This “leg-length discrepancy” is not really caused by your legs being different lengths, but rather by your pelvis being slightly rotated. Good news. It is an easy fix.
- Pelvic upshear and downshear – When you experience the leg-length discrepancy caused by innominate rotation, it is like walking around with one shoe. Every step is a stress on the hips. Your body may respond by shifting the whole pelvis. We call this a pelvic upshear or downshear.
- Sacral flexion/Sacral side-bending/Sacral torsion – The sacrum is the bone at the bottom of your spine. It is surrounded by muscles and ligaments and thus, does not move a lot. However, when the sacrum gets even a little out of place, your back feels achy and you can experience sciatic pain. This sciatica is so common and yet a little self-mobilization of the sacrum makes your back feel so much better.
- Lumbar rotations (FRS and ERS) – When your vertebrae at the bottom of your spine rotate, it affects the discs between them. Spinal discs are like jelly donuts between our bony spinal column. Unfortunately, they are easily squished, especially with twisting the spine. The worst move is usually bending forward as if to touch your toes and turning to one side. Our body is not made for that move. To handle lumbar rotations, you need a core strengthening routine that gives you the right muscles and does not hurt you in the process.
- Pelvic inflare/Pelvic outflare – With lumbar rotations often comes pelvic rotations. Think about it. If your spine gets twisted one way, your hips must twist in the opposite way to keep you facing forward. You can discover with a tape measure which way your hips twist and how to correct it.
Best of all, we teach you how to see what is happening in your own body AND how fix it yourself. Plus, you can do it all from home with minimal equipment by meeting with our online exercise training. You meet one-on-one with our expert team to fix your lower back pain.
Get started today!
Check out these resources for more help with your lower back pain:
https://www.webmd.com/back-pain/ss/slideshow-low-back-pain-overview