How to actually get relief from low back pain
If you're still icing and taking ibuprofen then you need to read this article.
I led my first fitness after-hours talk of the summer a few weeks back and wanted to recap the subject matter here for those who couldn’t make it.
If you’d like to attend a future fitness after-hours talk, where a local business hosts me for a talk where I dive into a particular health and fitness topic and teach you all about it, be sure to keep an eye out here and on my social profiles for upcoming announcements.
This talk was about low back pain and how to get real relief from it. There are a lot of things that are misunderstood in the health and fitness world, and low back pain has got to be one of the most misunderstood topics.
I’m going to recap some of what I discussed at the talk about why low back pain is not caused by the things you think cause it. Then I’ll get into what does cause it. After that, I’ll tell you why things like ice and ibuprofen don’t solve your problem, and what actually does.
OK, let’s go…
What causes low back pain
Low back pain is NOT caused by age, disc degeneration, hernias, “wear and tear”, bad luck, or because everyone in your family has a “bad” back.
Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase ‘correlation does not imply causation.’ The phrase refers to the inability to legitimately deduce a cause-and-effect relationship between two events or variables solely on the basis of an observed association or correlation between them.
Put another way, ice cream sales are highest in the summer, as are shark attacks, but just because both seem to increase around the same time doesn’t mean one causes the other.
You might have disc degeneration or a hernia (in fact, in one study of over 3000 people under the age of 40 who reported no back pain or back symptoms at all, more than 50% DID have one or both in their spine that showed up on imaging of their spine.)
Pay particular attention here, the people had no pain, yet they had “problems” in their spine that many would assume would certainly cause back pain.
And that was the under 40’s. Imagine how many over 40’s have degeneration and hernias!
Just because you have degeneration in your spine or a hernia does NOT mean it is the cause of your back pain.
Same goes for “wear and tear.” We all have wear and tear on our bodies. Just because you do doesn’t mean that it’s the cause of your pain.
And same for age, because it runs in your family, and bad luck. You might be 60 now, and you might have three sisters with back pain, and you might have hit a string of bad luck.
But assuming any of these is the sole cause of your back pain is barking up the wrong tree.
Especially when you consider that pain is far more than just a symptom of a physical problem.
We know now in modern times that pain can arise due to a multitude of factors that are grouped into three categories:
Biological factors like bumping your elbow on the door as you walk past it, or having an excessive amount of inflammation in the body.
Psychological factors like how stressed you are and if you have a lot of fear about your body.
Social factors like how much of a support system you have at home and if you feel secure in your financial situation or your physical location.
This is call the biopsychosocial model of pain.
Pain is a multi-factorial experience. Not a singular problem due to one singular cause.
Let’s move on to factors that can cause low back pain. While each person’s back pain will have different root causes, here’s a short list of common issues that cause and contribute to low back pain:
Inflammation
Diet
Stress
Lack of movement
Compensation patterns
Fear & beliefs
If ice and ibuprofen don’t work for back pain, what does?
First, you need to know that ice and ibuprofen might work to lessen your symptoms. But they also negatively impact your ability to heal.
Ice slows down the inflammatory process, which is necessary for healing. And ibuprofen interferes with the healing process (and comes with a host of negative side effects, from gut health problems to heart issues.)
So first step in addressing your low back pain is to decide how bad it has to be in order for you to go for the ice and ibuprofen.
That’s not to say that you should just suffer along with terrible pain, but there are heaps of alternative ways of getting relief from pain that don’t destroy your gut and disrupt the healing process.
From herbs to breath practices to mindfulness practices, there are tons and tons of options out there. Do your own research.
Here are a few simple strategies you can use to get relief from low back pain…
And if you want to learn more, you can check out my Becoming Unbreakable Workout & Lifestyle Course, where I go much more in-depth with practical application of what I’m teaching you here.
Use good breathing strategies to bring your autonomic nervous system back to its parasympathetic state so as to decrease its sensitivity to pain.
To breathe correctly, you should be able to breathe entirely through your nose, your entire tongue should rest on the roof of your mouth, your ribcage should expand in all directions, and your belly, neck, and shoulders should not make move a lot as you inhale.
Most people have room to improve when it comes to how they breathe. It is the first thing I work on with clients, no matter their goals, because breathing influences literally everything about your existence, and every goal you could possibly have.
Restore your "stack" to relieve forces off of tissues and joints that are being overloaded & disperse forces more appropriately through the body.
The “stack” refers to the ribcage sitting on top of the pelvis in an ideal position, ie, a stacked position where the bottom of the ribcage faces down to the top of the pelvis, and neither are tilted forward or backward.
And if we’re getting full-on here, I’d also want to help the head sit properly on the ribcage and pelvis, so that it’s not too far forward, nor tilted to one side.
To achieve this, do NOT try and flex your muscles to get yourself into the position. That ain’t it. What you need to do is figure out why your body is not already in a good “stack” and then address those things.
Your body will naturally find the “stack” when it is given the opportunity to move into it. Step number one is to learn to breathe correctly.
Examine your habits to understand if they are supporting your low back well-being or detracting from it.
If you’re living life stressed out, not working out, eating a poor quality diet that raises your inflammation, constantly cutting calories drastically or dieting hard, drinking alcohol excessively, holding onto grudges, having a negative inner self-talk, not sleeping well, not hydrating, etc…
Essentially - if you’re doing things that would naturally contribute to your body not feeling its best, it’s time to take a look at that stuff and start doing something about it.
OK, I told you what doesn’t cause low back pain, what does contribute to it, why icing and NSAIDs don’t work, and what to do instead.
If you found this article helpful, please share it with a friend or on your social media.
If this article inspired you to take action, here are a few ways I can help you do that:
Join my Becoming Unbreakable Workout & Lifestyle online course.
It includes my exact assessment process for figuring out why your body isn’t feeling so good, the exact exercises you should do to start improving what you find in the assessment, and enough workouts and lifestyle experiments to keep you on track for a year.
If you are local to Eastern Utah, join my Fit For Real Life Summer Challenge by attending my next workout or fitness after-hours talk and getting one of these teal cards so you can participate.
The next Strength & Flow workout is happening on July 8th at 9am in the Peace Gardens of Price. This is a free workout.
Then there is a workshop on Building A Youthful Body After 60 happening at Matsuda Acupuncture on July 12 at 6pm. The cost is $10 for this class, please register in advance.
After that, there is a fitness after-hours talk on Mastering Your Metabolism After 40 happening at Bookcliff Workwear on July 26th at 6:15pm
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