Understanding back pain and how to help it

They say you don’t truly appreciate your health and fitness until you lose it and that couldn’t be more true than if you have back pain. We’ve worked with everything from helping clients rehab from spinal surgery to that ache you get in your back that just won’t go away or at times gives you shooting pain down your leg.

The key to understanding back pain is to understand that the lower back is a stable joint that doesn’t like excessive amount of movement, yet the joints above and below it, the hips and thoracic spine respectively, should be mobile and move freely. Problems often arise when you start asking a stable joint (your lower back) to become mobile because the mobile joints (your hips and thoracic spine) are stiff, weak and tight.  

There is a solution to most of the back pain we see, and it can be resolved through three main relatively low investment means –

1)     Stretch and roll the front and side of the hips. (covered in video below) Use a foam roll and ball to work on soft tissue work around the hips and use the couch and pigeon stretches respectively (also shown in the video below) to assess what your hip mobility looks like and repeat the stretching and rolling daily.

2)     Walk more. One of the easiest ways to help improve back pain is to simply walk for 30-60mins daily. If that’s too much to begin with then start with 10mins and build up or try walking in a swimming pool to build up to walking outside. If you have a sedentary job like most people, it is especially essential to introduce more movement into your life. Take time at lunchtime for a walk outside, your back and your head will thank you!

3)     Strengthen your core. If the back is being asked to become excessively mobile, then one of the common reasons for this is a weak core. You can overcome this and strengthen your core to force the it into a more stable position. The best exercises we suggest are shown in the video below and in particular covers the most common mistake in the plank exercise which if performed incorrectly can actually hurt the back.

Video link – Lower back pain solution - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mAjbv4FDzE&t=3s

In summary, the lower back is essentially a stable joint and in order to keep it that way we should keep the joints above and below it mobile, strengthen our core safely and ensure we’re taking regular walks.  When we have no pain, keeping it that way will be greatly enhanced by following this guide.

For more on the essential mobility movements see Move Train Nourish, The Sustainable Way to a Healthier you by Dominic Munnelly and Grainne Parker