If you love sports and fitness and you are fed up of that nagging, lower back pain ache and you’re sick of it stopping your training, then this article is for you because all these tips I’m going to give you now will help you to get back to training without having to suffer with your back pain.
Tip #1 – Lower Back Pain is Nothing to do With Your Lower Back.
Lower Back Pain is just a symptom. If you try to deal with just the symptom, then you’re never going to get rid of the cause. The reason Lower Back Pain happens in the first place is because of the tightness in your pelvis, abdominals, hip flexors, adductors and quads. The tightness in these areas changes the position of your pelvis and that influences the muscles in your lower back.
Your lower back muscles will be pulled into either: 1. A very short position by tight, short hip flexors, lats, adductors and quads, so your pelvis is tilted forwards (this puts a lot pressure on the vertebrae, the discs and all the muscles around your low back and it makes them tired) or 2. A very long position by tight, short abdominals, which tilt the pelvis backwards (which lengthens the lower back muscles too far, making them tired and causing pain).
So rather than trying to treat the pain of the symptom, it’s far more effective to deal with the cause instead, which brings me to my second point…
Tip #2 – Symptom Chasing May Win The Battle…
Focusing on the symptom alone, leads to what I call symptom chasing.
By treating the symptom until it reduces or goes away, you may have won the battle, but since you didn’t remove the reason the symptom was there in the first place, it’s likely to return in either the same symptom as before, or a new one in a slightly different place, meaning you won’t have won the war.
Conventional wisdom dictates that you follow the symptom, so if you have low back pain, then you might use, for example, a weight belt or a back support, heat pads, painkillers etc., which depending on the degree of your injury might help at first, but in order to remove the tightness in the body that’s causing the lower back pain on a more permanent basis, we need to work towards getting movement back into your core area and into your low back.
Dealing with just the symptom also means that you’re focusing on your efforts on the back of the body, but that’s not the problem.
The majority of short, tight muscles are in the front of the body because our bodies are designed that way. Our eyes are in the front of our heads. So we do everything forwards. Our ankles bend a certain way, our knees bend a certain way. Our hips bend a certain way and when we’re repeating that sitting down motion, for example, it’s shortening all of the muscles on the front of the body. If these muscles get tight and short, then the muscles on the back of the body need to lengthen. If they’re being pulled long, the muscles get tired very quickly and then you get pain.
It follows that if you get rid of the cause, the symptom has no reason to be there, which will remove the symptom for good, but it doesn’t work the other way around. So, if you only deal with the symptom, you’re never fixing the cause of the problem, and the symptom will keep coming back.
Tip #3: Removing the Cause is Quick and Painless
You can make removing the cause of your lower back pain very quick and painless just by using movement to deal with the cause of the problems. It’s important that we keep these movements comfortably uncomfortable as a maximum, because when you create pain, or when you add pain to your body ,it tightens up to try and protect you. And since we’re trying to reduce the amount of tightness that you have in your body, then we need to make that problem go away by doing things in a comfortable, slow, gentle pain, free manner.
Now I know we’re used to hearing that if it’s not painful and it’s not working and no pain, no gain and all that kind of rubbish that the industry has been telling us for so long, but actually that’s not the case when it comes to fixing pain, in fact, adding more pain is very, very rarely helpful. We need to get the body to relax. We need to stop your brain protecting the area. We need to get it moving, and the best way to do that is to show your body through experience, that it’s a safe thing to be doing. If you go too far or you go too fast or you’re pushing too hard, then you’re telling your body this is unsafe to do. If you do this too close to the area of concern for your body, it will try to protect you by tightening your body and shutting down your movement.
But if you can go very close to the area of the problem or the area of concern, and you can move around gently, you can teach your brain that actually this is quite a comfortable thing to be doing, then your brain will protect you a lot less. The tightness will be a lot less and you will move forwards a lot quicker.
So, there’s two things to take away from this article:
- Stop looking at the symptom, start dealing with the cause
- Use gentle, pain free movement to move forwards quickly.
Now, if you want to make sure that you move forward as quickly as possible then I’d like to invite you to check out FREE Lower Back Pain Solution Video Playlist.
And if you’ve enjoyed this article, don’t forget to comment below, and if you think it will be useful for somebody else that you know, then just click share, share it with them and let’s get as many people out of back pain as we possibly can.