When you stretch for low back pain relief, do you twist from side to side? This is a common stretch recommended when searching for relief for low back pain on the internet. While your muscles really like this stretch, the joints and discs in your back do not!
In the video, you’ll see that there is a bony block at the end range of rotation in your low back. This amazing design acts to protect your spinal cord and discs! Your spine has about 15 degrees of rotation built into this design. But when you stretch into rotation, especially pushing into the end point, you are forcing your anatomy to move outside its designed range. Over time, this forced motion causes excessive compression and stretching in the facet joints contributing to arthritic changes. It also creates lots of shear in the discs which weakens the outer layer!
There are activities that benefit from creating as much rotation in the low back as possible like dance, gymnastics, and golf. But note that these sports are also associated with an increased risk of low back pain. Treating these athletes when they experience low back pain often requires teaching them to get as much rotation as possible from their hips and upper back instead of their painful low back.
So how do you relieve your low back pain caused by muscle tension or spasms if rotation stretching is not recommended? Get to the cause of the tension and treat that! Are you sitting for long periods of time? Maybe you’ll find relief rotating to a standing desk (pun intended). Lifting improperly? Poor lifting technique can be corrected so you can lift pain free. Correcting the source of the problem will allow your muscles to relax instead of guarding, eliminating your need to stretch for low back pain relief!
Need help getting to the cause of your low back pain? Give me a call, I’d love to help!
This video is intended for education and demonstration only and is not meant to take the place of guidance from your Primary Care Provider (PCP). Don’t use this post/video to avoid going to your PCP or to replace the advice they give you. Get clearance from YOUR PCP before using the information in this video. Use at your own risk.
Is it hard to get your arms fully overhead? Is standing without rounding a chore? This stretch addresses many of these and other mobility issues I often see in clients.
First, this stretch works to improve your overhead reach. Overhead reach can be limited by many factors including age related changes, poor gym training habits, or past shoulder injury that’s not been fully rehabilitated. If you can’t fully reach overhead, you’ll compensate by overextending through your low back. This explains why low back pain is often aggravated by working overhead in the gym or at home.
Second, your upper back is getting a great stretch into extension in this position. Gravity is doing all the work as you breathe and sink toward the floor. If you have problems with poor posture due to a rounded upper back (everyone), this stretch can be really helpful to restore mobility for better posture.
Third, by maintaining a good position in your low back as you sit toward your heels, you’ll get a good stretch in your hips. Our hips get tight with age and if we sit for long periods of time. This makes things like putting on your socks and proper squatting or lifting difficult. This position offers a gentle way to restore mobility in your hips.
When performing this stretch, there are a few areas you may struggle with. You don’t want to feel pinching in the top of the shoulders, or painful pinching in the front of the hips. And you don’t want to sit too far back towards your feet so that your low back goes into flexion or rounding. If you have tight knees this stretch might be a bit tricky. If you live in Southern New Hampshire and are interested in the work around for these problems, give me a call! I’d love to work with you!
Neck pain when you are looking down can be caused by several factors. Understanding some of these factors will make it easier for you to see what will help you relieve your pain.
First, think of your head as a bowling ball stacked on your neck. Your “bowling ball” is easy to control and hold when it is aligned right on top of your neck. When you look down, various neck structures, like muscles and ligaments, need to work a bit harder to hold that 8-12 pound bowling ball in this new position. Rest assured, your neck is designed to handle this task…to a point. If we spend a long time looking down, knitting, washing dishes, or using cell phones, then those structures start to get fatigued and can eventually strain under the load and become injured.
My favorite advice works in this scenario: if it hurts, don’t do it. This advice especially applies to tasks that your body wasn’t designed to do. Your body was built to hunt and gather, not look down at your phone, knitting or a book for hours at a time. Set yourself up more ergonomically to align your head and neck upright in a position it is able to sustain. For example, lap desks can create an elevated work surface to knit or prop your book or smartphone on. You can add a smartphone or book stand to add more height if needed.
Let’s look at another reason it is common to have neck pain when you are looking down. There are more than a dozen joints in your neck and upper back that have to slide and glide properly to ensure pain free motion. If any of these joints are not moving as designed (too much or too little), then your neck has to work even harder to accomplish looking down. Sometimes stiff joints are painful because they aren’t moving well which starves the joint structures of the nourishment and activity they need to be healthy. Sometimes the loose joints are painful because they are moving more than they should, compensating for the lack of movement in the stiff joints. This causes strain and pain in the ligaments around the loose joints.
The best treatment for this is to stretch the stiff joints and strengthen muscles around the loose joints to help stabilize them. This is hard to do without the help of a professional (me!) to assess which specific joints aren’t moving properly. But I can offer you two bits of advice to get you started. First, please don’t spend lots of time stretching your neck. Stretching the muscles of your neck can offer some temporary relief. However, when you stretch, you are going to stretch and pull through the path of least resistance, which is through the loose joints. This leaves the stiff joints to stay stiff, and tugs on the loose joints, making them even more unstable.
What you can do is foam roll your upper back! Your thoracic spine gets stiff as you age. Foam rolling this area is one way to get the joints in your upper back and rib cage to move a bit better. When these joints move better, they can contribute to the motion of looking down which they are supposed to do. This reduces the work load off the painful joints in your neck! Here is a video to show you how to safely foam roll your upper back: How to: Foam roll your upper back (and why)!
In review, setting up your ergonomics in such a way that helps you avoid spending long periods of time looking down is the best way to let your structures heal and feel better. And foam rolling to your upper back helps get the upper back moving better which will take some stress off the painful joints in your neck when you do need to look down.
I’d be happy to do a thorough assessment to determine which joints are causing your pain and why. With this information, we can apply the best treatment approach to resolve your neck pain if the above suggestions don’t do the trick! Give me a call anytime or contact me here.
This post is intended for education and demonstration only and is not meant to take the place of guidance from your Primary Care Provider (PCP). Don’t use this post to avoid going to your PCP or to replace the advice they give you. Get clearance from YOUR PCP before using the information in this post. Use at your own risk.
