When you are struggling with low back pain, it is common to seek relief with stretching and strengthening exercises. This approach is an important part of your recovery and healing. However, your time will be better spent, especially initially, learning to avoid the most common triggers of low back pain. By avoiding common triggers, your low back is no longer sustaining the damage caused by these triggers, often resulting in an immediate reduction in pain. Appropriate strengthening and stretching exercises are then less painful to perform and more effective at maintaining improvement.
So how do you avoid the most common triggers for low back pain? There are many activities that can cause low back pain depending on what structures in your back are injured. Repeated or prolonged bending, twisting, and combining bending and twisting is particularly damaging to the disks in your low back. These actions pull on the outer layer of the disc and eventually cause painful damage to that layer. If you can prevent this damage, or stop it from continuing, you can significantly reduce the frequency and intensity of your low back pain. Replacing your bending with a good hip hinge, squat, and golf lift is an effective way to stop pulling on the outside of your disc and allow it to heal and feel better!
Relieving low back pain by replacing bending with hip hinging and squatting can be challenging for two reasons. First, learning how to properly hip hinge and squat can be difficult, especially when you are in pain. Pain is a muscle inhibitor which reduces our coordination and strength with tasks. So it’s hard to learn something new when your body isn’t moving as it should because you are in pain! Second, hip hinging and squatting in the gym can feel much different than hip hinging and squatting at home. Can you hinge when you brush your teeth? Can you squat properly with your heels down and your bum back when you lift your laundry? Applying these movements to your home and work activities is an important step in eliminating bending and low back pain.
It’s not unusual to need help in this process.
Working with me provides the information and coaching you need to move with less pain. You’ll learn what structures in your back are acting up and why. Through treatment and coaching you’ll learn how to hip hinge and squat safely to keep your low back calm and painfree. You’ll also learn exercises that reinforce and strengthen these healthy movements. As a Physical Therapist, I can also help you correct any joint stiffness, muscle spasm, or nerve issues that are hindering your recovery. I’d love to work with you! Please call today!
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.