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Ironically, your low back pain may be persisting due to the very exercises that you're doing in an effort to get rid of it.
You may have started doing Pilates on the advice of your doctor. You may have hired a personal trainer to help you 'strengthen your core'. Or you may have been given a program of 'stretches for low back pain' by your physical therapist.
I currently have different clients who have experienced each of the examples above and who weren't able to start winding down their pain until we removed the offending exercises they were prescribed from their programs.
The problem is that if you haven't undergone a thorough low back pain assessment to identify your individual pain triggers then it's impossible to know what you should do and what you shouldn't do. This is why generic programs should be avoided until you've been assessed.
If you contact me about your low back pain it's because you've already failed with at least one, sometimes all of the following: physical therapy, chiropractic, osteopathy, yoga, massage, acupuncture, etc.
You've been living with low back pain for months or even years without understanding the cause of your pain. You may have even been told that you'll just have to live with your pain and learn to manage it.
Yet, in the majority of cases this simply isn't true. You've been told this by someone who didn't have the knowledge or skills to identify your individual pain triggers and show you how to avoid them. And, as a result, you've most likely been given a generic program of 'exercises for low back pain', some of which have made your pain worse.
The problem is that you've most likely never undergone a thorough assessment.
If you're reading this, then you probably believe all of the following things to be true:
In other words, you like to make decisions based on the best available evidence.
Yet, even with a scientific mindset, it can still be difficult to know what to do when you’re suffering from an episode of debilitating low back pain.
When my grandparents were still alive, I used to visit them during my summer holidays at their home in the south of Spain. The lasting image I have of my grandmother is with a gin & tonic in one hand, cigarette in the other, sitting in her favourite chair in the lounge of their villa. It's a position I saw her in so often that I struggle to recollect any other memory of her.
It's fair to say that she wasn't a fan of physical exercise. The furthest I think I ever saw her walk was from her chair to the passenger door of the car in the driveway.
Two issues that often accompany a low back injury are tight hip flexors (specifically, the psoas) and weak glutes (your butt muscles).
Both of these issues need to be addressed, but not in the order that they often are.
Just because a muscle is tight doesn't mean it should be stretched immediately. The tightness is more likely to be a symptom of your back pain rather than its cause. If you want to become pain-free it makes more sense to try to determine what the cause of your back pain is and eliminate it instead of just treating the symptoms...
Some genetic differences are obvious and provide clear physical advantages in different sports.
Others differences are less obvious. These make it unclear why different people have different physical capabilities.
It's some of these less obvious genetic differences that cause you to habitually move in ways that can contribute to your low back pain, both when you're in the gym and when you're going about your everyday activities.
So, can you blame your back pain on your parents or is there anything you can do about it?
