Page 1 How to understand your lower back pain and what you can do about it. The three main reasons that you get lower back pain and how to treat the cause and not the symptoms. Why your back pain seems to come from nowhere, where it really comes from and how you can prevent it from recurring. What is sciatic pain? Is it from a slipped disc or just muscle tightness? How to tell the difference and what you can do about it today. How do your emotions affect your muscles? What does this mean and what can you do to release them? The three main reasons that you get lower back pain and how to treat the cause and not the symptoms. There are four main reasons that you get lower back pain. Firstly, when there is lots of tension in your muscles. Muscles love stretching and contracting, moving in and out, and when they lose this ability due to tension they become painful and inflamed. Muscles develop tension through a number of reasons. Accidents from a heavy lift, a bad fall, trip or stumble. Sometimes it seems like an insignificant event but the muscles have been taken by surprise, couldn t cope and the pain was far greater than you would expect. You might do a repetitive activity that is slowly and successively putting strain on the muscles of your lower back. The tension builds and becomes embedded. You get occasional aches and pains until one day, your body can t cope with it any longer. This process can be due to many activities. It is different for different people. It can be occupational, recreational, long periods in a car, at a desk or leaning over a task for sustained periods of time. There may also be inherited tendencies. Your body structure is inherited from one, or a combination of family members. There may be a certain weakness or shape that predisposes you to a painful lower back. Sometimes it is just life - kids, work, and families but check your parents and grandparents predisposition to back pain.
Page 2 Another reason you get lower back pain is if the joints in the area are jammed up. In the lower back you have the vertebrae and the sacroiliac joints. The vertebrae are stacked on top of each other, with a disc in between, that should be able to move in a three dimensional way against each other. The sacrum at the base of the spine attaches to the pelvis at the sacroiliac joints. These joints don t move much, but they do need to go through their normal range of motion. When joints jam up, they become painful and inflamed. This is a significant contributing factor to lower back problems. If the vertebrae are jammed up in the spine, the local swelling can irritate the nerves that are supplying the surrounding muscles. This will cause the muscles to become tight and painful. Where the pain is, is not always where the cause of the pain is. Many times in my clinic, a patient will believe the pain is on the left side of their lower back. But when I examine them, the dysfunction is on the right. This is commonly due to the left side compensating for the restrictions on the right side and struggling with it. It can also be due to a long term strain pattern, where the body layers up strained areas, trying to find relative ease so the lower back can continue to function. It s a bit like two wrongs trying to make a right. Here the pain can shift around. So it can be tricky to for someone to know exactly what is going on in their own back. The easiest thing to do to get the very best results is to throw all of the above into the mix and treat it as a whole. If you do basic stretching exercises you will get a bit of relief. If you do some focused stretching exercises you will get a massive amount of relief. By targeting specific problematic muscles, lower back pain can be resolved. If you are worried about your back, then you need to see your osteopath or doctor. If the exercises aren t helping enough, you will need to see your osteopath. It may be that vertebral function is impaired and needs to be released before your stretching efforts can bring complete results. Why your back pain seems to come from nowhere, where it really comes from and how you can prevent it from recurring. The body does a wonderful job of keeping its disturbances under the radar. It does this so it can carry on doing the tasks of every day life, because it has to. So muscles tighten, joints jam other muscles, and joints become restricted trying to compensate until all these issues become stacked on top of each other.
Page 3 This works fantastically, you get an occasional pain here and there but it self - corrects. Until one day BLAM - you get hit by a significant-to-severe-pain from a seemingly insignificant event. Simple things, like rolling over in bed, reaching for a cup of tea, or bending over to pick something up. This happens because your body has been able to keep a lid on this pancake of dysfunctions until finally; it can t hold it together anymore. This can happen anywhere in the body, but the lower back and neck, are the most common areas. Sometimes, this happens out of the blue while other times there have been little signs, little niggles that have been letting you know that something is wrong. Most people ignore these little signs because there are far more important things to do in life and they think my body will overcome that little niggle. You need to look after your body because no one else will. By having some understanding of what is going on in your body, you can apply simple, effective and focused exercises to disperse tension before it builds from a tremor - to earthquake proportions. What is sciatic pain, how to tell if you have it and what can you do about it today. Sciatic pain comes from the impingement of the sciatic nerve. Nerves radiate from the spine to the muscles and skin in very specific patterns. There is very little variation in these patterns. Each nerve goes to specific muscles and regions of the skin so they can be easily mapped. If there is altered sensation or pins and needles in a certain area, then we know it comes from a specific nerve supply and from a specific level of the spine. Another pain pattern can tells us it is neurological in origin coming from specific nerves and spinal levels. The sciatic nerve runs deep in the buttock, close to the piriformis muscle, down the back of the thigh, divides at the knee then supplies the whole lower leg and foot. So, by definition the pain pattern must start deep in the butt, run down the back of the leg, through the calf and into the foot. To be sciatica, the pain cannot be in the side or front of the leg or in the groin. It must be down the back of thigh and knee and into the calf and foot. Anywhere else and it s not sciatica. There are degrees of intensity of sciatic pain, ranging from intense deep pain in the butt, hamstrings, calf and foot combined with pins and needles in the foot. At its worst, you can barely walk, and sitting is unbearable. In milder forms, when the sciatic nerve is not compromised as much, you will get pain down the back of the thigh ending at the knee.
Page 4 So is it a slipped disk (also known as a herniated disc) or is it from tight muscles? When you are trying to do a simple diagnosis you can only generalize. Basically, if the pain is quite severe down the leg into the foot then it is probably a slipped disc. If you add pins and needles into the mix then you can almost guarantee it s a disc problem. In this case if it is aggravated by sitting, then it is again almost certain to be a disc. If the pain is deep in the butt and down the back of the leg to the knee then it is likely from tightness in the piriformis muscle deep in the butt pressing onto the sciatic nerve. This is a much easier problem to solve. I have seen variations of these pain patterns in my clinic that don t fit the norm. One patient had severe pain only in the buttock and was subsequently rushed off for surgery to trim the disc away from the sciatic nerve. I have also seen sciatic pain go down to the foot with a mild dusting of pins and needles being caused by muscle tension in the butt. If the pain is severe and/or you are worried, see your doctor or osteopath and get a thorough diagnosis. It is best to err on the side of caution. However, if the pain is manageable, then doing a few focused stretching exercises will release the tension in the piriformis and the back in general. This will relieve the pain and get you more mobile. How do your emotions affect your muscles? What does this mean and what can you do to release them. Finally, is there an emotional component to your lower back pain? What does this mean? With every thought pattern there is a corresponding electrical firing sequence in the brain and nervous system. This triggers a corresponding chemical cascade that (like the nerves) travels throughout your body. Simply, if you think angry thoughts then you get angry chemicals in your body. Happy thoughts trigger happy chemicals and your body is happier. So how you think and feel will directly influence how your body will function. Like the fight or flight response, when you tense up if you think you see something in the shadows. And to make this situation slightly more complicated, it s not only our conscious thinking but also our unconscious thought patterns that trigger these reactions. We tend to develop habitual holding patterns when we think of something with strong emotions attached. If the stress is ongoing the neurochemical response becomes automatic and self sustaining without us even noticing. So, with varying degrees, there is always an emotional component connected to muscle dysfunction. Letting go of unresolved emotions like childhood injustices, lost loves, regrets or grudges can be helpful.
Page 5 If musculoskeletal issues will not resolve with good osteopathic treatment and home based exercises, then it is worth considering whether emotional issues may be a factor. Each person needs to find a way that helps them release these unconscious factors, these trapped emotions that are perpetuating their muscle tightness and lower back pain. There are a variety of integrative therapies that work with the mind-body connections. Ask for a recommendation from a trusted health practitioner. Copyright 2016 all rights reserved. Advertisement Stretch for Life Osteopath Tim Judd presents an indepth and 3D look at the causes of stress and strain in all areas of your upper and lower body. His series of targeted stretching routines focus on relieving, repairing, maintaining and rejuvenating stressed bodies and is presented in an easy to follow and visually appealing way. These DVDs are a culmination of years of treating patients at his clinic and research into the best ways for people to diagnose and heal themselves safely and effectively at home. He sees patients who have outlaid travel time and travel expense to consult on anatomical problems that need only a simple stretch to remedy the ailment. While a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, Tim goes to great lengths to explain, and show with 3D animation, how the body functions and the various
Page 6 http://stretchforlife.co.nz/buy-dvd/ triggers that can cause pain and discomfort. Then he presents you with researched, developed and proven stretching techniques that will relieve pain, repair muscle and joint damage and maintain your body to its maximum efficiency. The multiple camera angles ensure you can see every detail of the stretching technique, while Tim's narration will clearly instruct you how to get the most out of the stretch. The routines in each volume are an effective montage of exercises honed into a routine that will assist you in stretching and strengthening the body zone of choice. Go to the Stretch for Life website for more information or click on the link at the top of this page.