Does Your Lower Back Hurt?

It’s been estimated that 80% of all Americans have had or are currently experiencing lower back pain. There are so many different types of lower back pain as well as a multitude of factors that contribute to each condition that it’s impossible to have a quick and easy fix to the issue. Having said that, here are five tips that have helped the vast majority of our members who have come in complaining of back pain.

1) Avoid Stretching First Thing in the Morning

While you sleep, your discs “hydrate” and expand over night – it’s necessary and vital for nourishment and lubrication of the vertebrae. It’s also the reason why those with lower back pain always seem to feel “stiffer” first thing in the morning.  It’s extremely important to resist the urge to stretch out the stiffness, because the expansion in the discs reduces the effectiveness of your spine to support you while in a flexed position.  You need to give your discs some time to “dehydrate” – most of which will happen in the first hour that you’re awake.  It’s the reason why you see so many people blowing out their backs first things in the morning performing seemingly innocuous tasks like picking up a pencil off the floor or unplugging their laptop.

2) Breathe Through Your Belly

Put one hand on your stomach, and the other on your upper chest. Take a deep breath in – which hand rises first? For most of you, the upper chest probably did.  When you adopt this sort of improper breathing pattern, a few things happen. For one, the muscles around your neck and upper back get extremely tight from helping you perform a job (breathing) it wasn’t designed to do. Ideally, your diaphragm should contract and descend down in order to let your lungs and ribs expand fully. When you chest breathe, the exact opposite happens. The diaphragm cannot come down and the ribs and lungs are stuck in a position where they can’t fully expand, which makes for shorter and shallower breaths. In order to compensate for this and obtain a deeper breath of air, your body will naturally shift itself into a position where the bottom of your rib cage gets tilted forward and up, which places undue stress upon your lower back.

To help correct this, try an exercise called “crocodile breathing”. Lie facedown on your stomach and rest your forehead on the back of your palms. From there, try to breathe in through your nose and really think about sending the air down into your stomach. If you do it right, you should feel your stomach press into the floor and expand. Exhale through your mouth slowly. Try crocodile breathing every night before bed for 5 minutes, and your lower back and neck/shoulders will thank you!

3) Stretch out your hip flexors!

As a society, we spend way too much time sitting down whether it’s at a desk, or in a car, or on the couch at home. Because of this, those muscles at the front of your hips can get very tight. This stiffness in the hip flexors can wreak havoc on your posture by pulling you into a position of “anterior pelvic tilt”.  When your pelvis dips forward, your lower back is in a constant state of extension and is unable to relax. It also puts your glutes and abdominal muscles in a disadvantageous position to contract and be used effectively.

Take some time every day to stretch out your hip flexors by performing a “half kneeling hip flexor stretch with core engagement”. Get down on one knee like the picture shown in the blog and grab the end of a broomstick. Push the stick down into the floor (this will engage your core), tighten and squeeze the glute of the knee that’s down, and push your hips forward. Hold for a count of two seconds, and then ease off the stretch and relax. Repeat that 10x per side. Engaging the core and glutes while performing this stretch will help counteract most people’s tendency to arch the lower back, which would take the stretch off the hip flexors and actually encourage anterior pelvic tilt.

4) Stop doing crunches and sit ups!

I’ve had the opportunity to see Dr. Stuart McGill speak on several occasions. He is the professor of spine biomechanics at the University of Waterloo and one of the world’s foremost authorities on the lower back. His research has shown that the flexing the spine over and over is a surefire way to develop a herniated disc. Unfortunately, this isn’t mainstream knowledge, and it’s why you see the majority of commercial gym goers repeatedly crunch and twist their way towards a future of lower back pain. Instead opt for the “spine friendly”, but challenging core exercises included in this blog post.

5) Learn how to hip hinge!

Place a dowel along your spine with one hand behind your neck and the other behind your lower back. From try to maintain contact with the back of your head, upper back, and butt and sit your hips back as far as you can with your knees slightly bent and without letting your hips drop and without losing contact with the dowel.

Learning how to hinge using your hips rather than flexing at the lower back during every day activities is extremely important.  Simple tasks like getting up or down out of a chair, picking up your child, and shoveling snow can all irritate your lower back if you’re in a flexed over posture. Instead do your best to keep the back flat in order to distribute the stress to your hips and rest of your lower body.

As always, make sure you get checked out by a qualified medical professional if you’re having lower back issues, or any pain for that matter. These exercises really only scratch the surface in terms of lower back care and you definitely don’t want to put off something as potentially debilitating as lower back pain.

Train Hard (and Smart!),

The Achieve Fitness Team