Don’t Look (At Your) Back In Anger – Why Flexibility May Be The Key To Solving Your Back Pain

If you feel like you’ve tried every homecare back-pain remedy under the sun, but at best have got a fleeting glimpse into the utopia of life without pain before the nagging ache slowly creeps back, then you’re not alone. 

Maybe your bathroom cabinet is a modern apothecary’s pick-n-mix of half-squeezed tubes of Deep Heat, leaning towers of paracetamol and heat patches of dubious quality that promise ‘8 hours of pain relief’ (great, but what about the countless other hours of my life?!). Perhaps a well-worn hot water bottle lies on standby, patiently waiting for its next call of duty. 

Back pain affects approximately one-third of the UK population every year. That’s 22 million people. Of those, around 20% will consult their GP about their back pain. That’s 4.4 million people seeking advice from their GP each year.

Perhaps you’re included in that number. Perhaps you visited your GP in the hope of kicking the back pain to the curb so you could get on with your life and do the things that you want to do, or achieve, or experience.

I too suffered from back pain and sciatica for 10 years and diligently persevered in finding someone, anyone, who could pinpoint why I was in daily pain. In that time, I completed a full lap of the back pain specialists assault course – GP, physio, pain specialist, neurosurgeon (3 spinal injections), podiatrist (custom-made orthotics, anyone?), muscle-function test (literally sticking pins in my muscles to test their function), osteopath, chiropractor. The list goes on.

And the pain went on. The quest to find the root cause of my back pain remained fruitless. 

I became known as the person with the dodgy back, who had to get up and ‘stretch it out’ all the time. Each day was an endurance test of trying to focus through the constant fog of an aching back. I struggled through each workday by accommodating my sore body in the Ferrari of all ergonomic office chairs.

Perhaps that all sounds familiar.

Now, don’t get me wrong, many people will gain relief from their back pain from one or more of the various specialists I saw. But for those of us who haven’t, and where there’s no obvious indication of any underlying injury or pathology, where do we go from here?

Well, for me the answer lay in my hip flexors. Specifically, my tight hip flexors. And my tight hamstrings. And a whole bunch of other tight muscles.

There was a reason that none of the specialists I saw could solve my back pain conundrum.

They were looking only at my back.

For many of us who spend a huge portion of our waking hours in a seated position, our back pain may be caused by tight muscles in the hamstrings, hip flexors or even the shoulders.   

The problem is that modern daily life is making our muscles tighter. We spend a lot of time in a sitting position that barely touches upon the full range of motion that our body offers. Think about the movements you do on a daily basis. You wake up, roll out of bed and make breakfast and sit on a chair of stool at bum-height. You get into a car (a seat again), arrive at work and promptly sit down in an office chair, hunched in front of a computer. Our knees have barely flexed past 90-degress. The muscles and tissues that affect flexion and extension, adduction and abduction, internal and external rotation of our hips are barely used at all.

What happens as a result? Our muscles become short and tight. We feel stiff in our hamstrings, our shoulders feel locked up and our hips feel tight.

What’s the danger of tight hips, for example? They’re inconvenient and a pain in the arse (literally) – you can’t sit on the floor properly, it affects your running and walking gaits, you can’t tie your shoe-laces or play with your kids without putting undue stress on your back and sitting down at a desk or in a car is uncomfortable and sometimes painful.

But it’s much worse than that.

When you’re tight and imbalanced, your body creates workarounds to get you out of trouble. For example, people with tight hips and hamstrings often externally rotate their hips and swing their legs when they walk or run. People with tight psoas muscles (hip flexors) often sway their back and stick out their bum. People with tight shoulders are often in a constant hunch. These imbalances lead to neck and knee injuries, among others.

And lower back pain.

I was a classic example of this modern sat-behind-a-desk-all-day posture. I had one hip higher than the other, my pelvis was tilted forward putting pressure on my back and my neck stuck out. I was basically wonky.

So, what’s the remedy?

Surely, we just need to stretch our muscles to ‘undo’ all that tightness and correct the imbalances. Yes, but how you do that to actually stretch your muscles and improve your flexibility is the key.

Many of us may enjoy going to yoga or seek it out as a panacea for our pain. But it tends to demonstrate flexibility, rather than develop it. Most classes focus on strength, balance, breath, concentration, and the mind-body connection. Flexibility is surely on the list, but it’s usually at the bottom of the list of priorities in most classes.

Some of us go at it nineteen to the dozen in the gym to squeeze in a workout around office hours, sometimes accompanied by warm-up and/or cool-down stretches. That should help, right?

Unfortunately, no. Firstly, warm-up stretches, or dynamic stretches have no effect on flexibility. Zero. These stretches are designed to warm the body and prepare it for exercise, not to increase flexibility. Secondly, muscles can tighten up following exercise. If we don’t have a regular stretching regime to at least keep our flexibility at baseline after exercise, we’re on the slow train to stiff city.

Similarly, foam-rolling or massage-gunning our way to limber land doesn’t work either. These are great tools for relaxing the muscles, getting rid of knots and calming the electrical activity in our muscles to prime us for stretching. But they don’t do anything to actually increase your range of motion.

So, what’s the secret to stretching the right way to improve flexibility?

Gravity Yoga.

Gravity yoga is a highly effective form of mobility and flexibility training, consisting of long-hold, passive postures that target specific muscle groups to regain full range of motion. It’s paired with a down-regulating breathing pattern to turn off your nervous system’s stretch reflex, turn on the parasympathetic nervous system to encourage relaxation and release.

Muscles stretch best when relaxed. This means that when you’re in the middle of a dynamic movement, whether running or doing Warrior I, it’s very unlikely your soft tissues will lengthen.

You can love yoga, or you can hate yoga. Either way, this is not normal yoga, and you don’t need any experience of yoga to benefit from it. It’s accessible to all ages and ability levels. And unlike many yoga classes, the number one focus of Gravity Yoga is improving flexibility. Nothing else. No chanting, ohms or meridians.

After 1 week of practicing Gravity Yoga, I noticed a dramatic difference in how I felt in my body – I felt more ‘spaciousness’ in my legs and hips and my back pain wasn’t as intense as usual. It was so liberating that I kept practicing every day. After a month, my fiery sciatic pain had diminished to a feeble fizzle. My all-day back pain was kept at bay so I could get on with my entire workday with total pain-free clarity and without having to get up and stretch every 30 mins.

Gravity Yoga has now found its place as a daily habit that I do to protect my back from future pain. Each time I practice I am challenged both mentally and physically, but I’m also immensely rewarded. It’s almost impossible not to make flexibility gains by consistently practising as little as 15 mins a day.

So, how does Gravity Yoga help relieve back pain?

For me, it helped by getting to the root cause of my pain. My tight muscles had affected my posture and that was putting strain and stress on my lower back. By releasing my tight muscles, my body was able to regain its natural alignment and take the strain off my lower back.

Plus, the benefits of improved flexibility don’t end there. If you’re keen to get to the next level in your sports, then mobile hips, hamstrings and other muscles allow for:

·        Greater physical performance (which is why athletes obsess over hip flexibility)

·        Less athletic injury – tight muscles lead to imbalances and poor movement patterns which lead to lower back, neck and knee injuries.

·        Improved circulation – tightness in the back of your legs, for example, could indicate you have impaired circulation to your extremities and connective tissues. Flexibility training unblocks stuck areas and helps to naturally improve whole body circulation.

There are also benefits in travelling in comfort – when you regain your natural flexibility, it becomes easier and more comfortable to sit for long stretches of time. And finally, many find that with just 15 minutes of Gravity Yoga before bed, they sleep deeper and wake up refreshed.

If you feel like you’ve been on an endless quest to get to the root cause of your back pain or if spending huge portions of your day sitting has tightened up your muscles and affected your posture, then Gravity Yoga may be exactly what you need to give your back a break.

Follow along to a simple Gravity Yoga routine here: https://bit.ly/GravityYogaTaster