Hack To Overcome Chronic Back Pain
Michael Fatica
Back Injury Expert. Speaker. Lead Consultant Osteopath For Back In Shape Program.
From experience seeing thousands of patients with long standing low back pain and sciatica, as well as thousands of members of the Back In Shape Program from around the world, there is one critical detail that is overlooked time and time again when it comes to low back pain. However, with this simple hack that uses one common household item, you can immediately start to make improvements by understanding how often you’re accidentally re-aggravating your lower back.
To watch the full video click here.
The source of daily flare ups in your back pain
Whether it is back pain or sciatica, when you have an injury to a joint, you often do not have as good control over that region of the body as a result. So when you injure L5/S1, the last segment of the low back, where the lumbar spine meets the sacrum, this junction often is a little less stable as a result. Just like an ankle or knee where the ligaments that support its integrity have been injured.?
Unfortunately this instability is exploited by the many daily activities that you’re doing. Unlike the ankle or knee example, where you might have support for the joint or protection by way of a cast, and perhaps crutches so everything else compensates for the injury giving it time to recover. The lower back is not something that can be protected in this manner. And now without awareness of this weakness and how to guard against it, every time you get out of bed, a chair, off the toilet or into and out of the car, the back is aggravated. When you pick up your toddler of take out the bins, carry the shopping or have to get out of the chair to answer the door. All these little movements can constantly “wiggle” the lower back, catching the area off guard and resulting in flare ups.
While it is important to recognise the important reality that these flare ups are likely not causing significant objective damage beyond the initial injury, the little flare ups create an inflammatory response that frequently, results in symptoms, tension, pressure or pain in the low back or down the leg in the case of sciatica. It is the inflammatory build up in the confined space of the lumbar spine’s bony architecture that creates the environment in which the reaction to a minor flare up can give rise to more significant symptoms. Sometimes very significant symptoms, far in excess of the actual damage present.
Consequences of recurrent flare ups of back pain
The issues with these seemingly random flare ups are manifold, however some significant consequences are as follows:
Mental consequences of back pain flare ups
The mere mental impact, disheartening you, making it feel like you cannot possibly do anything without your back becoming more injured, leading to more fear and avoidance of an ever increasing list of activities and things often that bring us joy in life. This knock in confidence is something that can be the biggest challenge in recovering from low back pain and injury. With confidence at an all time low, if you cannot trust your body to work without pain simply through daily life, how on earth can you trust yourself to do something daunting like an exercise?!
This is an understandable belief, but incorrect, you can rebuild – just to be clear for those of you that need to hear this!
Physical consequences of recurrent flare ups
In the physical realm, the consequences of these flare ups are reinforced by the mental ones. Gradually the physical structure of the body wastes, and the muscle that we did have, perhaps insufficient in the first place, further deteriorates. This leads to less control, more flare ups and a continuing downward spiral.
Take back control of your back health!
You really need some tools to help you start to rebuild what we like to refer to as the “database of reasons”. This is a little mental collection of things that you can point to that show that you’re improving. It starts with this simple use of a household item, sticky tape!
You’re going to use this tape to help you regain an understanding of when your lower back is strained, in particular when you allow flexion to creep into that lower back. By eliminating this in the short to medium term, you’ll start to make inroads into those many daily activities that are plaguing your back injury recovery.?
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How to use the tape test for your daily back pain improvement
Firstly you need a volunteer to help you if possible. Then cut a 3 to 4 inch piece of tape and stand tall with good posture. The person is then going to find the bony bits in the photo below. These are usually the “dimples” and they are the PSIS, basically they are about 1-2 cm below the end of the lumbar spine.?
Once you’ve found the dimples, come into the centre, and go up about 1-2 cm and stick the tape from there lined up along the spine as in the picture.
The tape will not stay there and stop you moving, but what it will do is “mark” the best posture you have in your low back. Now try a number of activities to see what happens:
Hopefully you get the idea, you’ll know that some of these immediately are problems, but now you’ve identified how, you can move onto the next step.?
Adjust how you do daily life
Building new habits is the aim of the game, you’ve probably realised that many of those activities are problematic, aggravating the low back or your symptoms of sciatica. But what now? We still need to live of course, so it’s time to modify things!
Some of the activities you cannot avoid, do your best, but combined with skills of core control you should be learning in your rehabilitation, you should begin to retry these movements with correct movement. For example, washing your hands/dishes, engaging your core and performing the hip hinge will allow you to perform the movement, for a moment without the tape pulling and likely without pain too! For some this movement will still be problematic in the early days but with practice and rehab progress you will get there!?
Implementing this test from time to time to help create new habits will help you no end. Some of these might be short term to medium term habits that are working around the injury to reduce strain, once recovering nicely you can return to more “normal movement” however for most there is some middle ground between moving terribly with your back, and moving in a way that’s too rigid.?
For example, putting on your shoes, some will just completely round over with straight legs and a rounded low back, a nice middle ground for the long term would be to bend down onto one knee reaching the feet with mostly hip movement then a little forward bending in the spine to comfortably tie the shoes. The more extreme limited short term version might be to use a long shoe horn and keep the spine completely neutral.??
Long term back pain recovery
Ultimately, using this tape test hack to help you with daily life while you’re working with the proper rehab work is essential for your long term recovery and will help even the most chronic amongst you turn a corner and start seeing results with your back pain.?
This area of “daily life” is the most overlooked area and more or less always a reason why people are not getting better, they’re literally sabotaging their own progress. But combined with the right rehab you will make huge strides in improvement. If you’re worried about exercises specifically still, then you need to check out the latest podcast on if you should exercise with low back pain, it should be another insightful one!
Once you’ve done that you can check out the “fixing back pain masterclass” or join us in the Back In Shape Program to start taking control of your back pain or sciatica and getting results that last!