How Parents Can Avoid Low Back Pain & Sciatica
Michael Fatica
Back Injury Expert. Speaker. Lead Consultant Osteopath For Back In Shape Program.
If you’re a new parent it is only a matter of time before lower back pain finds you! Today we’ll look to provide you with some guidance to minimise the lower back pain you experience, as well as some dependable steps you can take should you find your lower back giving you trouble. Our daughter Evelina is now 18 months old and considering our background with the program and the clinics, seeing patients and members all over the world with back pain, the degree to which having a baby affects your lower back is quite shocking. So whether you’re a new parent, or grandparent this will hopefully be a great guide to help you in the coming months and years.
To watch the full video click here.
Just how challenging could it be, really?
Obviously there are so many great things about having a baby, but the toll it can take on your lower back is remarkable, and perhaps the last thing on your mind. For the sake of keeping the article of reasonable length, we’ll ignore any pregnancy complications or events that your mothers might have experienced, focusing more on the challenges that will affect mothers, fathers and grandparents alike!?
Where play takes place
Unfortunately you cannot practically have an ergonomic play station for a baby or toddler. And while the nappy changing station might be a good height, much of our time as parents is spent on the floor or bending down and back up again. Most of the time this is not done with the back in mind. And even if it was, from our experience, so many of us over the age of 30, especially the men, struggle with proper mobility to get up and down from the floor without rounding the back terribly. With this in mind, as a new parent or grandparent, all of a sudden, much of your interaction with this amazing little person is going to be at shin height and there’s no ergonomic way to do that!
Travelling with your baby and infant
In spite of us investing in the rotating car seats, which is an absolute must for any new parent who wants to minimise the strain on your low back, car seats are still a struggle! You’ll invariably find yourself standing on the side of the curb putting your baby or toddler in the car seat, realising that the added elevation of the curb only adds an extra 5 inches you need to bend over, and you’ve got to round your back to avoid banging your head on the car while trying to strap them in. Then there’s the instances where your little one decides that now is not the time for the car seat and they’d rather go anywhere other than the car seat!
You’ve then got the leaning back from the front seat to grab things that have fallen into the floor well, or pick the shoes up out from underneath the seat before you get up to leave the car.?
Of course, much of this tends to only come in once you’ve moved on from the detachable car seat used when the babies are small. Although they tended to be easier in terms of there being less protest because Evelina was younger, the detachable car seats still weigh a lot!
Learning to crawl or walk has its challenges
These periods of learning to crawl, and walk continue to offer challenges to us and our low backs, and for the tall mothers and fathers this can be even more challenging. With their wobbly nature in the beginning, we dare not leave them for too many steps alone in the early transitioning period and so find ourselves constantly crouched down to make sure they’ve got a safety net. And once they’re up, they often want to be independent at all times so walking is always on the cards, even when it is not ideal! So we as parents learn to walk with a significant side bend while our little toddler holds onto one finger, toddling along.?
In spite of all these challenges our children are amazing and a tremendous blessing in our lives, but our lower backs might not be so happy about the above activities, and many more besides these, and at 18 months old, Evelina will certainly be continuing to demand more of Lara and my own lower backs for a good period of time to come. Whether it’s playing on the floor or lifting her up and many other things besides these.
The simple truth is that this can be a challenge if you do not have a lower back injury, but if you’ve got sciatica or low back pain, our children can really be a difficult challenge for our recovery because they need us. Understanding the nature of the activities above is the first part, we have to acknowledge that recovery is a little more challenging when we have to take care of someone who needs our help in the way our babies and toddlers do. So where do we go from here?
Combating Parental Back Pain & Sciatica
Fortunately there are some tools that can really help keep things under control and that is what we’ll be covering for you in the latter part of this release. Tools and a routine to help you regularly give your low back a little respite and take pressure off those discs. These are relief based strategies that you need to try to do daily, whether there is pain or not as like so many things, it is the cumulative load that breaks us, it is not just putting them in the car seat once, it’s the hundreds of small strains that add up over the days and weeks. This is like an antidote to counteract that.
These shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes or so and can be broken up into smaller chunks to fit them in around an understandably busy day, of course if you have the time, do more of them!
Note: try to perform these in the order presented.
Mobilise your tight hips to ease pressure on your back
The better your hips are the less involved your lower back has to be when you sit, i know this is personally a major weakness for me and needs to be improved, regularly working to improve the mobility of your hips through a simple stretching routine can really help lessen the strain on your low back when moving up and down.?
We’ve got a great routine that is a complete hip stretching guide you can follow along with here to unlock tightness in your hips and improve mobility instantly! It takes about 8-10 minutes and can be done at least once per day.
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Decompress your lower spine to ease pressure on your discs
The next important part is to take some pressure off of your discs, this can be done with a great combo of two stretches done one after one another. The first, is done on the bed. Lie across the bed with your arms hanging over the edge, then press your arms into the side of the bed, when done correctly this will create a little decompression in your lower back which will feel like a strange but pleasant ache. Just like you feel a strange sensation when you stretch your hamstring for example, the muscle on the back of your thigh.
With this “bed decompression” you want to create a slow rhythmical pumping motion decompressing, and relaxing, perhaps somewhere in the region of 10 to 15 pumps, with each pump taking about 3-5 seconds.?
From there you can do the “towel stretch” on the floor. This is where you roll a normal bath towel up. It should look similar to the size of a foam roller, then place this underneath the small of your lower back so it is supporting the natural arch. Lie here for 3 to 5 minutes.?
Just like before, we have a full demonstration of both of these great stretches in the resources section below so check those out:
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Managing inflammation in the lower back
For most cases of lower back pain, it is actually the unmanaged build up of inflammation around an injured or herniated disc that gives us most of that back pain or sciatica. So managing the inflammation is really important. This can be done to great effect by working with contrast bathing - hot and cold therapy. Here, periodically through the day, you will place the hot on the spine, in the low back for 3-5 minutes then immediately switch to cold for 3-5 minutes. Continue this alternating for a total of 20-25 minutes.?
The great thing about this one is that you can literally hold the hot or cold pack in place with your waistband and carry on doing whatever you were doing hands free. If you want a great tool to help make this even easier and something we’ve used and can recommend, the RecoveryTherm Cube by Therabody is a great option. We did a review of the cube so you can check that out if interested in the resources below.
Resources:?
Managing lower back strain as a parent
Ultimately as parents and grandparents we’re going to have to do things the best we can and there are going to be opportunities for us to do things better but sometimes we just have to manage. Routines like this are great ways for us to provide some moment to moment support to combat the strain that will develop from daily life as a parent. Don’t feel like it's all or nothing, so what if you didn’t have time to do it all, do what you can daily. It will help you no end!
Time permitting it is of course going to be really helpful if you can build up strength and stability with proper resistance work in the gym or with home workouts. This is something we recommend to all people with and without lower back pain. If you currently have back pain or sciatica, then get started on this, it doesn’t take that much time each week. And if you’ve not got back pain or sciatica yet, make sure you’re doing some strengthening work as the best time to start is BEFORE you have an injury!
If you need some more help with the essential exercises that will build your back strength and resilience, then check out the tutorials linked below and the full masterclass video for a more structured approach!
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