Should You Exercise With Low Back Pain?
Michael Fatica
Back Injury Expert. Speaker. Lead Consultant Osteopath For Back In Shape Program.
Lower back pain can be severe and make life incredibly difficult! Doing practically anything around the house can be a real challenge, work, house chores, children, the dog. These are all commitments and activities that aggravate your back, struggling to get through a full day without these things setting off your low back pain is hard enough, should you even consider exercises too? How could they even help??
In today’s podcast we’ll be taking a look at the role of exercises in your recovery from a lower back injury, hopefully helping you understand how you should be approaching this once and for all!
To watch the full video click here.
You need to let your back heal
When you have an injury, understand that the area of the body that’s injured is weaker and less stable, for example, your sprained ankle or broken leg. It’s very clear to most that this would result in weakness and so limiting the use of the injured limb would be a “no brainer”. The low back is no different, if you have a herniated disc at L5/S1 giving you sciatic symptoms down your left leg, you need to give it the opportunity to start to undergo the healing process.?
The two sides of healing low back pain
It is important to understand with any injury that there are 2 parts of the healing process. There is the “patching up” i.e the scab formation, this is stabilising the area as best as possible, which will happen relatively quickly. Immediately post injury or flare up, the body will go to work to try to patch up the damaged tissue.
The second part is the gradual re-integration of this injured tissue back into the system. This is where the tissue begins to strengthen again to fulfil its role. For example, the layers of the annulus fibrosis in the L4/L5 disc bulge, strengthening up again to bear load more effectively. This second process requires 2 important things: stimulation & time.
Using exercise as a tool for healing
Specific exercises are your way of providing that specific stimulation in a measured and controlled environment. Proper technique is vital to allow you to safely apply small challenges or stimuli to the low back so that it can use that stimulation, and time to regenerate and rebuild strength. Done repeatedly over weeks and months in a progressive manner, this will allow the herniated disc or other injured tissues in your lower back to properly complete the second part of healing and bring them back up to the right level of strength and competence.
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Avoid the most common back pain mistake
Unfortunately, people are all too often worried about injuring their lower back with “exercise” thinking that their back is too vulnerable for that kind of stuff. Yet simultaneously they’re doing all manner of daily activities that involve strain. Picking up kids, taking the dog for a walk, doing the laundry, bringing the shopping in, doing the ironing or vacuuming, the list goes on. These activities are frequently a source of lower back pain relapse. They ALL involve strain yet so many just carry on with them whilst simultaneously being extra cautious of “exercises”.?
Granted, there are many commonly prescribed exercises that are not good for back pain recovery, such as the child’s pose, but to be honest, being on the other end of a dog leash which could pull you in any direction, or standing up doing 1 hour of ironing is more of an issue than doing knee hugs. Not that we would suggest either are contributing to your back recovery!
The safest way for you to recover from lower back pain
If you’re to have success with recovering from lower back pain, you must understand this one thing, and act accordingly:
Proper resistance exercises performed with proper technique over weeks and months, is the best and perhaps the only way for you to get long term recovery from low back pain and sciatica.
It is the only time in the day where you are 100% focused on your body, how it’s moving, you’re perhaps using your smartphone to record your technique, you’re being meticulous with the resistances or weights you’re using and you’re not being distracted.
This is how you get results and recover from lower back pain. Your daily life activities are a distraction and a source of uncontrolled activity that could likely be a source of the daily recurrence of your low back pain. With controlled effort applied to proper resistance exercises over the long term you are able to direct the healing process to build strength back into your lower back. If you do not, you’ll never really address or support that second part of the healing process.?
If you’ve made it this far and are wondering what sort of exercises you should be doing then we’ve included a couple of links below to the masterclass as well as a few tutorial videos that will help you start to build strength into your lower back and finally recover from long standing low back pain!
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