Spinal compression is caused not only by the weighing down effects of gravity but the clenching caused by muscle activity. Yet its vertical stack of spinal segments is subject to one major drawback - COMPRESSION. The human spine is an amazingly versatile structure, if you consider that you can reach up to the ceiling to change a light bulb and bend down to the oven to reef out the roast dinner. WHY SPINAL DECOMPRESSION IS SO IMPORTANT IN TREATING ALL TYPES OF BACK PAIN You can download the video 'Sitting To Avoid a Bad Back' from Sarah's PACK PAIN VIDEO LIBRARY here: Yes, you may be uncomfortable for a day or so while the back gets used to the new rules, but this is certainly the way to go. Being frightened to bend makes your back worse. The proper way to bend is bending normally - with the core and gluts switched on - and doing it with gusto. It’s abnormal, unnatural and bottom-out awkward (anything that LOOKS that bad IS that bad!) and by letting the deep muscles between the individual vertebrae get weak, it actually makes your low back fragile - and the pain worse. Just as misguided is trying to bend with a rigidly straight back and genuflecting the knees. It’s no kind of therapeutic solution to try not to bend! You could even say that one of the main roles of the lumbar spine is to lower the clever, useful upper part of the body - the hands, eyes, ears, mouth etc - to workable heights. We’re meant to bend and the spine is designed to bend. Not curling forward, nose towards knees, in the normal automatic way means the abdominal muscles are sidelined and stay weak - and keep failing to support the lower back.īelieve me, bending is Nature’s way. I’m never quite sure where this directive came from, or why (perhaps the old humdinger fallacy about slipping out a disc at the back) but after doing countless core strengthening exercises (about the only therapeutic measure proffered these days) and then failing to put that newly acquired strength to good functional use (by getting up normally) the abdominal muscles go flabby again. Imagine that, relaxing! (Incidentally, there’s not a chair I sit in that I do not use a pillow behind my own back.) You will see from the Sitting pages below that the best way to sit is with a cushion in the small of the back and then leaning back (yes, letting the belly go) and relaxing. These backs feel stiff, tired and twingey all the time, with relief to be gained only from lying down. Their relentless switched-on state keeps the spine too still, drives fluid out of the discs while also throttling down the metabolic life of the discs. It requires huge muscle effort which increases spinal compression far greater than gravity. Too upright for too long causes untold mischief by invoking intense overactivity of the long back muscles. Some won’t sit at all and hover round on their pins until they collapse into bed come the end of the day (a back should never dictate the rules in such a way). Sure enough, people with a chronic back tend to sit rigidly upright while driving and using chairs. People feel that if they just sat up better they’d be more trim and everything would be okay. I sometimes wonder if there’s something buried in our subconscious that suggests you deserve a bad back because of your slovenly ways. Either not bending at all, or going down with a straight back and bending the kneesĪnd strangely enough, all three things relate to over-activity of the powerful long back muscles - making the back ever-more brittle and difficult to move. ![]() ![]() Rolling over like a log to get out of bedģ. Sitting bolt upright in the belief you shouldn’t slouchĢ. either making you worse or stopping you getting better.ġ. Like many other areas of Medicine, backworld is littered with old wives’ tales, but some for the low back are drastically wrong. ![]() People with a bad back tend to get into bad habits - usually in the belief they're doing what's right! THE 3 'BACK BADDIES' THAT IF YOU STOP DOING, YOUR BACK WILL SLOWLY GET BETTER (WHATEVER THE TREATMENT!)
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