You’ve gone to your Chiropractor, Massage therapist, Physiotherapist and Osteopath…. and you feel better for awhile, but you slip back into the back pain that brought you there in the first place! How do we end this cycle?
(p.s. I love my healthcare team and they are part of my own health management and in rehabilitation in injury. They are amazing at what they do…. AND you have so much more power to make their appointments work better for you and getting lasting results which is why I wrote this… to empower you)
Although there can be a number of factors like injuries, conditions, surgical plates etc. I have found after working with clients 1:1 it really comes down to these 3 things. If you can work on understanding and improving these 3 things, regardless of your condition your back will feel better.
The 3 Missing Pieces to Heal your Back Pain are:
Shoulder Blades and Hips must be able to move well (in all directions)
Breathing Mechanics and Core needs re-patterning
Operate within your Capacity
Let’s take a deeper dive into each of these to find out why they are so important.
What is between your shoulders blades and hips? Your back!
If your shoulder blades are stuck and have limited movement you will compensate somewhere else which is fine….. until the pain comes and its no longer fine.
Shoulder blades are triangular bones that are supposed to glide over top of the rib cage in all directions. There are a lot of muscles that cross over and under the shoulder blades and even have attachments to the shoulder blades. You can imagine then if your shoulder blades are not sliding well in all directions how those muscles and their attachments start to get tense, stuck, or sticky while pulling on their attachments (where they start and finish in the body), some of which attach to your back and hips which is where you are probably feeling the pain even though the problem is further up.
Same goes for your hips! A lot of people don’t actually know that one of your hip flexors (the psoas muscle) has attachments into the thoracic spine (mid back) and travel through the diaphragm (your breathing muscle)!
A simple solution would be to stretch your hip flexors right? Well yes and no. The idea of teaching the muscle to lengthen and contract is a good one, BUT, that muscle itself is a little more nuanced to get to all of the attachments and require some supporting movements like twists and side bends and breath (because remember it travels through your diaphragm).
This is your psoas muscle (your primary hip flexor). Can you see the attachment in the spine? This is why assessing your hip movement is important in fixing your back pain. It’s all connected.
An addition alignment of your shoulders, ribs and hips matters which is why I spend a lot of time here with my clients and group classes. If your hips are pulling forwards and your ribs are lifting up this alignment will affect your core and you will feel this in your low back. Which brings me to my next point…. the core.
The way you are breathing directly affects your core and therefore your back. Your deep core is like a canister with a bottom, a top, and a wall that travels from the back to the front. If any of these pieces are not strong enough, connected enough or not moving well it will affect the whole system. Working on getting these pieces moving together like a well oiled machine will not only get you breathing better but you will naturally feel stronger and be able to carry and disperse more load. (think of if someone hands you something heavy…. can you absorb the weight across your core or do you fold at the hips and feel it in your back?)
Absorbing more and carrying more is all about understanding your capacity. Not just your muscles but your energy level too. This is why so often I see people with back pain also feeling fatigued. They are constantly pushing through their limits and oscillating between ‘holding it together’ and ‘collapse’ by the end of the day. If you can fine tune your awareness to understand your capacity ie. how much weight you can carry, for how long, emotional stress, environmental stress etc. and peel back when you’re noticing it or even better… adding some breath or gentle movement in to help get you back on track so you don’t reach that collapse stage. Each time you build on this your capacity increases! You can start to do more! Get back to the things you love to do with a greater understanding so you trust yourself not to get hurt again as you’re building up your strength and integrity for the things you want to do.
If all of this sounds like exactly what you need i’m offering a group program which will address these 3 missing pieces and more. Its a personalized approach that I will guide you through specifically for your body and circumstances teaching you and guiding you so you learn how to move, and what operating in your capacity means for you. It’s called Back Pain and Burnout find out more here.
