Breaking Down Back Pain

We’ve all been there before!

Living life, everything’s going well; then you make one wrong move and Ouch, you’re stuck in bed nursing severe back pain!

While it may be our first instinct to lay low after we tweak our backs, that’s actually likely to do more harm than good!

Let’s dive a little deeper and investigate the best strategies to manage your lower back pain!

Firstly, there are two main groups that we put lower back pain patients into: acute and chronic pain.

When we tweak our back, or “throw it out of place”, the result is acute pain. We’ve gathered from multiple studies that acute lower back pain will resolve over time, regardless of how you choose to treat it [1]! While you could turn to hot packs, ibuprofen, or a massage, there’s a much simpler, time- & cost-effective treatment that you should consider first!

Simply adding in a daily 10-minute walk to your recovery has been shown to significantly reduce acute lower back pain [2]! Easy fix, right?

Usually it’s much easier said then done! What if weeks go by and your pain is still lingering?

After about 6 weeks, we’d label your back pain chronic and our treatment approach changes a little bit.

Chronic pain is the more mysterious variant. It’s not always clear why your back pain may be hanging around! Chronic pain could be the result of a variety of different components, including underlying social and psychological factors. There isn’t always a distinct, specific incident that causes your pain. Interestingly, research has shown that depression and anxiety are closely linked to chronic lower back pain, both causing and resulting from it [3]!

It’s no shock, long-standing back pain can be a huge burden in a number of ways!

With there being so many different potential causes for chronic back pain, one would think that there must be a different treatment for each one, right?

Not quite! The most proven treatment we have, that works for most cases, is actually really simple… just stay active!

Essentially every study done on the subject points to physical activity as the most successful treatment strategy! In fact, it’s strongly recommended that you attempt multiple weeks of exercise therapy before utilizing pain-killers when you’re treating chronic back pain [1]! To take things a step further, the evidence also definitively ranks therapeutic exercise over bed rest, as well [4]! That runs completely counter to our first inclinations! You could let yourself rot away in bed while you wait for your back pain to resolve, or you could get up, go outside, and fight it off!

So, now that you’ve got a good idea what to do, it’s time to actually to do it! Let’s go over some more specific recommendations to get you started!

What are the best exercises for treating your chronic lower back pain?

Increasing your level of physical activity is a lot easier in theory than it is in practice! Saying “do more exercise” without giving any sort of additional guidance would definitely be setting you up for failure! So, let’s go over some proven, professional recommendations!

There isn’t a singular, “best” exercise that will relieve all of your back pain, but there are a few that have consistently proven beneficial.

When we’re prescribing exercises for lower back pain, the most common method is to group patients into one of two directional preference groups: flexion-biased or extension-biased. To put it in simple terms, some people respond better to bending-over exercises (flexion-biased) and some prefer bending-backwards (extension-biased)!

If you’re dealing with lower back pain, take a second to figure out your directional preference! If you’re sitting, bend forward, reaching down to touch the floor; try twenty reps. If that relieved your back pain at all, you’ve got a flexion bias!

Now if you’re standing, put your hands on your hips and safely bend backwards as far as you can, increasing the arch in your back; go for twenty reps. If you preferred that move, you’ve got an extension bias!

So, now you have a go-to exercise that’ll help relieve your pain! If you can do 20 reps a few times each day, you’ll be pain-free in no time! You’ll see even greater results if you add in a 10 to 20 minute walk to your program!

Both walking & directional exercises have been proven to reduce the length of your lower back pain symptoms [6]! You don’t have any more excuses! The answer to your ailment is cheap, easy, and efficient! If you’re tired of dealing with chronic lower back pain, get up and get active!

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Works Cited & Further Reading

1. Qaseem, A., Wilt, T. J., McLean, R. M., Forciea, M. A., Clinical Guidelines Committee of the American College of Physicians, Denberg, T. D., Barry, M. J., Boyd, C., Chow, R. D., Fitterman, N., Harris, R. P., Humphrey, L. L., & Vijan, S. (2017). Noninvasive Treatments for Acute, Subacute, and Chronic Low Back Pain: A Clinical Practice Guideline From the American College of Physicians. Annals of internal medicine, 166(7), 514–530. https://doi.org/10.7326/M16-2367

2. See, Q. Y., Tan, J. B., & Kumar, D. S. (2021). Acute low back pain: diagnosis and management. Singapore medical journal, 62(6), 271–275. https://doi.org/10.11622/smedj.2021086

3. Fernandez, M., Colodro-Conde, L., Hartvigsen, J., Ferreira, M. L., Refshauge, K. M., Pinheiro, M. B., Ordoñana, J. R., & Ferreira, P. H. (2017). Chronic low back pain and the risk of depression or anxiety symptoms: insights from a longitudinal twin study. The spine journal : official journal of the North American Spine Society, 17(7), 905–912. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spinee.2017.02.009

4. Hendrick, P., Te Wake, A. M., Tikkisetty, A. S., Wulff, L., Yap, C., & Milosavljevic, S. (2010). The effectiveness of walking as an intervention for low back pain: a systematic review. European spine journal : official publication of the European Spine Society, the European Spinal Deformity Society, and the European Section of the Cervical Spine Research Society, 19(10), 1613–1620. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00586-010-1412-z

5. Hurwitz, E. L., Morgenstern, H., & Chiao, C. (2005). Effects of recreational physical activity and back exercises on low back pain and psychological distress: findings from the UCLA Low Back Pain Study. American journal of public health, 95(10), 1817–1824. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2004.052993

6. George, S. Z., Fritz, J. M., Silfies, S. P., Schneider, M. J., Beneciuk, J. M., Lentz, T. A., Gilliam, J. R., Hendren, S., & Norman, K. S. (2021). Interventions for the Management of Acute and Chronic Low Back Pain: Revision 2021. The Journal of orthopaedic and sports physical therapy, 51(11), CPG1–CPG60. https://doi.org/10.2519/jospt.2021.0304