Are there best exercises for chronic lower back pain?

Proposed solutions to lower back pain are a dime-a-dozen on the internet.

Do these lower back exercises and resolve your pain instantly!

You have a slipped disc so we’ll just push it back in (this entirely impossible in both mechanism and solution by the way… can’t happen).

You have tight hamstrings. Just stretch your hamstrings and your back will be fine.

If back pain solutions were that easy, no one would have back pain.

Few things interrupt a happy, active lifestyle than back pain (or any pain for that matter).

In many cases, we really don’t know the root cause of lower back pain.

Even when an X-ray or an MRI shows a herniated disc, degenerative disc disease, lower back arthritis, we still need to correlate these finding on the pictures (that’s all they are anyway).

Chronic lower back pain, especially when there are no obvious findings from diagnostic tests, is one of those curious mysteries in the medical field, yet many long-term back pain sufferers do get better with the right physical therapy or just by becoming more active.

A study by Paul Hodges and Lorimer Moseley (Behavioral Neuroscience 2006, Vol. 120, No. 2, 474–476) may shed light on why some chronic back pain patients get better.

What they found was that upon the onset of back pain, sufferers reduced their postural strategy options. In other words, they limited the number of ways that they moved or positioned themselves. Even if their back pain resolved. The limited postural and movement strategies persisted. They didn’t start moving normally just because their back pain improved.

I would equate this to sitting on a hard chair too long. We’ve all felt it.

Sit on a hard chair and eventually your butt starts to get uncomfortable. To alleviate the discomfort, you’ll either fidget to alter the pressures or simply stand up to take the pressure off your butt. Problem solved. No more butt pain.

But what if you couldn’t fidget or stand up. The pressure would persist on the same areas and the discomfort would intensify and may even become terribly painful.

If this is the cause of your chronic lower back pain, a simple reduction in your movement strategies, this may be why more active people have less back pain and why simply becoming more active can help.

Your loss of movement strategy can also be identified with a proper physical therapy examination. This can provide information as to the best choice of activities for you to expand your movement options and alleviate chronic pressure or tension on your lower back.

There are no magic lower back pain exercises.

There are only those strategies that will work for you.

IFAST Physical Therapy in Indianapolis
offers a free physical therapy consultation
to determine what your needs are
in regard to your chronic lower back pain.

Call 317-578-0998 or email us at [email protected] to make your free appointment today.