Relieve Low Back Pain | Reduce Low Back Pain | Canada's Leading Authority in Human Movement | Dev Chengkalath

If you stop and break down every type of movement you do throughout your day, you’ll notice that they can be broken down into a few patterns or combinations thereof.

Dr. Stuart McGill, one of the world’s premier spine researchers, describes them as follows:

• Squat/Lift
• Lunge
• Twist
• Push/Pull
• Gait
• Balance

Now what if you did one of these, or a few of these, incorrectly?

What if you repeated that over and over again, day in, day out, day after day, week after week, year after year?

What if your compensation movement just so happened to be in your low back?

Perhaps every time you squat down to sit in a chair?

Or every time you bend down to tie your shoe laces?

Or every morning when you brush your teeth or wash your face?

Gold star for you if you’ve come to the conclusion that your bad movement pattern is probably making your low back pain worse.

Be nice to your spine.

How do you fix it?

Because we’re dealing with low back pain, one of the most important movement pattern skills to learn is abdominal bracing. This simple (not easy) skill can help you accomplish all the patterns listed above more efficiently and effectively, while protecting and stabilizing your spine.

As well, abdominal bracing can be an important factor for improving your posture, fixing those muscle related issues, and optimizing mobility.

Here’s how you do it:

Start by standing up tall.

Place your thumbs in the small of your back, with your fingers wrapped around your abdomen.
Slowly start to lean forward at the hips until you feel the muscles in your back and under you thumb start to tighten up.

As soon as you feel them tighten up, slowly come back up to an upright position, feeling for the muscles under you thumb to go slack again.

Once they’ve gone slack, tighten up your stomach muscles until you feel that same tightness develop in the muscles of your back under your thumb.

There you have it, the abdominal brace.

This is the first part of my exploration of bad movement patterns and how to fix them.

Join me tomorrow for the next episode.

Yours in movement,

Dev Chengkalath

In keeping with the theme of relieving your low back pain and getting you back to the things you love doing, I’m going to be talking about mobility.

What does mobility mean?

Mobility in this context is your body’s ability to move a joint and create range of motion. Some people equate mobility with flexibility. The only problem with that is when dealing with flexibility, we typically don’t take into consideration any of the neurological implications.

Too much mobility is NOT a good thing.

So how does mobility relate to low back pain?

As with everything in life, either too much or too little mobility can cause problems. However, with mobility issues, it depends on which joints are mobile and which ones are immobile.

In the case of low back pain, many sufferers will find they have hypermobile lumbar spines and hypomobile hips. Basically this means your low back moves way too much, more than likely as a compensation because your hips don’t move enough.

Remember, your body doesn’t know muscles. It knows movements.

If your hips don’t move enough and you can’t produce extension there, your body will find a way to recreate that desired movement by forcing extra movement elsewhere. Usually through your spine.

Combine the above with poor posture, weak core and a few adaptively changed tissues and you’ve got yourself a recipe for low back disaster.

With all these problems, your body’s biomechanical movement pattern will be severely altered. And you’ll keep inflaming and irritating the tissue in that area.

Irritated tissue= source of your pain.

Cause and source.

Remove the source, you get temporary relief. The band-aid solution. I’ll bet that’s not what you’re looking for.

Remove the cause and the source can heal.

Permanent solution.

So how do you get from having this problem to implementing the solution?

This is where I recommend Magnificent Mobility.

This amazing product is geared towards maximizing your hip mobility while maintaining your spinal stability. This DVD has everything you need to improve performance and maximize your potential. 

In only 10 minutes.

Flexibility, Performance & Health

And for most of you reading this, I am sure you can find that 10 minutes to dramatically improve your health. Even if it’s during commercials when you’re watching TV. 

Yours in mobility.

Dev Chengaklath

I realize I’ve already posted today.

While this blurb will only vaguely follow along the theme of relieving your low back pain, I feel this is something that needs to be addressed. 

About an hour ago I was at the gym. Tucked away in the back corner is the “leg” workout area. This is where all the power rack, squat cages and other various implements of leg training sit.

As I was working away on my front squats today, there was a young guy, possibly in his early 20s who was in the power rack behind me.

What I saw next actually made me feel ill. 

He proceeded to load up a fairly significant amount of weight onto the bar, about 315 lbs give or take. 

Here’s where it all went downhill.

With that amount of load, he started to complete his version of squats. Unfortunately, these looked like a standing version of a very loaded sit up and then a back extension from a flexed spine position with a 2 inch knee bend.

He should not be squatting!

Basically, imagine Gumby trying to do heavier squats. 

I honestly felt like I would have to dodge his vertebral discs as they shot out of his back. And then dodge some more as they bounced around the walls of the room.

Where am I going with this?

Please, please, please, always use a load you can handle safely and keep your form clean. If you don’t know what you’re doing, invest in the expertise of a coach or trainer. 

You only have one back. Take care of it.

Dev Chengkalath

So now that you’ve had a few hours to work on those glute squeezes, how’d they go? 

Were you able to get the muscles to contract when you wanted them to? Were you able to get them to contract to a sufficient level? Were you able to squeeze them hard enough?

Although this may seem like a wasted exercise, I assure you, this is probably the easiest motor control movement you can do to get you on the path to a pain free low back.

It requires no equipment, it’s portable and best of all, it take very little time. 

In this post, I just want to go a little bit more in depth on why the glutes are so important for your back health. 

First off, this group of muscles is one of the largest and strongest in the body (or so it should be!). It’s also one of the major constituents of your core.

That’s right.

In contrast to popular belief, the core is not just made up of the muscles that form your six-pack abs or allow you to rip out all those sit-ups. It’s actually an interconnected network of muscles, joints and tissues that work to transfer energy, create stability and resist various forces such as rotation through the trunk.

As the glutes are one of the largest groups of muscles attached to the pelvis, they play a significant role in creating stability, transferring energy and creating optimal movement in that body region.

Functionally, the glutes’ major role is to extend through the hip and allow your leg to move behind your body.

This becomes important because if you’ve turned off your glutes from all that sitting or those hours and hours of repeated poor postures, your hip won’t be able to extend as far back.

Inhibited muscle=less movement. 

The problem is that your body doesn’t understand this.

It doesn’t know muscles. It only knows movements. 

If your brain says extend the hip, your body will find a way to get that hip extension. Unfortunately, this usually happens through painful or undesirable compensations in the low back and spine. 

So if you’re walking uphill, going for a jog, or doing that all familiar sit-to-stand, and you have inhibited glutes, there’s a good chance that you’re actually compensating with excessive extension through your low back in order to get that full hip extension. 

Over time, or for those unlucky few, instantly, this will cause low back pain. 

Now get back to working on your squat and get those glutes firing!

To your low back pain prevention and relief!

Dev Chengkalath

P.S. If you didn’t catch the squat video, you can check it out here!

Now that I’ve lightly touched upon postural issues, it’s time to move on to muscular ones.

In the last post, I alluded to the fact that repeated poor postures cause certain muscles to change from their ideal through adaptive changes. I also talked about the pelvis and its relationship to low back pain.

Today and over the next couple days, I’m going to link the two.

At this point, I think it would be wise to take a moment and welcome the brothers glute: Maximus, Medius and Minimus.

Rock Crushing Glutes: Not Dysfunctional

Collectively and colloquially they are known as the “buttocks”. And we’ve all got ‘em.

So how does this tie into relieving your low back pain?

This powerhouse muscle group is almost always dysfunctional in the posteriors of all the non-traumatic, chronic bad backs that I’ve had the pleasure of working on.

Think about this for a moment. People with low back pain have weak butts.

Let’s dig a little bit deeper, shall we?

For most of you out there, what’s the most challenging movement you’ll do in your day?

I’m sure there are a few of your out there who will do some pretty incredible feats in the gym or whatever your training field may be. You may be crazy acrobats or gymnasts or super-athletes.

However, for most of you, as is the case with the majority of the clients I see at the clinic, it will be…drum roll please…

Sitting and Standing (aka The Sit-to-Stand).

You do this when you wake up in the morning and roll out of bed. You do this when you use the toilet. If you eat breakfast, which you should be doing, there’s a good chance you sit then stand from the kitchen table. If you drive or ride the bus or train to work, you more than likely sit then stand. At your desk, sure enough, you sit and stand. Repeatedly. And so on and so forth.

Now if you are a low back pain sufferer, I can almost guarantee that you do this incorrectly.

Yup. You do.

I know. It hurts. Sitting then standing seems like such a simple skill! I mean, after all these years, you should be a pro right?

Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, you picked up some pretty bad habits and developed a beneficial relationship with gravity. It’s called the “plop”. This means you “plop” into you chair without any control. 

When’s the last time you thought about how you sit? Or how you stand from sitting?

If you spend a good part of your day sitting, you will end up inhibiting the glutes. When these muscles are turned off like that, it changes how your pelvis functions. It changes how your hips work. Which then changes how your spine functions.

All these alterations in function then affect all the tissues up and down what we call the kinetic chain.

Think dominoes. 

Now if your glutes don’t work properly, your low back has to pick up the slack. Little muscles start doing the work of big muscles. Big muscles start doing the work of little muscles. And some muscles just stop working. 

In the following clip, a couple squat variations for you to try out are shown.

Before I get any of my clients squatting like in the video, I get them to actually turn their butt muscles back on. Since there isn’t a switch to flip, this does require some effort. 

First exercise: The Glute Squeeze. 

If you’re sitting, sit up tall and sit on your hands. Now squeeze your butt cheeks. You should feel the muscles tighten on your hands and it should feel like you’re lifting your body up. Do this for 10 reps every chance you get and every time you find yourself sitting. 

So that’s your homework for today. Nice and simple. Squeeze your butt. Lots.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk more about those glutes of yours. 

Yours in search of buns of steel,

Dev Chengkalath