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

Now that you’re educated about your problem, it’s time to take control of the situation. 

In the case of solving your low back pain issues, this means getting your motor control back.

Motor control issues encompass a broad spectrum of items that relate to how we move and how we interact with gravity and our environment. These include daily postures, our muscle function, our mobility and our overall movement patterns.

Motor Control at its finest

I like to split motor control issues into four sub-sections and will explore each one separately. Do keep in mind that each of these items interact with each other and should not be considered independent of the others.

Motor Control Issues:

1. Posture
2. Muscle Imbalances
3. Mobility Issues
4. Movement Patterning

In this post, I’ll just briefly highlight each of the above.

Posture: Posture is the combination of all the positions of all the different joints of the body at any given time. Faulty posture may put you into positions of stress while ideal postures may alleviate them.

Muscle Imbalances: This simply means that your muscles aren’t working properly. In most cases this relates to how your muscles deal with forces. If an imbalance exists in muscle function the end results is that they aren’t dealing with either creating or resisting forces properly.

Mobility Issues: Mobility is your body’s ability to move a joint under control. With mobility, three states of being exist: optimal, hypermobility, hypomobility. Optimal mobility means your joints can be controlled through any required range of motion. Hypermobility is when a joint moves too much (too much range of motion) without being under control. Hypomobility then becomes the opposite-when the joint doesn’t move enough to allow the required range of motion.

Movement Patterning: As humans we tend to move through the same patterns every day. If we’ve picked up some bad habits, this can put various tissues at risk of injury. Take for example a sit-to-stand. This movement is probably one of the most frequently performed functional tasks we do each day: think toilets, chairs, cars etc. Now imagine that you have a faulty pattern and you repeat that pattern every time. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month. At some point, there will be a structure in your body that won’t be able to tolerate that stress and it will fail. This is where your back “goes out”.

Now if you can apply the appropriate knowledge and take control of the above four issues using physical therapy, you’ll be well on your way to relieving your low back pain.

In the next post, I’ll cover the final element of the top 3 steps to relieve your low back pain: Get Fit.

Yours in movement.

Dev Chengkalath

In dealing with exercise errors and low back pain, poor warm-ups rank right up there as major contributors to either keeping you in pain, or getting you there. 

What do I mean by poor warm-ups?

Take a quick look around any of your neighbourhood gyms or fitness studios and you’ll see that most people walk out of the change rooms and straight to their favourite piece of equipment. They will then proceed to get on with their lifts or exercises without a care in the world. 

In many cases, poor warm-up actually means NO warm-up!

Sure, you may see a few obligatory static stretches thrown in after a few minutes on the treadmill, but you’ll seldom see a well designed or consistently applied dynamic warm-up which follows the principles I discussed in my free report (if you haven’t already done so, sign up for the free report at the end of this post. It’s FREE!). 

Why is that a problem?

Well, how many of those people have spent their day sitting at a desk? Or sitting in a car? Or slouched on the couch?

The point of the warm-up is to PRIME your body for optimal health and performance.

After a day of poor postures and bad habits, shouldn’t you get your body ready to face the rigours of your exercise program? And wouldn’t this seem even more important if you were trying to relieve your low back pain?

Basically, if your body isn’t warmed up properly, all the systems that come into play may not be functioning at the level they need to be working at to keep you healthy and pain free.

This takes us back to the risk/benefit ratio. 

By not warming up appropriately, your level of risk goes up, while your level of benefit goes down.

And for relieving low back pain, this is not the position you want to be in.

So reduce your risk. Use trojan.

And after that, reduce your risk some more by warming up properly.

Yours in movement.

Dev Chengkalath

P.S. Don’t forget to sign up below for my FREE report on Athletic Warm-Up for Optimal Performance

There are very few exercises that are inherently safe or inherently dangerous.

In the case of low back pain, what will push an exercise into either of the above two categories is the application of said exercise.

As a physical therapist in Toronto, I come across this situation often. This becomes a delicate balancing act between the risk and the benefit of a chosen exercise to that particular client with their particular brand of low back pain (basically, what is the “cause” of their problem).

In my experience, the following are the primary exercise errors that may increase your risk of acquiring or perpetuating a low back injury:

1. Poor warm-up
2. Too much volume
3. Too much load
4. Poor technique
5. Biomechanical fault (e.g. injury, body type etc)

Over the next few days, I’ll dig a bit deeper into each of these.

Yours in movement.

Dev Chengkalath

As a physical therapist in Toronto who treats a lot of low back pain, a significant part of my job is to educate my clients on how they can become their own healers.

My goal is to not only enable them to get themselves out of pain, but to keep them that way.

Permanently.

As part of my client education, I always define three words:

Cause. Source. Symptoms.

By defining these, my clients should have a better understanding of what it really takes to relieve their low back pain and get back to enjoying life. 

Enjoy your life, pain free.

The Cause: The producer of an effect.

For low back pain, the end effect is a negative one. The “cause” is what leads to the direct, or more often, indirect, production of the pain, pathology and dysfunction.  For example, in some low back pain cases, repeated lumbar spine flexion and rotation movements put excess pressure on the discs. The discs wear out and bulge. This bulge in turn puts pressure on a nerve root, which then leads to pain to shooting down the leg.

In other cases, the cause may be repeated poor postures (think slouching in front of a computer or TV) for hours on end. This then leads to stretching or trauma over time to certain tissues such as the ligaments. These tissues will then become injured and painful. 

Notice how the cause was the repeated movements or postures which then in turn injured the discs or ligaments.

The Source: The tissue that is irritated, injured or involved that directly leads to the production of pain.

In many low back cases this can be the facet joints, the vertebral discs, nerve roots or ligaments, to name a few.

Disc Bulge: Why did it happen?

Notice how if you were to only look at the source of the pain, you wouldn’t take into consideration the reason that the disc is bulged in the first place or the reason the ligament was stretched excessively.

The Symptom(s): This is what you feel as a low back pain sufferer.

remember him?

Keeping with the same examples, in the first case you would feel the shooting pain down your leg (aka sciatica). Maybe some numbness, tingling or muscle weakness as well. In the ligament sprain case, you may feel some tightness or protective muscle spasm in the area around the injured site with localized aches and pains.

Now if you were only dealing with the symptoms, you’d deal with less than if you were just looking for the source tissue and even less than if you were looking for the cause!

Basically, you’d deal exclusively with stopping that immediate pain.

You might use hot packs, cold packs, pain medication, muscle relaxants or other modalities such as interferential current. You may avoid painful movements and take plenty of rest. 

The easy stuff. 

Notice how if you were only to deal with the symptoms, you’d just mask the deeper underlying issues.

To recap, as a physical therapist who treats a lot of low back pain, my first priority is to educate my client, to empower them to become their own healer.

To do that, they must learn a very important lesson:

Separate the cause, the source and the symptoms so you don’t miss out on identifying and removing the real reasons that you are suffering from low back pain.   

Dev Chengkalath

“O bed! O bed! delicious bed!
That heaven upon earth to the weary head.”

Thomas Hood, Miss Kilmansegg – Her Dream

 

Truer words were never spoken. 

How many times have you crawled into bed thinking that this was your escape from the wear and tear, the hustle and bustle, the rigours of your never-ending day?

How many times have you risen in the morning only to feel the exact same way you did when you laid your weary head down onto your pillow?

Foggy. Un-refreshed. Exhausted.

How about those times when you’ve gone to bed feeling great, but then wake up the next morning all stiff, sore and achy?

Sleep should be your salvation from pain. Your bed, your sanctuary. 

If you suffer through the night, your mattress may be the problem.

In fact, it could be one of those hidden causes of your low back pain. Or at the very least, it could be exacerbating your current problems. 

As a physical therapist who works at relieving low back pain, I see this all the time. 

why can't everyone sleep like her?

I have clients who come in and tell me about their 10-15 year old mattresses, or that they sleep on the same side all the time, in the same “groove” that they’ve worn in. 

Based on my experiences, this is the one piece of furniture that everyone should invest in.

Think about it. 

When’s the last time you flipped your mattress?

When’s the last time you rotated your mattress?

Heck, when’s the last time you bought a new mattress?

Seriously, think about the number of hours you spend sleeping in your life. 

Shouldn’t those hours be spent in comfort? Shouldn’t those hours be spent actually restoring your body? Shouldn’t those hours be spent sleeping instead of tossing and turning?

If you only do one thing (after fixing your posture), it should be investing in a solid bed. 

To your sleep-full nights.

Dev Chengkalath