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

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!

…To remove the cause of the pain.

I’m not just talking about quick fixes or dealing with symptoms. I’m not talking about looking for the source of the pain. I’m not talking about figuring out what tissues hurt. I’m talking about finding what’s truly causing you the pain.

That, however, is one of the hardest things to do, if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

In most cases of low back pain, there is no one defining incident, there is no one injury, or no one single devastating event that can be pinpointed as the root of that shooting back pain, those tight knotted back muscles and those crippling back spasms.

In fact, your low back pain is usually the end result of years of neglect and abuse of your poor spine!

Now if you do know what you’re looking for, things get a little less complicated (although, nothing related to low back pain ever gets easy!).

Low Back Pain or Fire on the Spine?

As a high performance physical therapist in Toronto, Canada, I see quite a few bad backs. I see low back pain of every type and description. I see low back pain that’s been around for 30 years. I see low back pain that’s been around for a few days. I see that low-grade, nagging type of low back pain that comes and goes. I also have people limp, crawl and stumble in to the clinic in incredible pain, unable to function or perform their most simple daily tasks.

These backs are typically attached to a few different types of people, from executives to stay at home moms, to athletes to weekend warriors.

No one is immune.

According the the research, approximately 4 out of 5 people in North American will suffer from low back pain at some point in their life. Of that 4, many will have recurring episodes. Many more believe they have to live with the pain, suffering and dysfunction.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

The following is my list of the top 5 causes of low back pain. These aren’t based on scientific findings or research papers, but on observations from my physical therapy practice and my own personal clinical experiences.

These are the ones that you can fix. Simple, yes. Easy, no.

1. Poor Posture
2. Muscle Related Issues
3. Mobility Issues
4. Bad Movement Patterns
5. Deconditioning

For now, I’m going to give you some homework.  I want you to see if you can come up with your own thoughts as to what could be the problems, in each area, that could lead to low back pain.

Yours in freedom from low back pain.

Have you ever stopped to think about all the things you’re able to do?

Or do you spend more time thinking about the things you’re not able to do?

Riding up the elevator this morning to my apartment, I was carrying a 25 lb box of nutritional supplements that Fed Ex had safely imported for me from the United States. 

There was an older lady who was wheeling her small portable grocery cart who hopped in with me. Seeing me holding the box, she told me that I should rest it against the  metal railing to make it easier.

For me, the 25 lbs box wasn’t what I’d consider heavy. I had no problems carrying the parcel for the 6 or so minutes that it took to get from my car in the underground parking to my place 23 stories up. 

But what she said got me thinking. 

How many times in my life had I tried to make physical tasks easier when I should have relished the challenge of making them harder?

How many times had I taken the escalator or elevator when I should have taken the stairs?

How many times had I circled the parking lot looking for that money spot right by the entrance?

How many times had I taken the easy road when I could have gone off the beaten path?

In my line of work I’ve had the fortune of interacting with some of the strongest people out there. I’m not talking just physically strong, but mentally tough. These are the people who have had the fortitude to face and overcome incredible challenges and hurdles, the people who have had to relearn how to walk, relearn how to feed themselves, relearn life. These are the people that had their movement, among other things, taken from them, through error, accident or misfortune. 

The ones who got it back, didn’t take it for granted after. 

Funny how it takes losing something so precious before your realize how much it’s worth.

How many times had I taken for granted what I am able to do?

What do you take for granted?

Wishing you and yours a prosperous and movement filled 2009.

Dev Chengkalath

Going back to general exercise physiology, one will encounter many “laws”, or basic tenets upon which all training programming should be based.

In the realm of strength and conditioning, one of these is defined as the principle of accommodation.

In the athletic sense this principle states that you can expect a decrease in performance gains over time if your training stimulus is kept constant over a long period.

In athletic preparation, the stimulus is the physical exercise and the response to this stimulus is the performance enhancement specifically caused by the adaptation. By increasing the training volume or the duration of the training, the degree of adaptation will decrease.

This follows the law of diminishing returns.

For example, a relative beginner to weightlifting may see significant performance gains by using a relatively small training stimulus, whereas, with seasoned lifters, even very intense training regimens may not cause any noteworthy performance improvements.

This is why a gym newbie can increase their bench press by 50 pounds while a gym veteran will do well to increase their max by 10!

So, in order for you to avoid the loss of performance gains via accommodation over time, your training must be varied to avoid stagnation with respect to the training stimulus. This, however, creates additional concerns. By creating variety in training, your must still maintain event-specific motor patterns with sport-mimicking physiological demands. This is where the familiar term “sport-specific” training comes in.

So what does that leave you with?

Chaos will make accommodation harder!

Effective training programs must both be variable, to decrease accommodation, and specific, to maintain training transferability to the athletic event.

How can this be achieved?

To minimize or negate the deleterious effects of accommodation, your training program must be changed on a regular basis. Essentially, they must be altered in some form at a given point in time either through quantitative methods (changing the loading parameters) or qualitative means (such as changing the type of exercises or movements).

If you want to keep your performance up, make sure you don’t accomodate!

Stay tuned for the next segment in this series where we’ll take a closer look at specificity and individualization as they relate to the Law of Adaptation.

Yours in movement.

Dev Chengkalath