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

Over the past couple of weeks a few articles have been published in the popular press that have seemingly undermined the usefulness of the physiotherapy profession, and by extension, given us physiotherapists a bad rap.

In my practice, there are three things I consider of utmost importance, my own golden triad if you will: my clients, my profession and my reputation. And I will endeavour to protect all three.

The following link will take you to one of the most prominent articles cutting down the physical therapy for injury rehabilitation.

“Treat me, but no tricks please”

After my first reading, I could feel my blood pressure bubble over and and those small hairs on the back of my neck rise in defensive posturing.

Within the first few lines of the article Gina Kolata wrote:

“But the letter the angry doctor had received from his insurer made me wonder whether physical therapy was different from the plasma treatment. Is there rigorous evidence showing it works?”

Here’s this journalist cutting up the profession which has given me so much and allowed me to help so many people.

Then it all made sense.

Therapeutic ultrasound

A few lines later, I realized that Ms. Kolata lumped all physiotherapists with what I refer to as “CHUM therapists” (Cold/Heat/Ultrasound/Massage):

“When I’ve gone to physical therapy, the treatments I’ve had — ice and heat, massage, ultrasound — always seemed like a waste of time. I usually went once or twice before stopping.”

It seems as though my profession had been boiled down to a few “modalities” of treatment that are typically used as quick time filler or that could or should otherwise be done at home.

Ice Pack: Not really physical therapy

It seemed as though the actual “physical” aspect had been forgotten.

Most importantly, the cerebral nature of our job description was completely omitted.

And this reminded me of something the esteemed Dr. Shirley Sahrmann, physiotherapist extraordinaire, spoke about at one of her movement impairment syndrome courses. I can’t recall her words verbatim, but in broad terms she lamented the fact that the way the industry is set up, we get paid for procedures, not to think.

Modalities are procedures. Actual physical therapy work such as progressive exercise programming requires thinking. And time.

As physiotherapists, we should be first and foremost educators. We should be teaching our clients what may be causing them pain. We should be teaching them what they can do to  get out of that pain. And we should certainly be teaching them how to stay out of that pain.

And we should be using movement as our medication of choice.

Yours in movement.

Dev Chengkalath

Toronto Physiotherapist

Just a quick video clip of a more advanced physical therapy core exercise to help relieve low back pain: The Cross Over Plank.

Yours in movement.

Dev Chengkalath

As always, in the realm of physical therapy and injury rehabilitation, there are often more questions than hard answers.

One of the most often debated areas relates to the notions of mobility, stability, flexibility and how these impact low back pain.

Because the language used can change from person to person or physical therapist to physical therapist, I want to start off by defining some terms in the context I’ll be using them.

That way, we’re all on the same page. Or at least on different pages of the same book.

Mobility: Ability of a joint to go through a specific range of motion under neuromuscular motor control. To confuse things even more, mobility can be further categorized as hypomobility (not enough movement) or hypermobility (too much movement). So as you can see, mobility can encompass components of both stability and flexibility).

Stability: This term falls under the continuum of mobility, but for our purposes will be used to denote the ability to of a joint to resist excess motion and maintain joint integrity under neuromuscular control.

Flexibility: The total range through which a joint can move through without necessarily taking into consideration the level of neuromuscular control that is exercised (e.g. when you’re lying on your back and someone is pushing your leg into a hamstring stretch).

One of the most common statements I hear  in my physical therapy practice from my low back pain clients is that they believe they need more flexibility in their lumbar spines or in their hamstrings, that these areas just don’t move enough.

In most cases, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

As I’ve stated previously, what is needed is more hip mobility and increased lumbar spine stability.

In the next post, I’ll dig a little deeper into the impact of mobility, stability and flexibility on low back pain and how mobilizing your hips and stabilizing your low back could spare your spine and save you pain.

Yours in movement.

Dev Chengkalath

Over the last couple of blog posts I’ve explored the basic concept of sitting.

Surprisingly, when broken down, it’s not as simple as it seems. It’s not all about just plunking yourself down into your seat. There are rules and regulations to be followed for optimal spine health.

This holds true for the simple art of standing as well.

The Art of Standing

Standing is probably the first movement pattern that we lose over time. Sadly, in many cases, the loss of this ability will ultimately lead to the loss of personal independence.

So what can you do to hold on to your youth?

Practice proper standing.

Or more specifically, fix your sit to stand. This is what I spend countless hours helping my clients understand at my Toronto physiotherapy practice.

Since I’ve covered the optimal sit in the previous couple posts, I won’t belabor the point other than to reiterate how important that initial component of the sit to stand really is. It sets you up for success in the latter half, the stand.

The stand:

Let’s start off with the final position of the sit with your spine in neutral. Make sure your feet are wide enough apart. This will give you an appropriate base of support from which to initiate the standing motion. For most people, a hip to shoulder width distance tends to work well.

Now that your feet are set and you have a good foundation to start from, it’s time to switch focus to the hips.

As you start that standing movement, lean forward through your torso. By leaning forward, I don’t mean you should be flexing through your spine! This is a very important point to keep in mind.

Your back still maintains that neutral position with the motion taking place through your hips.

As you lift yourself up into a standing position, you should be bringing your hips forward by thrusting through your buttock. Think of this as hinging through your hips. The following video clip demonstrates the hip hinge pattern with movement through the hips while the spine remains in neutral.

A common movement pattern mistake here is using the muscles of the low back to ratchet or “pull” yourself up. This will put all sorts of potentially harmful forces through your low back.

Putting it all together:

Now that you’ve got the sit from before and you’re aware of how to initiate the stand, it’s time to integrate all those bits of information together and complete the sit to stand as demonstrated in the following video.

While this may not seem like a lot, if those of you with low back pain paid attention to how you executed this movement, over time you’d save your spine from some significant trauma.

Think of it this way, how many times do you sit and stand in a day? In a week? In a month?

Now if you could remove those unnecessary forces, how would your back feel?

Yours in movement.

Dev Chengkalath

In yesterday’s post, I discussed the subtle loss of stability in the lumbar spine when most people complete the sitting action.

Today, I’ll be giving you some quick physiotherapy tips on how you can fix your sitting. In the next post, I’ll give you tips on how to improve your standing from a sit.

As always, I’ll be using my trusted three part approach for relieving low back pain:

1. Knowledge

2. Motor Control

3. De-Conditioning

First, recognize that you are doing something to yourself multiple times a day (repeated sitting with loss of control) that is causing trauma to your tissues and that you must remove these injurious forces in order for healing to take place. If these forces aren’t removed or resolved, things just won’t get better.

You have take action to fix it.

This is the knowledge component.

Second, improve your motor control.

Recognize that motor control encompasses four major components including posture, movement patterns, mobility, and muscle balance. Each of these areas will have to be addressed for a long term solution.

This is the action phase where you apply your knowledge.

Start by fixing your posture as described previously (just click the link to be taken directly to the posture post).

Next, learn proper sitting mechanics. Sure, you’ve known how to sit since you were an infant, but when’s the last time you checked to see if you were doing it right? Are you sure you haven’t picked up any bad habits along the way?

You can work on mobility (loosening the hips and stabilizing the spine) and muscle balance (think about resolving any imbalances you may have because of compensations or specific movement habits) concurrently using simple drills such as the quadruped hip rocking movement in the following video clip.

Finally, and just as important as the other two areas, is fixing your fitness level. If you’re de-conditioned, you’ll let gravity do more work than it should, especially on the sit (remember the plop?).

Putting it all together…The sit breakdown:

From a standing position, control yourself down towards your seat while keeping your lower spine in neutral position (between rounded and arched). As your buttock descends towards the seat, push your hips backwards, making sure you keep your spine in that optimal, stable alignment.

Toronto Physiotherapist Demos Neutral Spine Sit To Stand

Some common errors include standing with your feet too close together, rounding your back as you sit down and of course, not controlling yourself down. Another often seen compensation is the use of the arms to lower yourself down.

Toronto Physiotherapist Demos Bad Sit: Posterior Pelvic Tilt and Rounded Spine

As your buttock touches down on the seating surface, this is where you need to be aware of the potential for loss of control through the lower back and pelvis. The plop tends to allow the lower back to round and the pelvis to fall into a posterior pelvic tilt (tailbone tucked under position).

For a proper sit, don’t allow the lower back to deviate from the neutral position throughout the WHOLE movement. Maintain that position right from the standing to the descent into the seat.

And that, my friends, is how you should be sitting. With control and purpose.

How many of you can honestly say that you pay attention to how you sit down every day?

If you’re experiencing low back pain, it’s probably time you started.

In the next post, I’ll work through the standing component to keep your back healthy and safe.

Yours in movement.

Dev Chengkalath