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

Doesn’t exist.

Because everybody is different and every body will respond differently to different treatment approaches.

But using the basic principles outlined in my post on the 3 most important steps to relieve low back pain will definitely give you a head start in solving your low back problems. 

Those principles are designed to take into consideration the root causes of your low back pain and not just mask the symptoms. 

Today, I just want to touch on an activity we do all the time yet take for granted. 

Sitting and Standing.

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 at work, sure enough, you sit and stand. Repeatedly.

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

Yes. You do.

I know…It hurts.

Sitting then standing seems like such a simple skill! I mean, after all these years of doing it, you should be a pro right?

Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, there’s a good change you picked up some pretty bad habits and developed a seemingly beneficial relationship with gravity.

I like to call this relationship the “plop”.  

Basically, this means you “plop” into you chair without any control; you let gravity do all the work and pull you into the chair. 

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 your buttocks, guaranteed.

When the glutes are turned off like that, it impacts how your pelvis functions, it impacts how your hips function and in the end, all of these changes will impact how your spine functions.

All these alterations in function affect the tissues up and down what we call the kinetic chain. This basically allows for a dysfunction in one part of the body to cause, through various compensations, dysfunction in another part of the body.

Think dominoes. You push one over and one by one, they all fall over in a chain reaction.

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 altogether. 

Over the next few days I’ll be outlining some exercises you can add in to your daily routine to get your butt back in gear. 

As always, yours in movement.

Dev Chengkalath