3 Most Important Steps to Relieve Low Back Pain-Take Control
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:
- Posture
- Muscle Imbalances
- Mobility Issues
- 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
