Unload your low back pain
If you want to relieve your low back pain, unload your spine.
As I’ve stated before, in my physical therapy practice in Toronto, I see a lot of bad backs. Many of these people have tried all sorts of “solutions” for their back pain, but none of them seem to work.
Usually, one of these solutions is exercise.
As I’m sure you can infer from my blog, I am a HUGE advocate for exercise in relieving low back pain. However, not all exercises are applicable in the treatment of this dysfunction for everyone. Doing any old exercise is not how you fix your bad back.
Where do most people go wrong with their exercise choices?
Typically, as discussed in the previous post, a lot of people crank their training volume too high. To recap, doing too many exercises or too many repetitions can lead to form failure or sloppy technique, which only puts vulnerable tissues at greater risk to injury or irritation.
Another major exercise error is overloading the spine.
Spinal Loading Arnold Style
When certain tissues are injured, they don’t respond to being loaded (essentially, made to work) the same way that uninjured tissues do.
So what’s the solution?
Unload.
This just means don’t lift as much, don’t push as much, don’t pull as much. Don’t do as much.
This does NOT mean do nothing.
This just means you need to make sure that you are challenging your tissues, but not overdoing it.
You are stimulating them to repair, not breaking them down through excessive exercise.
The key is to work within your capacity, always maintaining neutral spine and making sure your form is bang on.
So spare your spine and unload.
Dev Chengkalath
