Firstly I have to apologise, I have been very busy in recent months with the work in the clinic and I have sadly neglected the blog lately. I am aiming to correct that over the next few weeks and months as I have some exciting ideas for it so keep checking back or even better subscribe to the blog and receive it straight to your inbox.
Well as the headline says, I will attempt to answer the most common question put to me by nearly every patient I see who is suffering from back pain.
“What can I do to make sure this doesn’t happen again?”
Well as you can imagine every patient have a slightly different problem in the back but there are some common trends which we can change to make it less likely that your back pain returns.Unfortunately the statistics aren’t on your side, most people who get back pain have a recurring problem at some point in their life. But considering 80% of the population will have back pain at some point in their life, we can only conclude that this is normal.
The easy answer is, you need to move more.
I know what you are thinking, “but I am fairly active/I have an active job that keeps me busy etc.” so let me qualify my statement a little. The majority of people these days have jobs that require them to be sedentary for large parts of the day in a sitting posture or that they are very repetitive. We are increasingly commuting further and further for work and this is done in a sedentary sitting posture. Some people then go home and sit watching tv or at the computer at home in the evening.
What I am trying to highlight is that the problem isn’t movement but the lack of variety of movement. Do something that does the opposite of what your dominant pattern of movement is. Now I am not going to prescribe any exercises here because it is all so individual, but there should be no limit to what you can take part in from simple things like walking to joining the gym, cycling, doing pilates or yoga or take up a martial art. The recent guidelines for treatment of chronic low back pain by the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists puts exercise as one of the main components to include in the rehabilitation of back pain. It did not single out any one form of exercise and showed that general exercise was as good as pilates based exercise in terms of returning people to a pain free state. With that in mind, is any one exercise better than the other in preventing back pain?
I believe in movement and the activation of your muscles, if your body gets some variety of movement it will maintain the muscles in a more active, healthier state so that they are better able to protect and support your spine when you need it. The best form of exercise is the one that you enjoy, for that is the exercise you will continue with.
in essence you need to move more…
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