Having back pain shouldn't be a full-time thing.
And it certainly isn' necessary to suffer day in day out hoping that it will magically disappear one morning when you get out of bed.
I've treated a few new clients in the Achieev Movement Therapy room over the past couple of weeks that have been living with sustained back pain over
a number of years. They have tried pain killers, various types of treatment that provided short term relief but nothing that really addressed the cause of the issue.
A couple had been given exercises that must have just been randomly selected off the internet under might help with back pain section. They hadn't even been demonstrated correctly.
Back pain affects most people at some point during their life -
amazing insight from the NHS website - because we have stopped doing the things that humans are designed to do.
Our days are now spent in an office and tapping away at computers rather than moving around, lifting things up and putting them down somewhere else, running after our dinner or being bent down foraging for it. Our bodies have changed very little in function since our caveman predecessors, we just have better gadgets now.
I upset a client once when I pointed out that his day consisted of a maximum 15 minutes when he wasn't sat down. Unsurprisingly, he had back pain.
Think about a typical day.
- Get up, shower, brush teeth.
- Walk downstairs, grab a quick breakfast and sit down to eat it if you have time, if not eat it in the car.
- Drive to work, park in the space closest to the
door.
- Walk to office, sit down.
- Maybe get up to go to the coffee machine and toilet (well I hope you leave your desk to go to the toilet).
- Lunch at the desk.
- Drive home.
- Get dinner, crash in front of the TV.
- Walk up the stairs to bed.
If you're part of the minority, you might go to the gym, cycle or walk to work, have a manic and physical job. However, you are the minority. My job is fitness and health and I spend at
least 3 hours at my desk each day and around 90 minutes driving.
A high level physio I used to work closely with was telling about her time working in hospitals with wheelchair users and the problems they have in their bodies -"wheelchair users become wheelchair shaped" was her description. Meaning that certain muscles would become fixed in position and tight and others would lose their function.
If your day is similar to the one above,
you're heading in the same direction but unlike a wheelchair user you have a choice to make a change.
It's not necessary to do hours of exercise everyday, just some basic movement and mobility; we give all of our members a mobility routine to follow each morning and evening and they feel great as a result of it. Unfortunately many gym users just exacerbate the problem by working the very muscles that are already too tight because they are the ones they can see in
the mirror.
If you have back pain, you don't need to suffer. There are ways to ease it, I have a team of therapists I work with. If I can't resolve the issue, there is a very strong chance that I know somebody that can. And I don't mean, quick relief and on your way but a plan to improve the problem long term.
If you don't have back pain, do something to make sure you don't take yourself closer to getting it. Move, do
some activity at the weekend, change your gym programme - speak to a coach who knows what they're talking about, go to one of Fran's Pilates classes.
The list is endless just start using your body in a way that it was designed for.
Darren 'move a little' Checkley