Statistically speaking, if you are a human between the ages of ten and dead, you are currently experiencing or are soon to experience back pain. Even in our modern society, where we work less with our hands than we do with our phones, many of us can’t bend over to tie our shoes without two ibuprofen and a heat wrap. It’s one thing to throw your back out moving furniture, but many of the clients we see here at LIFT Fitness seem to go to sleep after a quiet day of reading by the fireplace and wake up with back pain. Sometimes, the cause is something medical like degenerative disk disease, in which case the solution is beyond our realm of capabilities (vast though it may be), and surgery may be required. Most of the time, though, the problem is biomechanical, which means some pulley or lever in the organic machine that is your body isn't doing what it’s supposed to do.
Know this: as with many injuries, the cause of your low back pain is probably not the low back itself, but rather some weakness in the supporting structures above and/or below it.Stretching your lower back to relieve the pain isn’t addressing the problem, and may in fact make it worse by adding more mobility to an area that needs more stability. We’ve outlined some of the most common causes of lower back pain in modern society, and some of the things you can do on your own or with us at LIFT Fitness to help fix it.
Cause #1: Too Much Sitting
You’ve probably heard this one before: sitting is the Chris Brown to your lower back’s Rihanna. Good for you for working out, bonus points if you work out at LIFT, but most of us are still sitting down for the vast majority of our day, and unfortunately an hour of activity won’t undo twenty-three hours of inactivity. Sitting, especially with bad posture, puts a tremendous strain on your lower back (even perfect posture is harmful for long periods of time) by undoing the S-shaped curve that we as a species have spent millions of years developing for the sole purpose of standing upright. Not only that, but continually keeping your knee in a flexed position for hours at a time will physically shorten the muscles attached to the back of your pelvis -that would be your hamstrings- and tilt it out of line. Your spine is on top of your pelvis, so where the pelvis tilts, the spine must follow. Hamstrings are typically the worst offenders, but the same thing can happen to the muscles on the inside, outside, and front of your pelvis, which would be like balancing a bowl of candy over your head as four angry children pull at you from different directions.
The Fix: Stand up a lot and stretch your hamstrings. This could be the easiest solution to anything, ever, at least where your body is concerned. Stand up every commercial break, every time you get a text, every time you switch windows on your computer, any little frequent reminder you can think of to get you off your butt every so often so that your spine can get a break and the muscles attached to your pelvis don’t freeze up. If you can make it a habit to stand up as much as you sit down, your back will feel better, your weight will be more manageable, and we’ll finally see peace in the Middle East.
And while you’re up, it wouldn’t be a bad time to stretch those tight hamstrings. Here’s what you do: plop your heel on a chair or step, keep your back flat, your chest up, and tilt your upper body forward until you feel a stretch in only your hamstring. Don’t touch your toes. It might look like you’re stretching, but you may be ignoring your hamstrings by rounding your low back, which actually makes things worse. A good stretch should be uncomfortable, maybe even just short of painful, and last at least 20 seconds. Come on, you’re trying to physically change the length of your tissues by pulling them apart, it can’t be easy.
Cause #2: Weak Glutes and Bad Lifting Mechanics
Your butt (known as your glutes when they want to be take seriously) has two important jobs: filling out your jeans, and extending your hips, and if it’s bad at one it’s probably bad at the other. Proper form for picking something up involves primarily using your glutes, and to a lesser extent your quads and hamstrings, while the muscles in your low back keep things in line. If you’re bending over and rounding your back to pick up a heavy object (what we professionals call “stupid”), you turn off your potentially powerful glutes and put the stress on your substantially weaker lower back. But even with decent form, weak glutes just aren’t able to do a good job of extending your hips when things start to get heavy, and you’re left with a Tebow-Sanchez situation: you have one job that needs doing, and both of your options (lower back and glutes) aren’t very good at it, so bad things tend to happen. Jets suck.
The Fix: Learn to use and subsequently strengthen your glutes. One of my favorite exercises, the kettlebell swing, is a staple in all of my group classes and personal training programs because it gets people to use their glutes in a way that is intuitive and effective. Unfortunately, many people with back pain instinctively avoid this exercise because it looks like it puts a lot of strain on the low back. This may seem reasonable at first glance, but if kettlebell swings (or their slower cousin romanian deadlifts, also known as RDLs) are done properly, the low back stays flat and stable, with the glutes and hamstrings exclusively working to extend the hip. Teaching proper swing and RDL mechanics -what we call a “hinge” movement- is awkward and no one wants to be seen practicing their form in public, but it does wonders for back pain (and gives you a nice backside to boot). Trust me, awkward stares while learning the hinge now are well worth the slack-jawed, lustful stares you’ll get later.
To hinge properly, stand up straight, keep your chest up, and push your butt back like you’re playing post defense against someone particularly attractive. If you’re holding a barbell or kettlebell, it should be against your shins. To come back up, thrust your hips forward by squeezing your butt. I could have said “extend your hips by engaging your glutes”, but I didn’t and I’m not sorry. At no point should you round any part of your back, and your shoulders should move up at the same rate as your hips.
Cause #3: Tight Middle and Upper Back
A good 90% of my instruction on any given exercise boils down to two simple cues, “Back flat, head and chest up”. As a trainer, I say it probably twenty times a day. But out in the real world, the back twists and bends and rounds and arches and no one wants to show off perfect deadlifting mechanics when picking up a fork they dropped on the floor.
When we talk about back pain, we’re almost always talking about the lower back...but why? There is a foot and a half of back up top that rarely seems to give anyone any trouble. Why is the lower back such a problem child when it seems to be made of the same stuff that behaves on top? Don’t fall for it. The mid and upper back are the two stronger but less flexible older brothers that break everything and blame it on the poor red-headed step-child that is the lower back. When you round your back to pick something up -and you will, so will I, it happens- your back will bend at the point of its greatest laxity. Almost always, this is the lower back. The same goes for when you twist. If we could increase mobility in the middle and upper back, the range of motion required for daily living and lifting could be distributed more evenly between each section of your spine.
The Fix: Soft Tissue Work
What we in the industry call “soft tissue work” refers to any attempt at physically altering either the length or density of a muscle. We can change the length of a muscle by stretching it, as mentioned earlier. But try as I might, I can’t stretch the middle of my back. I just don’t think I bend that way. So the other option is to change the density, and we do this by applying pressure to points where the muscle is so dense that it affects mobility. Your best option would be a massage, either by a professional or competent significant other. But if you’re poor and/or alone, the next best option is a foam roller, which looks like a big pool noodle. We have plenty of foam rollers here at LIFT that you can use before and after class if your back is giving you trouble, but if you want your own they’re only about ten bucks on Amazon.com. The cool thing about foam rolling is that there isn’t a whole lot of technique involved, just put the roller on the ground and roll the muscle group you want to target back and forth. For your mid and upper back, make sure to pull your shoulder blades apart to get to the muscle underneath. 8-12 rolls, nice and slow with special attention paid to any “trigger points”, should do the trick.
An even cheaper, possibly even more effective option is to tape two tennis balls together and make a specialized back roller that would make MacGyver proud. Place the peanut a few inches above your waistband lined up with the two parallel muscles running up along your spine, and lay down on top of it. Try to completely relax for a second and let the peanut seep in, trying not to conjure too much imagery from that statement. Do three small sit-ups, just enough to put pressure on the tennis balls and feel it pressing against a segment of your spine, then roll the peanut towards your head a quarter roll and repeat. Keep going until you get between your shoulder blades.
Just remember, go easy on rolling and stretching your lower back. I know that’s where you feel the pain, but remember, we stretch and roll areas where we want more mobility, and too much stretching and rolling of your lower back is just adding more laxity to an area that was too lax to begin with. A few rolls to loosen up is fine, but any more than that and you end up scorching the shirt you meant to iron.
Summary
Back pain is a disease of disuse. I will be the first to admit that I love a good twelve hour session in front of my xbox, moving only when I need to eat or go to the bathroom and sometimes not even then, but too much of a good thing comes at a price. To get the most out of the body you’ve been given here in the 21st century, you have to make a real targeted effort into undoing some of the damage done by an increasingly sedentary lifestyle. That means stand, stretch, swing, and roll in the face of a hostile, uncaring world that seeks to do you harm. Either that, or develop a tolerance for ibuprofen and a familiarity with bell towers.
General Tips for Back Health
-A strong core will go a long way in keeping the spine in line. Don’t sleepwalk through your ab routines, they’re good for more than just keeping you looking good at the pool.
-Stay loose. If you come to our classes, put genuine effort into our hip mobility drills during the warm up, and go through a full range of motion on all of our exercises. For legal reasons I’m no longer allowed to use a taser to “encourage” people to reach the bottom of a squat, so for now it’s all up to you (until my lawyer pulls through).
-Stand up often. Are you reading this hunched over in your chair? Do you dive into a bag of chips when you read dieting tips? Don’t let yourself sit for more than twenty minutes at a time. You’ll be surprised at just how much better you feel all over. Seriously, stand up after you get done reading this.
-Get to class early and foam roll. It only takes a few minutes, and we’ll be there to help you if you’re not quite sure what to do. A few foam rolls combined with our dynamic warm-up will keep your back and hips mobile and healthy.
-If it hurts, fix your form and try again. Like I said earlier, hinge movements like the kettlebell swing are Doctor Jekyll when done properly and Mister Hyde when done incorrectly. But as much as it pains me to say, if you can’t do the motion without pain, don’t do it at all.
Justin Gibson is a certified personal trainer at LIFT Fitness and Wellness in Lexington, Kentucky and a recent graduate of the University of Kentucky’s Kinesiology program. He has dealt with his own back pain more than anyone his age has a right to, and wants to give you the help he wishes he’d gotten years earlier.
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