Today we are going to dive into eliminating back pain. Everyone complains about it, so how can we resolve the issue?
Let’s first dive into how posture impacts our back. As you can see below, we have Good & Bad posture. Good posture, is when we have everything from the head down stacked in line over each other. Bad posture on the other hand, we have the head and neck protruding forward, and the hips getting dumped forward into anterior pelvic tilt. This Bad Posture position creates all sorts of havoc within the body.
So above we can see how posture impacts our skeletal structure; but how is it resulting in a stiff or painful back? That’s where we need to look at what’s called Cross Syndrome. We have Upper & Lower Cross Syndrome.
Above we can see an example of Upper Cross Syndrome. Instead of maintaining balance between the neck/cervical musculature, we create a very large imbalance which creates aches and pains through out the body.
In our next example, we see Lower Cross Syndrome. Here we have created an imbalance within the musculature of the mid section & hips, thus the culprit of our back pain!
So what’s the solution here? It’s simple actually; we just need to bring balance back to the body by inhibiting or relaxing the over worked muscles, and re-activating the weakened muscles. Here’s a few simple ways to do that!
1: Cardio. Simply by raising your heart rate and core body temperature, your muscles will naturally loosen up. It’s not going to completely fix the problem, but it will serve as a great first step!
2: Soft Tissue/Foam Rolling. The pain and irritation that we are feeling originated from a muscle that was or is overstretched and weak, or shortened and overactive. Foam rolling, and really any type of soft tissue work; will help the muscle relax. The goal here is to RESET the muscle by allowing it to get back to a natural state.
3. Mobility. Mobility is best trained and improved AFTER we have completed steps 1 & 2. The body is in a much better place to adapt. Mobility work will act as a re-education period to essentially re-groove the muscle tissue. Again, the whole reason why we have our back pain in the first place is from our muscles overworking and becoming unbalanced throughout the body.
4. Activation. Our last step is to re-activate and get our muscles firing as they normally should. This can involve anything from a plank, a hip bridge, to really any type of dynamic exercise. The most important piece here; is that we execute each exercise correctly and don’t fall into any faulty movement patterns.
This is a very simplified approach to alleviating back pain. Although a great foundation, there is much more to truly correcting the problem, and chances are…it does go deeper than just posture. We will continue to dive into topics like this and expand upon our articles, but in the mean time; please leave us feedback! Was this article helpful? Do we need to elaborate more? What should we cover next?
Phalanx Performance 