If you are looking for the best stretches to do for back pain, here are six types of stretches that you can do to help and keep yourself in good alignment. 1. Relaxing Stretches Here is the king of relaxing stretches. Do this exercise for about half an hour each day. It’s the best position
About John Miller
I started my professional life as a PhysEd teacher and am currently a corporate health, fitness and wellbeing consultant and seminar presenter. In past lives I’ve been the National Executive Director of Australia’s national physical education professional association, Director of the South Australian Recreation Institute and Manager of the Australian Institute of Sport’s Health Management Centre. I’ve run my own boutique fitness centre, ‘Fit and Healthy’ in Canberra, Australia’s national capital.
The Global Back Care program emerged from the years spent running ‘Fit and Healthy’, where I designed the program to help people with musculo-skeletal pain. I worked out that a high proportion of musculo-skeletal pain is a fitness problem, not a medical problem. As people became stronger, their muscles looser and their skeleton in better alignment their pain went away.
A big stimulus in the development of the Global Back Care program was the need to work out the cause of my own back pain and fix it. You can read that story in other places on this website and in the Fix Pack Pain ebook.
Relieving joint pain and muscle pain is essentially something you have to do to/for yourself. All it takes is 40 (or more, much more) minutes every day until the pain has gone and then a 20 – 30 minutes, three times a week maintenance program.
My work has extended to the development of a range of health, fitness and wellbeing programs which you can view on these links:
www.millerhealth.com.au
www.fitandhealthyonline.com
www.hourglassdiet.com
www.completefitnessworkout.com
In the meantime stay tuned, highly tuned and when your skeleton is in good alignment, there’s a high likelihood your musculo-skeletal pain will have gone.
John Miller
Director
Global Back Care
If you would like to get in touch with me, complete the contact form.
Principles Of Musculoskeletal Dysfunction
There are five key principles underlying the cause of joint and muscle pain, particularly lower back pain. The first is, ‘Muscles pull bones out of alignment.’
Click below to find out the other four causes.
The Shocking Truth About Back Pain
Some years ago we did a survey of people to see what sort of condition their musculo-skeletal system was in. They completed the musculo-skeletal risk profile. 50% of people gave themselves 5/10 or less for their current condition. By far and away the worse the condition the less likely people were to have a regular and systematic strength and flexibility training program.
The Real Causes Of Back Pain
If you believe most expert medical committees, a high proportion of lower back pain is idiopathic, ie. its of unknown cause.
We’ll let’s set things straight. In most cases of back pain, the cause is your own muscles that have, over the years and decades, gradually tightened up and taken the pelvis and the bones above it out of alignment. Click below to find out what you can do to keep your skeleton in good alignment.
Does sitting down cause lower back pain?
Have you ever wondered if sitting down causes lower back pain? Some time ago, I received a note from Esther asking if I had any advice on how to help a friend who thought sitting down was the leading cause of her back pain. To cut a long story short, here’s the reply I sent […]
Get Fit To Fix MusculoSkeletal Pain
Sit-ups And Press-ups can help Fix Musculoskeletal Pain. If you don’t like going to a gym, I recommend you do these three strength exercises regularly. These exercises are outlined in the Strength Training Diary attached to the Fix Back Pain program. For situps and press-ups, I recommend several strategies. Do the exercises daily and aim […]
Avoid costly therapy for back pain
Considerations to Avoid Costly Therapy for Back Pain There are three significant dysfunctions in our community Metabolic Musculoskeletal Psychological Musculoskeletal dysfunction is costing an absolute fortune. People are running manual handling programs teaching people how to lift correctly when they aren’t strong enough to tap a keyboard or push a pen, let alone lift anything […]
The Universal Fitness Test
Joint and muscle pain goes with people who lack the strength to do every tasks. Even something as basic as sitting in a chair all day, or lifting a ream of paper off a bench can lead to joint and muscle pain.
To take the Universal Fitness Test and see exactly how strong you are – and determine your risk of coming down with joint and muscle pain.
Want To Avoid Back Pain?
One of the great tragedies of modern medicine is that very few of the people with lower back pain and neck pain have a regular and systematic strength training program.
Lower back pain goes with weak abdominal muscles. Neck pain, particularly in women occurs when the muscles designed to keep the head on the shoulders are not strong enough to do the job there were designed to do. Click below to find out what you can do to reduce joint and muscles pain by becoming stronger.
The Musculoskeletal Ecosystem
It’s a common fallacy (particularly in the medical world) to believe that the cause of joint and muscle pain is located at the site of the pain.
Some times it is. In more cases than is recognised, it isn’t.
Each bone in your body (and the ligaments, tendons and muscles attached to it) is part of the musculo-skeletal ecosystem, which means that if one bone is out of alignment it may affect the alignment of other bones.
For instance if your pelvis is out of alignment it will affect the alignment of the bones above it. You experience back pain and think that it can be relieved by rubbing and crunching the spot where it hurts.
Diagnosing The Causes Of Back Pain
An Xray or MRI is a useless tool in providing information about the cause of back pain. It tells you what the architecture of your lower back looks like. It will show that bones are out of alignment. It will show if discs are herniated. What it doesn’t tell you is what’s caused the bones to move out of alignment and the discs to herniate.
For most people with back pain, finding the cause is not a difficult problem. Just see how tight the muscles attached to your pelvis are.
Yoga For Lower Back Pain
If everyone did yoga for 20 minutes three times a week, doctors, physiotherapists, chiropractors, radiologists, surgeons and psychologists would be sitting around twiddling their thumbs.
Likely as not, just about every exercise you see that’s recommended for fixing back pain will have come from yoga.
How To Fix My Aching Back
You won’t believe this, but ask most of the world’s leading health agencies and medical research institutes what the major causes of back pain are and all you’ll get is a blank stare.
Scour the internet and the best information you’ll get is that the cause is ‘idiopathic’, ie it has no known cause.
The cause may be identified as an incident, like lifting something (that a person in good shape will take in their stride). Maybe your doctor will look at an Xray and tell you your back pain is caused by a herniated disc. What they won’t tell you is what caused the herniated disc in the first place.
All in all you’re going round in circles sending more and more good money after bad on treatments that don’t treat the underlying cause of the problem.
So what is the usual cause of lower back pain?
Back Pain in the Workplace
If you’re a manager you’ll need to read this post. As a rule (and strange as it may seem), anyone on workers compensation for joint and muscle pain takes twice as long to recover as a person who is not.
You’d think that with all the resources of coming from the workers compensation insurer, recovery time should be twice as fast. But it’s not.
Back Pain – Clinical Practice Guidelines
Who Do You Believe? The Experts? Clinical practice guidelines prepared by medical institutes around the world for the treatment of back pain are just about useless. If you can’t identify the likely cause(s) of back pain, the chances of the treatment being effective are just about zero.
Back Pain is a Symptom
Musculo-skeletal pain is your body’s way of telling you to get your skeleton back into better alignment.
Listen to what your body is telling you. Embark on a good strength and flexibility training program as soon as you feel pain. If you don’t, a small problem will become a big problem.
Get More Than One Opinion for back Pain
The therapeutic world is full of therapists working in silos, blinkered by their own training and experience. Opinions vary as to what you need to do to get your body back into a pain free state. Each therapist has their own way of doing things: some of them have worked for some people.
I suggest you start doing a range of things that are most likely to get your skeleton back into better alignment and your muscles strong enough to support it. And don’t forget YouTube: it’s become a very good repository of advice, tendered by people with your problem who found a way to successfully fix it.
Please Help Fix My Aching Back
I frequently get requests from people asking me what they themselves can do to relieve their aching back. One of them was from Esther who had the opinion that sitting down was the cause of her problem. She wasn’t wrong.
Now that sitting has become the new smoking, standing up to do one’s work is a good idea. But standing up is one small part of what you need to do to relieve back pain. Here’s my response to Esther, ‘Don’t just sit there, do something!’
Six Principles of Joint and Muscle Pain
If you have a problem with your musculo-skeletal system, first find out the underlying cause. Then get to work doing the strength and flexibility exercises most likely to get your skeleton back into better alignment and well supported by strong muscles. Do that and there’s a good chance you can fix it yourself.
The best advice is to fix small problems before they become big problems.
How Can I Relieve Back Pain While Sitting?
Can You Relieve Back Pain While Sitting? One of the principal causes of lower back pain is your inability to sit up straight. The calf, hamstring, and buttock muscles pull the pelvis back, changing the spine’s S’ curve into a ‘C’ curve. This puts intense pressure on the ligaments, tendons, muscles, and discs in the […]
Fix Back Pain By Becoming Stronger
A lot of people complain about back, neck and shoulder pain. In fact I read that over 30 million Americans have some sort of musculo-skeletal problem. Most of them don’t have a strength training program. And if you don’t have a strength training program you’re getting weaker by the week.
Sooner or later the muscles of your body won’t be strong enough to support your skeleton in good alignment or allow you top do every day lifting without breaking down.
Ten Minute Stretches to Avoid Back Pain
If you think you can spend 8 hours a day sitting down without moving you’ve got another think coming. Sooner or later something’s going to give, your mind, your back … You’ve got to give yourself a break, in fact a number of breaks during the day to freshen up. Call these breaks a health defrag.
How To Avoid Back Pain
It’s a tough assignment expecting to keep your back in good shape if you don’t have a regular and systematic strength and flexibility training program.
There aren’t many people who ever got looser or stronger in a surgery or a pharmacy.
How To Relieve Back Pain Naturally
If you’re going to relieve your back pain, the first thing you need to do is work out the underlying cause. For some people the pain just creeps up on them. Others will blame something they lifted. But whatever you think it is, it’s highly likely that lurking in the background is a skeleton that’s out of alignment and muscles that are weak.
How To Reduce Back Pain While Sitting
If you want to be free of joint and muscle pain you either need to be seated properly or stand up.
If you’re sitting down make sure the back of your chair is bolt upright and pressing firmly into your back and your abdomen pressing in to the desk. That way you’re locked in.
They say that sitting is the new smoking! It makes sense then to spend at least some of your day standing up. There are plenty of standup solutions.
Recommended Back Pain Books
I’d like to introduce you to books on back pain (and other joint and muscle pain) by leading authors around the world. I highly recommend the books by Pete Egoscue, particularly Pain Free.