In my experience, most chronic back pain first occurs as either an acute episode or quite mysteriously. You wake up one day in pain or move a certain way and feel something give and end up with a pain that won't go away. The reality is you could have done something the day before, a week, or even a month ago that overworked or injured muscles in your body in some way and started an imbalance or deterioration that weeks later led to the chronic problem you now have.
As a result of overuse, a trauma or strain, even bad posture , tension will build up in a muscle to the point where the circulation is impaired and eventually that muscle will weaken and in certain situations, fail causing the body to compensate and eventually get out of balance.
Like someone who is constantly hunched over when they sit at their desk or leans on one leg when they stand.
A muscle imbalance invariably leads to the pelvis moving into the wrong position causing it to either tilt forward or back, up or down, or rotate. These 5 positions will have a flow on effect to the spine which will upset the position or spacing of the vertebrae and put pressure on the discs or nerves leading to back pain or even worse, sciatica.
As tightness builds up in a muscle due to poor circulation, that muscle becomes weak causing other muscles to have to compensate or carry the weight for it. These other muscles then start to overwork, fatigue and tighten up and the odds become higher that one of the joints in the spine will be put under an uneven pressure which will end up causing pain and inflammation.
As the muscular system gets out of balance you slowly lose flexibility. When you notice your flexibility is going it is the first warning sign that an imbalance is building.
Imbalances and compensations continue to build until there is no potential left and something has to give and it's often at the weakest point, the joint. This is where many treatments are incorrectly focussed , leading to expensive and unnecessary X Rays, MRI's or CT Scans which invariably show very little. Even wh en they do identify a structural problem with the joint, odds on it's not the cause of the pain anyway so treating it has little or no lasting effect.
The muscle imbalances that set all this up will usually be the underlying problem yet they are rarely considered or treated by most Doctors and therapists.
These imbalances can be confined to one area such as the back or shoulders, or spread throughout the whole body causing a pattern of tight muscles and pressure that eventually leads to weakness and pain. I have treated many people who have been doing regular exercise for years yet their muscles are weak and painful.
Some treatments you get for pain will exercise and stretch you until your body compensates sufficiently that your pain goes away but it doesn't remove the imbalances, it just covers them up. You lose flexibility and have a negative effect on the circulation and strength in the body.
The more your body has already compensated for previous injuries or damage, the less effective these stretching and exercise type treatments will be. Usually the older a person gets the less they respond to these treatments, consequently people end up having to curtail their activities as a way of relieving their pain.
When we move, especially doing vigorous exercise, we exert a force which should be carried evenly throughout our whole body.
But as a result of even a minor imbalance it is distributed unevenly throughout our muscle system causing compensations and the imbalance to spread deeper into the body. Especially when the body is unhealthy or weak and holds onto its tension.
This build up of compensations and imbalances leads to a greater potential for injury if we over exert or over extend ourselves in our lifestyle. This also explains why sportspeople, even elite ones, end up being much more injury prone later in their careers. Unbeknown to most of them, it is less to do with their age and more to do with bad body management during their younger years.
Even though at any one time most people have imbalances and therefore the potential to injure themselves it will generally only become a problem and end up a pain episode for people who push themselves beyond their body's limits through such things as an accident, or overuse in their work, sport or lifestyle.
Bending over at that particular angle to pick something up off the floor can be just a bit too much stretch for a muscle in the back that was already too tight and too weak to support the weight or pressure you were putting on it.
This movement caused the muscle to go into spasm, (a permanent state of contraction) and become irritated at the point where it attaches to the bone, or it upsets the alignment of a vertebrae causing pressure on a disc.
A good example of this is when a person strains muscles across their lower back by lifting something fairly heavy into or out of their car. The erector spinae muscles (the supporting muscles that run either side of the spine) are often tight already and therefore weak and so the action of trying to support a weight out in front of the body is too much strain on them and they go into spasm.
When receiving treatment, attention normally focuses on the area where the pain is felt. The problem muscles that are causing the pain are left in the locked up condition resulting in a person feeling their back pain every time they sit or bend forward. Sitting and bending requires the erector spinae muscles to relax and lengthen but they are in spasm so they can't........... continues
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