4 Reasons Why Your Back Pain Isn’t Improving
1. You are not doing anything to help your back heal:
Let’s face it, sometimes, when we have low back pain, we get up and get on with it. We might have a night out, or the house needs cleaning, or you are tired of minding it, and you think playing a game of golf or football might help “loosen it up”. The truth is that this approach rarely works. Trying to push through pain tends to make your nervous system more sensitive to smaller movements, thus making your pain worse. While you may even get through the activity fine but then afterwards, the pain comes back with a vengeance, hell-bent on screwing up your week. So you get even more frustrated with your body and try to take some pain killers to get through the days and maintain some level of activity. Does this sound familiar?
2. Your activities are aggravating your lower back:
As mentioned in the previous section, yes, you might think your back can do a lot more than it can do and irritate it. But aside from activities, things like sitting for too long, driving, walking for too long, walking uphill, walking downhill. These are all activities that seem very innocuous, but it comes down to what length of time you are doing these activities and then at what point your back gets sore, and you keep on pushing through the pain. Going for a walk is entirely normal, but expecting to be able to go for a 3-hour hike up and downhill when you can’t sit for 20 mins or stand for 5 mins without pain is asking a bit much. You need to be aware that while your lower back can withstand these activities typically, right now, when you are in pain, it cannot tolerate this type of load for a significant length of time.
Why, because you are compensating, and when you compensate, you fatigue quicker.
3. Stress:
We all have periods of stress, but if you have a very busy/hectic lifestyle, this can cause your body to go into fight or flight mode, which means that your Cortisol (stress hormone) levels are high. When cortisol levels are high, your body is on high alert, and your muscles are tense. You find it difficult to relax and unwind. You forget to breathe and find yourself taking a sizeable deep breath during the day. All of these symptoms of stress are screaming out protection. Our fight or flight system is our danger system which we can rely on to get us out of a dangerous situation 10,000 years ago if a tiger was chasing us. It would give us a short burst of adrenaline, increase our breathing rate and heart rate. It would also increase our reaction speed to get away from the said tiger. The system would turn on and turn off very quickly. Nowadays, our fight or flight system doesn’t give a large burst of adrenaline, and it trickle feeds small amounts so that when we have a lousy night sleep because our kids were sick during the night, and then you have to go to work for 9 hours, come home cook dinner, wash kids clean the house the fight or flight system helps you do this. But it also needs some downtime, time to relax and unwind. It is so important to look after yourself when you have a hectic lifestyle. You are going to crash at some point if you keep going at 60mile an hour every day.
What has this got to do with my low back pain? Adrenaline increases muscle tension, heightens senses, and increases pain sensitivity. An increase in pain sensitivity is not good when trying to recover from a bout of low back pain.
4. Reduced Sleep:
Having reduced sleep also links with fight or flight as you are tired and fatigued begin your day. When we sleep, it is our body’s time to repair itself. Getting into 60 to 120 mins of deep sleep every night allows our body to regenerate cells and damaged muscles. A lack of sleep causes our body to be catching up on recovery, replacing old damaged cells with new cells ready to take on the stress and strains of your day.
If you have a busy life and sleep well, feel refreshed, and you are doing great. If you are not getting enough sleep and feel wrecked in the morning, you need to look at your rest and how you can improve this.
If you have any questions on whether physio is the best option for you, or you have any questions about MVMNT in general, feel free to contact via email.
- Jay Towolawi, Specialist Sports Physiotherapist and MVMNT Founder.