Back pain is all too common. And the cause can be physical/structural, biochemical/nutritional or mental/emotional. According to statistics up to 80% of working age people will at some time experience low back pain and up to 90% of those cases the pain cannot be attributed to a specific illness or injury.

Research shows that up to 75% of people with back pain still have the problem one year later or it has recurred in one year. So it really pays to know what you can do to correct this debilitating issue. Lets explore the physical aspects first.

PHYSICAL Cause
You may associate back pain with lifting or carrying heavy items, or sitting too long in front of computers or TVs, or too much gardening, or poor posture. That may well be the case, but there are other contributors as well.

Muscles help each other quite naturally. In any situation when one muscle is struggling its neighbours will pitch in and help out, even though the angle is not exactly right for the helper muscles to take the whole strain. Over time the helper muscle or muscles can be over strained and can in turn become painful.

Pain is mostly associated with a tight muscle that will not or cannot let go. It may protecting an area that has been strained or hurt, or is working too hard to help a muscle that can’t do its share because it has not yet healed enough to be working again. There are further reasons for back pain.

Poor Muscle Tone
Your body is designed to engage in lots of varying movements on a regular basis, and when this happens muscles maintain their tone and capacity for activity. It’s a feedback loop system – what you use is maintained and strengthened.

Back pain can involve poor muscle tone over all with very little spare capacity for any extra physical demand making you susceptible to overtaxing your back support muscles all too easily. Even standing for longer than you are used to can lead to back pain if your posture muscles are inadequate.

Back pain can also involve specific muscle weakness such as slack belly muscles creating strain on low back muscles, a common occurrence. General posture, the way you sit, stand and walk, will often clearly show that some muscles are working too much and others too little.

Belly Hanging Out
When your abdominal muscles in the front of the body do not do their share of supporting the body’s upright stance, then that requires all the work to be done by the back muscles alone, leading to overload, tension and finally pain.

You may not even notice how tight the muscles are till the tension hits your pain threshold. A muscle can be 75% contracted for days, weeks, months, even years. You may recognize subconsciously it is a bit tight and restrict your range of movement to avoid feeling the tension, but you won’t experience pain till the muscle tension increases to 80% contracted or whatever your pain threshold is. Now the situation is obvious and you finally have to attend to the problem.

Women often develop back pain in later stages of pregnancy when their expanding belly forces them to change their posture to accommodate the extra size and weight in the front of their body. Their hormones specifically allow muscle tone to soften so the belly can expand as the baby develops in their womb.

A common postural change pregnant women will make is to take the upper body further back as a counter weight to the heavy belly out front. This shift compresses the low back area. The upper body is now too far back taking the head back with it, so the head is brought forward, sticking out like a turtle, resulting in neck tension and eventually pain here too.

The problem compounds as the normal gentle “s” shape of the spine (side view) becomes very exaggerated, compressing more on the inner curves in low back and neck and losing support and rounding more on the outer curve, rib cage and shoulder blade area. The knees are forced to lock back as a further compensation with other consequences.

Overweight people with a large belly will also take on a similar problematic posture with no tone in belly muscles, poor tone in mid and upper back, and over-toned tight muscles in the low back, often with matching neck compression.

When this is the case, no amount of medication, or herbs or supplements will make the abdominal muscles do their share of the work. The abdominal muscles need to be activated and strengthened to take on their share of supporting the body so specific back muscles can do less, thereby reducing the tension and pain. (See how to do that in separate article.)

Feet Turned Out
Muscles deeper within the body can create problems too. One example is the low back muscle designed to rotate the leg out. When it is too tight your feet point away from the midline of the body. This muscle, the psoas, is situated behind the internal organs of your belly, attached from the front of the spine and to the inner upper leg. The angle of the feet is a give away of the tension in this low back area caused by an over tight psoas muscle.

When standing each leg is held in position by muscles that rotate the leg inwards (medial rotation) and other muscles that rotate the leg outwards (lateral rotation). When these muscles have equal tone the leg is in a balanced position with the feet pointing straight ahead.

When an outward rotating muscle, like the psoas, is working harder than inward rotation muscles there is likely to be tension and pain in the low back because this outwardly rotating muscle is attached to the low back vertebrae. The vertebrae are being compressed, putting pressure on the nerves between these spinal bones.

One Hip Higher
Another muscle often involved in back pain is working when you bend sideways. It contracts to bring your shoulder towards your hip when you lean over to the side to scratch our outer knee. When this muscle is tighter on one side of the body, you may have the hip on the tighter side pulled up higher, or the whole upper body may lean a little to the tight side so your shoulders are tipping or not centered over your hips. This can certainly be a source of pain.

One Hip To the Front and One To The Back
As you reach back for your seat belt to pull it forward and across your body to buckle up in the car a series of muscles down one side of your spine contracts to allow you to twist while reaching back. If you only ever twist one way these muscles can become tighter that the other side and as a result when you stand up one hip can be more forward than the other. This can contribute to back pain.

There are more possible physical causes of back pain that may have been set off by lifting or carrying something heavy in an awkward way. But whether the pain is from long standing tension and postural imbalances or from a one off over straining activity, or some accident, finding how to reduce and eliminate the back pain becomes critical as quality of life deteriorates rapidly with constant pain.

So what are your options for being pain free once more? Please see the article “Solutions for Physical Back Pain.” Other causes for back pain will be covered shortly.

Cheers
Anna McRobert