3 Vital Tips For Low Back Pain || WBWL Ep 101

In this episode, I dive into the 3 vital tips that you should know to reduce chronic low back pain.

These are based on over 10 years of experience treating hundreds of clients with low back pain unresolved with manual therapy, medication, surgery, or injections.

Because it is a more holistic view, addressing exercise selection, mental tips and more, I hope this will be a valuable episode to empower you to fix your own pain completely by yourself.

Also, if you have a desk job, download my free Pain Free Blueprint Ebook here: https://flexwithdoctorjay.com/blueprint

Join our free Facebook group with a free course and live trainings: https://flexwithdoctorjay.online/group

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Transcript

0:01

Hey, welcome to the Won Body Won Life Podcast. Hi, I'm your host, Dr. Jason Won, Lifestyle Physical Therapist and Strength Coach. Today, I wanted to give you three solid tips that I think will help you to, not just improve your low back pain, but actually eliminate it. And so low back pain is one of the most common. symptoms and ailments that we see in the world. Over 90 percent of people in the world will have some form of low back pain at some point in their life. I myself have gone through a series of different low back episodes from either injuring myself or jumping from a fall and tweaking my back to lifting weights off the floor. And often times when we go through Huge episodes, or even more frequent episodes, it can cause a lot of fear, anxiety, it makes us second guess how our body is, it makes us feel that we're actually aging a lot faster than we actually are. And me as an athlete, as well as a busy parent, I know for first hand how it feels, so I can speak for a lot of the parents out there that maybe you were an athlete before, maybe you have young kids or maybe you have kids that are older and is oftentimes feeling harder to actually keep up with them. Maybe you feel like your body is fragile. Maybe you feel like you've had, so many low back episodes that you're second guessing what your body is actually capable of. So again, I wanted to share. Again, three solid tips that I know will help to change your life and also be able to eliminate that low back pain. So the very first thing I want to talk to you about is the role in strength training, and what I call training smarter, not harder. So if you think, for example, that it's simply just about training hard, that's not the most critical piece. We need to learn how to train smart, and this is what I mean. Training smart is not just lifting heavy weights, it's also challenging your body in multiple planes. So you have your low back. And the spinous processes and the many different vertebrae and the muscles that accompany that, you need to learn that you need to be able to strengthen areas above as well as strengthen areas below. And what that means that just because you have low back pain, you don't want to just load the muscles corresponding to the low back. You also want to strengthen muscles above, like in the mid back, and also muscles that pertain to your shoulder. And you also want to strengthen the muscles below, which are also accompanying your hip and your pelvis. So the muscles above, some of the more critical muscles that I often see overlooked, are the latissimus dorsi. The latissimus dorsi is a muscle that attaches to the inferior aspect of your shoulder blade, and attaches into the middle of your back, but also attaches into this weave of fascia, which we call the thoracolumbar fascia. And those that fascia is this huge mesh of fibers that attach directly to your lower back. So if you're just loading the muscles of your lower back, you're actually missing a lot of the muscles such as your latissimus dorsi that contributes to not just extension and inward rotation. of your shoulder, but actually when you do tense up those muscles in your shoulder blade, it actually stabilizes your lower back. So we actually use our lat muscles to keep either weighted objects or even babies or even groceries. We keep it close to the center of our body by actually engaging our latissimus dorsi. So when I see a lot of my clients that oftentimes are either doing barbell deadlifts, dumbbell deadlifts, you'll often see them that they start to round their back or that their shoulders flail away from their body. And so by way of not strengthening your lats or doing isolated latissimus dorsi exercises, you're actually not able to keep that bar or that dumbbell close to your body. And it often weighs significantly when it comes to functional demands. So if you engage your latissimus dorsi, you'll notice that you can keep your back a little bit straighter when you're doing heavy lifts or even just functional day to day lifting at home. And so I wouldn't stress, I would definitely stress the fact that Let's just miss or she's strengthening is a huge part of strengthening your lower back. You're also looking at the muscles below your lower back too, such as your groin muscles, namely your adductors and also your glutes, as well as your hamstrings. All of those muscles are contributors to hip extension. So when we are lifting something off the floor. It's not just about our lats, which is the muscles up above, but the muscles below also contribute greatly to hip extension. Our adductors, our groin muscles, the adductor magnus, is actually one of the more important muscles that when you are hinging from your hips, it actually is one of your more powerful hip extensors. So from a hip flex or a bent forward position, we actually need our adductor. To activate in order to get our body into a more straight position. So when we're talking about training smart and not just hard, we don't want to just do back extensor exercises, although those are really important. We also want to think about the muscles above and below. Another principle that I share with a lot of my clients is called multi plane stability or even tri planer stability. So we oftentimes will see a lot of exercise in the gym, such as leg press, hamstring curls, quad extensions. I love all these exercises. These are all exercises that I truly love. But if you want to essentially what I call quote unquote bulletproof or even prevent low back pain. You want to be able to strengthen outside of those planes so the plane that we all are accustomed to is called the sagittal plane These are when our knees go forward or if our butt goes backwards that's staying in that straight lane So if you think about a freeway a freeway, you're in the middle lane, so really you're only thinking about going forward and going backwards. But we're not thinking about the fast lane and the slow lane, which are like outside of that middle lane. If we're trying to venture outside of that plane, we want to be thinking about the coronal plane, which is basically side to side movements that is going side to side, looking at hip and toe. ADduction, hip ABduction. Those are muscles that we want to be strengthening as well. So namely our side glutes, like our gluteus medius, but we also want to be thinking about the rotary plane as well. So we Think about a car that's driving down the middle lane. We also want to think about how we can rotate that car side to side. And that's what's going to help us to strengthen our body and protect the ligaments and the disc within our lower back by also strengthening the rotary plane as well. A common myth that I often hear from a lot of doctors which should be really put to death is don't bend and twist, right? Don't bend and twist, don't bend forward and rotate at the same time. That will stress out our disc. But the thing is that we need to stress out. We do it and actually need to put good stress into our ligaments and into our disc in order to strengthen and prevent future. Recurrent low back pain and that is by strengthening again the side to side plane as well as the rotary plane Do not think that your body is fragile thinking that you cannot bend and rotate If you bend and rotate and if you are actually doing that in a calculated manner Meaning that objectively you're actually Progressing reps, progressing resistance, progressing weight, progressing speed in a predictable manner, actually logging those workouts and actually seeing growth, you will notice that you will become more accustomed to rotational as well as side to side patterns, and that's going to further strengthen your back. So that is the first critical step when it comes to the tips for low back pain is training smart and not hard. So we're thinking about areas above and below, strengthening those areas as well, but also strengthening any multi planar fashion. Okay. So number two is modifying stress factors and environmental factors in your life. We know that low back pain, and maybe you don't, but low back pain is not a manifestation of just physical symptoms, right? That's what we call the biomedical model. The biomedical model was something that was coined back in the day, meaning that all disease and all dysfunction is a product of just strictly anatomical disease. That means that if you have a disc issue, if you have some sort of ligamentous dysfunction, that is the true cause of your low back pain. So once you have disc degeneration, once you have muscles or let's say muscular sarcopenia or something that's being confirmed by x ray and MRI, that is the tell all. That means that because you have a disc issue, you forever will live with low back pain. And that can't be further from the truth. We know now that there are psychosocial factors, there are many environmental factors that contribute to the pain experience. That means that, research shows that, If you are of lower socioeconomic status, meaning that financially you are not making as much, that is a stress factor in itself, and that can be a cause of low back pain or any other pain in your body. We know that if you're going through an abusive relationship, if you're being in a fight with your kids, if you have project deadlines and they are coming up very soon, or if you have a boss that's always breathing down your neck, these are all contributing factors that contribute to the overall low back pain experience. When you're looking at the fact that if you're sleeping poorly, if you're malnourished, again, these the facts is that low back pain is not just strictly physical symptoms. We need to be thinking about our environment. We need to be thinking about how we mitigate stress. And this is something I, I did back in my physical therapy student days when I was doing my dissertation on positive versus negative coping mechanisms. So negative coping mechanisms are things like, if we are stressed, We'll tend to venture towards a sedentary behavior. We'll tend to watch a lot more TV. Maybe we'll smoke or we'll drink as a way in order to mitigate stress. But if we can choose more positive coping mechanisms, namely if we choose exercise or movement or running outside, Side as a way to combat stress that oftentimes we can relieve some of the mental stressors in our life, and that oftentimes can make our low back feel a lot better too. You'll be surprised that even just people that do what I call awareness, breathing, grounding something, I teach to a lot of my clients that if you become more aware of your stress, as in you're not just letting stress. Internalize and become physical symptoms such as low back pain, but if you become more aware of your stress, then therefore you can start to do things like just breathing and becoming more present and therefore grounding yourself in the present moment, not worrying about the future or dwelling in the past. That oftentimes that strategy of what I call awareness, breathing, grounding. It can really make a huge difference in terms of relieving and outletting that mental stress. And when you are relieving or even decreasing that amount of mental stress. Don't be surprised that your low back starts to feel a lot better as well. And don't forget that, again, sleep and nutrition, huge parts, and I would consider the two most important pillars of recovery from stress, physically or mentally, are critical pieces. Addressing your nutrition, eating more protein and fiber, eating less processed foods, eating foods that are not as pro inflammatory, those oftentimes contribute to the pain experience. And often when you're Lacking sleep such as quality or quantity of sleep. You want to be thinking about how much sleep you're getting in Research shows that seven to nine hours is often that critical Amount of sleep and that actually does decrease with age So as we get into our 40s and 60s, we oftentimes may need less Sleep in order to function but nonetheless seven nine hours is still a great point for the general population And also quality of sleep So what are you doing going into the last minutes of your sleep or even the last hour of your sleep? Are you looking at social media? Are you doing a lot of online shopping? Are you thinking about a lot of? Stressful things and a lot of to do's that you have to do the next day, because if you are, if you're feeling overwhelmed or anxious going into your sleep, that oftentimes will lower the quality of your sleep. So you may be getting a quantity of seven to nine hours sleep, but maybe you're getting just light sleep. Maybe you're not getting that deep restful sleep that oftentimes is critical for recovery for improving just many aspects of our life. Sleep and nutrition. Don't discount that and oftentimes look at your positive coping mechanisms Whether you are if you are somebody that oftentimes goes through a lot of stress Think about the ways in which you can replace some of the negative coping Mechanisms with more positive coping mechanisms namely again, whether it's meditation or exercise Okay, so the last thing about the last and final tip that I want to give about chronic low back pain and how to relieve that for good is learning how, learning how To basically take that low back pain and make it feel that much smaller, right? So when we talk about the psychosocial factors, we oftentimes feel that pain is this really large cloud That is always raining on our parade we fail to realize that pain is just a small entity when it comes to the grand scheme of what life actually is because Life is all about memories. Life is about our family. Life is about finances. Life is about finding other purposes in life. Yet, when we go through recurrent low back pain, we often feel that is something that consumes our every other aspect of our life. If we let pain consume our life. consume it, consume our finances, consume our personal life, consume our job, consume our ability to play with our kids. Then we're going to make pain feel that much larger. So we basically think about a word doc is that we're making pain, which is just a small thing and we're enlarging pain to like this hundred size font. Okay. We're letting pain become this larger cloud that is constantly raining no matter where we go. pain is always present. Now, I oftentimes say this and we can make pain feel smaller. We can make you feel larger from a mental standpoint. Okay. One of my favorite quotes is this, is that we want to make sure that when it comes to pain, that pain is not something that you live with. Pain lives with you. So if you say that pain lives with me, then we're basically saying that we're the larger entity and that pain is a smaller entity. Okay. So mentally think about how pain can be a smaller part of your life. And I'm not saying that don't discount your pain. Don't just distract yourself from pain. You want us to address your pain through sound exercise, sleep, again, nutrition and all those. But, look at pain as something much smaller. There is so much more to life. Okay, there is your purpose. Okay, there is your job. There's the people around you. There's your family and friends. Okay, there's a lot more things to worry about or to improve upon rather than just thinking that pain is the only thing that I'm trying to get rid of and once pain is completely eliminated, that's when I decide to live life. Okay, even for myself, somebody that is a pain relief expert, I know that Even for me, there's times where I'm working on a lot of stuff. I get stressed out myself about. I'm just one normal person as well. And I often times will start to feel discomfort in my lower back or my neck. I start to feel my shoulders get tight. And that's just a part of life. However, I can't let pain be this consuming factor that's going to prevent me from living my life, from living a fuller quality of life. Okay? So if you could think about how You know, instead of you are the house and pain lives in your house rather than like you are this one little, person, this one individual and you're living inside of pain's house, flip the script. Okay, try to think about pain being this small entity that you can truly control. From an objective standpoint and not letting ping consume you so hopefully that's helpful And that's it for this episode if you found this episode truly helpful. I appreciate if you give us a but also Let us know, by subscribing and also leaving a five star review that way if you leave a five star review This episode and my many other episodes will be able to inspire others. And I really hope that this can inspire you as well, especially if you're somebody that's been dealing with chronic low back pain. I really hope that these three tips really inspire you to make some changes. So that's it for what I got for what I got for you today. I'll leave you always with this one quote that I always leave all my episodes. We only have one body, one life. May every action you take be one that makes you a better version of you. Take care and have a beautiful rest of your day.