Understanding Your Back Pain – Part 1

You don’t have to live with your back pain.

It helps to understand what can cause it and what to do about it.

Your back aches as you sit in your chair trying to hammer-out those last few tasks at the end of the afternoon.  You get up and stiffness seems to overtake your body as you slowly get yourself to a fully upright position and walk away from your desk.   Sound familiar?

You’re unfortunately in the company of millions of Americans who suffer from back pain on a daily basis and may have the occasional acute, debilitating episode.  Poor posture and biomechanics can lead to constant aching or allow a sudden, unguarded movement to cause severe back pain.

You may know the type I am referring to – the type where any movement at all has you doubled-over or even lying on the ground.  However, it is important to remember that improving the health of your back starts with you and the actions you take.

Back Pain and Sitting

Let’s start with a major culprit: sitting.  If you are in a chair right now, or on your couch, or in the car (you better not be driving), take note of the angle of your low back.  Have you formed to the seat, allowing your low back to take a convex shape (rounded, bulging outward) that you might describe as “slouching”.  Or if you are not slouching, do you have some minor version of back curvature that is something less than straight?

Either way, holding this position hour upon hour during the day puts your low back at incredible risk – making you susceptible to back pain!  Muscles that stabilize your spine, which your body most efficiently recruits at a specific length and tension, get stretched out so that your body cannot use them properly.

Ligaments that hold the bones and discs of your spine together gradually stretch out as well, increasing your vulnerability.  The individual vertebrae of your back begin to shift, or maybe your body has such a significant guarding response that the vertebrae begin to get locked-up and don’t move properly when you try to move your body. Over time this poor sitting posture can also allow your vertebral discs to slowly “creep” out from between your vertebrae, where they belong, and begin to “bulge” out close to nerves.

Some of these or all of these factors can have an accumulating effect that results in your back pain.

The stiffness you experience on a frequent basis is likely a combination of several of these and other factors.  You are susceptible to a vertebra shifting suddenly (the tiniest amount!), causing an acute episode that includes excessive inflammation and sensitization of an area in which your body literally brings in chemicals that increase your pain (maybe to alert you that something is wrong, as if you didn’t already know that with the pain you were experiencing). 

Back Pain and Standing

When you lean over to tie your shoes and then attempt to stand up normally, but you find yourself painfully stuck and unable to stand straight, you are once again not alone.  If you are at the gym and do a complex movement such as a deadlift, and your back suddenly hurts immensely, the cause is not necessarily that much different!   This type of severe back pain can happen with too much rounding of your low back, called “flexion”, or possibly even with too much arching of your back, or over-“extension”.

If you maintain less than optimal posture in your daily activities at work and at home, you actually make yourself more susceptible to these kinds of painful occurrences.  As discusses above, compromised soft tissue and vertebra shift in such a way that acute pain is the result.  In the case of standing, certain musculature such as the hip flexors can additionally refer pain throughout your back and midsection due to chronic shortening and tightness. 

Which factor is causing my back pain?

People want to know what simple, isolated factor is causing their pain.  While it can sometimes be that simple, if there is one thing to gather from this blog post it’s that there are multiple anatomical and physiological factors that work together to cause back pain.  For example, if you get back surgery to repair “that one structure” causing your back pain (which may be the case, occasionally), are you ready to go full speed the next day, or are you doing chiropractic or physical therapy for a while just to get you moving properly again?  Likely the latter.  Even so, back surgeries frequently do not relieve a patient’s pain, likely because their pain was not caused by one single factor found on an MRI but was due to a multitude of the factors I described above!

Whether you’ve “thrown your back out”, had an injury at the gym, or simply had a gradual development of back pain from your regular activities at home or at work, I am committed to relieving your pain and helping you prevent it from returning.  I will likely use multiple modalities, including chiropractic adjusting, Active Release Technique® soft tissue therapy, and therapeutic exercise.  Find out more details about treatment on the Back Pain page of my website.

To schedule or to find out more, call Barlas Chiropractic at 206-954-7479 or message us through our website contact page.

I look forward to helping you be pain free!

Yours in health,
Jaffer Barlas, DC

Barlas Chiropractic
Seattle Chiropractic