Low Back Pain Explained! If you are Suffering this is for You!

It is estimated that 80% of the population at one point in time, will sustain or suffer some form of lower back pain. 

Understanding how the back pain was generated is the MOST critical component of understanding the solution to your lower back pain. 

This blog post is for you if:

1. You have dealt with lower back pain in the past
2. You are worried, apprehensive, or not confident about your back
3. You are refraining from doing certain activities that you want to do because of your back
4. You just sustained an injury

After having low back pain explained from this post you will know how lower back pain occurs, the proper way to go through a cause of pain evaluation, as well as going through movement assessments and orthopedic assessments to determine if there’s actually structural damage.

Simply looking at Xrays and MRIs to determine what’s causing pain from a structural approach is not enough!

If you want to deal with your back pain once and for all, if you need a solution, if you want a plan, Live Loud Chiropractic in Lafayette, CO has your back! Dr. Antonio’s specialty is lower back pain. He loves explaining lower back pain and helping individuals who are feeling defeated by lower back pain gain more confidence, strength, mobility, and ultimately gain more life! 

If this isn’t for you, but you are researching for a family member or a friend, we appreciate you putting in the time and effort to share this with them. This is such a prevalent topic and again unfortunately it is being mismanaged across the board. 

We at Live Loud Chiropractic want to be able to help you out by having low back pain explained to you!

Back pain is one of the most prevalent musculoskeletal conditions across the world. It’s estimated that roughly ⅓ of individuals are dealing with some sort of lower back pain. The majority of lower back pain is almost always some sort of flexion intolerance. 

Flexion Intolerance is when your body doesn’t tolerate bending forward well. Now, knowing this really helps us determine the best course of action for you. Flexing forward is normal, and you should be able to do that pain free and with enough stability that you’re in control. Often there are times where we have to manage that. So a lot of our conversation, depending on how acute the individual is, will determine what the immediate course of action is! 

First and foremost, our goal is to just help you get your pain down. Because if you’re in pain, you’re not able to do a lot of stuff as it is. We need to break that cycle and understand what your lower back pain triggers are! We want to understand what keeps causing you pain and then we can figure out where to go from there.

Now, more times than not if you have a good clinician and they’re asking the right questions, we’re going to know right off the bat, right? A good clinician can see it in how you move and see it in the description of what your symptoms are. When things are being mismanaged people are looking at a stagnant perspective of your pain. This means they’re taking an X-ray or an MRI to determine what the cause of pain is. 

What we need to do is look first and foremost functionally at what’s causing the triggers of your lower back pain. This will tell us the issues or the site of pain that we need to be more cautious of, but then also the area we need to focus on and strengthen afterwards!

We’ve got the solution about how to deal with your lower back pain.

Touch Your Toes

We are going to want to start off with a basic toe touch, this will help us determine if you are flexion intolerant.

1. Bend down and attempt to touch your toes. Does this create any symptoms? Does it cause any pain? 
2. Now take your arms overhead, come back up, and extend back.

Something to note here is, oftentimes when someone is flexion intolerant they actually become extension intolerant for a while too. This is a possible cause if when you are coming back from the toe touch position you feel pain as well. The exercises Dr. Antonio is going to give you today help soften a lot of your lower back tension. These exercises give you your mobility back in a subtle way that won’t trigger your pain. 

Again, understanding the triggers of your pain will help you get out of pain sooner than just putting some proactive exercises toward it. 

Compression Test 

The next thing to determine the extent of flexion is a compression test.

1. Find a chair or stool to sit in
2. Sit up nice and tall and grab the bottom of the chair or stool
3. Then with your hands grabbing the chair or stool, you will pull yourself into the chair

What this does is create compression in the spine. Does this create any issues for you? When we are in a neutral stacked spine, more times than not, this does not create the issue. If you had a plate injury, meaning you fell some sort of distance or took a hard landing, this might aggravate you. 

Next we’re going to repeat the test but this time instead of sitting up nice and tall we are going to tuck the lower back. This causes us to slump in flexion, meaning we are creating compression under flexion. 

Does this create any issues for you?

For those of you who might be having acute pain at the middle of the back, that tells us one thing. However, if you get some sort of shooting pain down your legs, that tells us something else. 

We’ll have a separate condition video tailored towards disc injuries and sciatic injuries. Where we will further explain your low back pain.

This compression test for your lower back pain allows us to determine the extent of how flexion intolerant you are. 

How Live Loud can help your Low Back Pain

Dr. Antonio specializes in low back pain here at Live Loud Chiropractic and Coaching in Lafayette, CO. He knows exactly what patterns to look for that are associated with flexion intolerance. What Dr. Antonio does is secondary to what we’re about to give you today. He tells every single one of his low back patients:

“If I can help reduce your pain without me touching you, that creates autonomy in your lower back pain. Then all you have to do is rinse and repeat when you get at home to help decrease your pain. Like compounding interest, the more you do it, the better it gets.”

Now we are going to give you the exercises we give to help you decrease your lower back pain once and for all. We want to not only have low back pain explained for you, but also give you the tools to do something about it too.

Hip hinges

The first one is understanding how to hip hinge. 

1. With soft knees, hinge your butt straight back
2. Notice we’re getting the torso down towards the ground, but all the load is going into the hips and the hamstrings
3. If you need to get lower, all you do is simply bend the knees a little bit

Supported squats

The next exercise is supported squats. If you have a TRX or suspension trainer you’re going to do this. 

1. Depth does not matter here, you’re just going to squat up and down
2. The goal here is to give the hands the majority of the weight

What this exercise does is loosen up the hips that are oftentimes very tight from holding down and guarding. This also helps stretch the lower back a bit. Most importantly, what we have found is it provides mild pumping decompression in the lower back. This really helps decrease a lot of the pain that you are having in your low back.

Hip Drops

Exercise number three is hip drops.

1. Start on your hands and knees (This is going to be like an upward facing dog but instead of being super active and prying up all we’re going to do is shift forward and let our hips sink down.)
2. Shift forward letting your hips sink down
3. It’s okay if you don’t get very far. Each time you want to focus on going a degree further
4. If it hurts going forward, we’re going to go backwards to soften and work on our mobility

Now outside of that, there’s obviously many more stages into getting you back to all the activities that you want to be able to do. Seeing a low back specialist such as Dr. Antonio at Live Loud Chiropractic in Lafayette, CO. He’ll take you through the appropriate progressions from day one!

If you can do hard things or lift heavy things, you’re gonna have a lot more confidence in your back and not only from your acute injury you might have now, this is especially important for all having chronic lower back pain. If you’re afraid of picking up your children or even a bag of dog food let’s get you confident in your back!

So if you’re tired of dealing with low back pain, stop waiting, come in and see us and I guarantee we’ll be able to help you deal with this either chronic or acute injury to get back to all the activities that you love to do!

Thanks for following along with us as we get your low back pain explained!