Nothing ruins your quality of life faster than back pain.
It saps your energy, consumes your thinking, and negatively affects your mood.
And the worst part…very few people understand what’s causing their back pain.
Research tells us that only 1 in 10 people ever find out the cause of their back pain!
Pain in the back is the second most common reason people visit their primary doctor.
In fact, 60-80% of low-back pain cases will go away and then come back within 2-years.
So, what’s the real reason for your back pain?
At PRIME, we see 2 major factors, that when addressed can help relieve the symptoms of back pain.
- Anterior Shifting of the Cervical Spine
- Weakened Glute Muscles
Everything in the body connects to everything else in some way. Therefore, if there’s shifting at any level, it has the capacity to affect an area that seems completely unrelated in the body.
The most common initial shift in someone’s spine occurs at the top of the neck. This core problem causes the head to protrude out in front of the body.
When the head is out in front of the shoulders, it causes the neck and low-back muscles to tighten and engage, in order to hold the person upright.
Over time, this leads to wear, tear, and fatigue in the muscles. Leading to pain and discomfort for the person with the anterior shift in the neck.
If the shift is corrected and the head comes back to neutral, then the stress will be significantly reduced on the muscles, making it less likely for the person to experience back pain or any other related symptoms.
To determine if you have any shifting in your neck, get your free copy of the
Postural Assessment Tool.
If it’s found that you have shifting, we recommend seeing a healthcare professional who has experience in this core problem.
The other common reason for back pain is weak gluteus muscles from sitting. The majority of people sit at a desk for far too long everyday.
Sitting damages the spine and soft tissue surrounding it. When you’re sitting at a desk, in a car, etc. your hip flexors engage, in order to pull your legs up into the sitting position.
This turns off the glute muscles, because their role is to extend the leg (the opposite movement). When we’re in this position constantly, the glute muscles fire less and less, which ultimately leads to weakness.
The gluteus muscles are some of the strongest muscles in our body and are largely important for helping to shoulder the load of our body and stabilize. However, when they don’t work at one hundred percent, the job then gets passed on to the muscles in the low-back.
Unfortunately, the low-back muscles aren’t designed to carry this kind of weight. So, ultimately it leads to fatigue and pain when the low-back muscles begin to fail under the huge stress load.
This is in no way a complete list. There’s many other possible contributing factors to back pain, such as excess weight and bad diet. However, the majority of people we see in our office who suffer from back pain are dealing with one or both of these core problems.
