Back Pain.
You did one too many reps in the gym, or maybe you just bent over to lift your child up from the floor… and it happened.. again… that sharp “twinge” in your lower back. Now you’re struggling to bend or move at all.
Back pain can be both scary and frustrating. Scary because you’re concerned that you might have done something really serious. Frustrating because you can’t afford to just lie around and wait for it to get better - you have work and family commitments, and you want to get back to training at the gym as quickly as possible.
And this might not be the first time that back pain has stopped you in your tracks - you’re wondering if you’ll ever be able to do the things that you like to do without worrying that you might hurt your back again.
It's really important to know that your back is an incredibly robust structure - it is both strong AND mobile (even if it doesn’t feel like it right now).
Backs are built to move
There are 33 vertebrae in your spine. The lower 9 (between your sacrum and coccyx) are fused. The other 24 vertebrae (cervical, thoracic and lumbar) are joined together by a vertebral disc and two “facet” joints on either side which allows your spine to maximise its movement - That's a lot of joints! Movement is what your spine is designed for.
If you are currently unable to move freely through your spine - don’t worry. This doesn’t have to be the new you. Our goal is to return you safely to full, free movement. In fact, by avoiding movements out of fear of further injuring your spine, you may be doing yourself a disservice - disuse can lead to further weakness, and continuation of the injury cycle...
My scan says that I have a disc bulge/scoliosis/degeneration - what does this mean for me?
Imaging is really good at showing you your anatomy. However you are not your anatomy. Scans are really bad at showing you your function, and sometimes they can actually do more harm than good.
A detailed imaging report can have a lot of big confusing words on them which are scary because you don’t understand what they mean. And the fact is, a lot of the time scans can show up ‘red herrings’ - things that may not be ‘anatomically normal’ but are not actually contributing to your problem whatsoever.
Of course, if you’ve had a scan, we always want to take the findings into account, but they only make up a small part of the assessment and very rarely change the course of treatment.
There are times where imaging is necessary, for example if your doctor or healthcare provider believes that there may be a serious pathology that needs immediate attention - this is not the case in most instances.
VIDEO: Lower Back Strengthening Exercises To Relieve Pain
What can Lift Physio do to help?
When you first come and see us at Lift Physio, there’s a few things we’ll do.
We’ll ask you a few questions because we want to fully understand your problem and what your goals are - what would you like to get back to that you can't do right now because of your back problem, for example.
We also want to get you feeling and moving better as quickly as possible. Some of the tools that we use to do this include:
Manual therapy
Spinal mobilisations (for example, freeing up some of those stiff “Facet joints” we talked about)
Soft tissue massage
Dry needling
Gentle “therapeutic” exercises (maybe some gentle stretches, roller/massage ball exercises or core exercises depending on what is right for you)
And we’ll also develop a treatment plan with you so that you can know exactly what to expect from us, your expected recovery timeframes, and what we’ll need to do to help you get back to 110%
Then once you start feeling and moving better, we’ll have a chance to get to the bottom of your problem and really understand its main cause. Where appropriate, we like to do this through one of our “Super Assessments”.
Our Super Assessments are a one-hour dedicated assessment where we go deep to understand the true cause of your back problem - assessing everything from your muscle strength and power, mobility and flexibility, balance and motor control, as well as any other factors that may be relevant for you. (We use some pretty cool, high-tech equipment to help us do this, too).
Once we’ve looked through the data, we can then come up with a tailored exercise program just for you, to address the underlying problems that we have found - because we want this problem gone for good.