What did you do to help it, what did your company do? Did anything help in the end?
If you're down to share, I'd love to chat: https://calendly.com/rohkoh/15min
:)
1. strengthening your abs / core muscles (planks, hollow holds, deadbugs, loaded carries, etc) 2. strengthening your glutes (air squats, lunges, glute bridges, etc) 3. stretching your hip flexors (kneeling hip flexor stretch, couch stretch, 90/90 stretch, etc)
The commonly-suggested treatment is to perform weight training- squats, deadlifts, lunges, rows, pull-ups, core stability exercises like planks and suitcase carries, anti-rotation core exercises like pallof presses. The idea is to strengthen weak muscles to improve muscle imbalances and stabilize your body when you move.
Exercise alone may or may not work. You need to screen for the root cause. This is a bit more involved, and the best advice I can give is to find a really good physical therapist and/or read "Rebuilding Milo". There's an entire chapter dedicated to back pain- anatomy, how to screen for back pain, classifying the back pain, and treatment. Other chapters are dedicated to hip and ankle. These joints can also be a cause too.
You can step away from your sitting position more often or buy a fancy chair but exercise is the ultimate solution here.
Deadlifts are great if you always do every rep perfectly. But it can be quite easy to let your guard down, or get distracted, or just not really realize your technique is a little off until you hit weights where irreversible damage happens. I think the game theory on deadlifts for the average joe is unequivocally “don’t do them”, especially because side there are so many other alternative and less risky exercises to build similar strength. You’re gonna be fine until the one time you’re not. The rest of those exercises are more than enough.
There are risks for injury throughout the entire fitness spectrum- from being sedentary to powerlifting. Not exercising has its own set of risks. On the other end, your risks increase when you lift too much weight, move too quickly, push through fatigue, or disregard technique. That goes for any exercise. You can reduce risks by learning from an experienced weightlifter and/or hiring a personal trainer.
I've never heard advice for the average person to avoid deadlifts. The therapy and fitness industry advises the opposite- they should learn how to perform hip hinges. The stimulus placed by deadlifts, RDLs, or any front-loaded hip hinge is unique. Weight distributed anteriorly to the body puts a load on the spine. This exposes weaknesses in spinal stability, but it's also a great solution to improve it. The challenge is figuring out the readiness of the person prior to and during a program. Do they have adequate hip and shoulder mobility to maintain a neutral spine throughout the hinge? Can they maintain this spinal stability when progressing to heavier loads or higher volumes?
I agree there are higher risks of injury for deadlifts compared to squats or lunges. However, I would not remove them entirely from a training program because of their unique stimuli.
For me again, it was just a very weak Core which I addressed with exercises such as squats. Even if you don't lift anything, just do squats at home for 10-15 mins and focus on Core exercises.
https://chat.openai.com/g/g-N4KUPUUox-back-pain-ai
Trained it on leading research papers and the suggested resources below.
What dyou think? I hope it helps someone!
It took many many years and several steps to address it.
1. My walking posture was bad with flat feet. So I addressed it with physiotherapy to change the way I walk. It was a success, my legs no longer pulled my hip incorrectly.
2. And then I need to change my home office to standing desk. It helped tremendously, no more pinched nerves.
3. And then my wrists, shoulders, and core are simply too weak. I started lifting weights and do core exercises. It helped tremendously as well. It makes me aware of my anterior pelvic tilt.
My company did nothing about it specifically, but no problems because they give me a really good health insurance plan, so I'm not paying anything to go really good doctors or taking exams.
Currently, I'm seeing 3 doctors to take care of it: endocrinologist, gastroenterologist and physiatrist. We're investigating it because it looks like the pain it's being caused an inflammation pinching a nerve.
Also: exercises, it helps a lot.
These chairs are over $1k new, but it seems you can find them used for around $400, maybe even less if you have a local used office furniture store. The downside is that you're giving up a good warranty by purchasing it used, so if this is a 10+ year purchase then it may actually worth be getting new.
This wasn’t easy at first because shortly in I’d have back pain just from walking, but over time this subsided and I was able to walk longer.
Now I go for a walk over lunch and use it to think about my work (which is great for brainstorming). Any time I stop my regular walking routine my back pain starts to creep back in so I know the walking has helped a lot.
Awesome to hear you've found that this works! How did you figure this out? What else did you try?
Look at how you're sitting, make sure your chair gives you good support for your back.
Look at how you're sleeping, a bad mattress can give you all sorts of problems including back pain.
If you are struggling to visualize how you're sitting then try recording yourself while working.
Some pushups/situps/barbells
Have done some yoga classes when things were really bad
Then realized also way out of shape
* Did some yoga to help with back pain
* Jogged to lose weight
* Added basic exercise program for overall strengtheningI think the best thing is keep it very simple and add one thing at a time and give your body some space to adjust
I mean I'm not an athlete by any means but just basic 30-45 min a day of simple exercise does wonders
Also I'll add that I noticed on my own that squats made my glutes very tight, inducing the back pain (I was doing heavier weights then, approaching 225lbs), so need to roll them after and not do too heavy weight these days.
It's kinda funny how they operated. This clinic made me watch a short video which praises chiropractics, they gave me an evaluation, then recommended a "treatment plan" over like 1-2 months, coming in 2-3 times a week. It's quite expensive at around a $30 copay.
Not sure you care about this info, but just me ranting a bit :)
I work on the sofa and my colleagues are urging me to get a proper office chair, but I don't really want to because my living space is tiny and I intend to move out soon (3-4 months ish).
the tl;dr of it is that a lot (probably even the majority of chronic pain) is psychological, not structural. This isn't obvious because the pain is in fact entirely real. What causes it though is that if you think there's something wrong/sense minor pain in your back, brain thinks 'oh no somethings wrong' and sends more pain - this reinforces your sense of something being wrong and makes the pain worse and stay.
This normally doesn't happen that often but if you're stressed, you're much more sensitive to pain making it much easier to trigger.
My story with chronic pain: I had bad RSI for 2-3 weeks. Went away over a weekend after I read a story [0] of how someone treated their RSI. Your thinking about pain influences you're brains perception of it - you can halt the brain pain amplification cognitively.
For more detail on the nitty gritty of how this works neurologically, I recommend Unlearn Your Pain by Dr. Schubiner: https://www.amazon.com/Unlearn-Your-fourth-Howard-Schubiner-...
The Way Out by Alan Gordon talks about this in more depth - one anecdote he mentions was a football player with REALLY bad back pain, who you'd expect to have all kinds of injuries, was pretty much completely fine after pain reprocessing therapy. This isn't an isolated case - I think the majority of people he tested PRT on in the Boulder Back Pain Study ended up getting significantly better via PRT implying most people didn't actually have structural issues
(note, exercise does still help because it's theorized that the way the body creates pain is by lowering blood flow/oxygen - exercise counters this. When my RSI was fairly bad, I remember that working out or sprinting and getting blood flowing would make me feel more or less ok)
And every 30 min I get up and look outside anyway to rest my eyes.
Just a little plank every so often offsets the back pain and posture issues.