Reduce Your Risk of FUTURE Back Pain by 25 to 40% -- It's Simple

Eighty percent of people will experience back pain at some point during their lives. It’s one of the most common health challenges, yet many people fail to find lasting relief, even after seeking medical help.

If you visit a doctor for back pain, you’re likely to receive a prescription as a solution. Acetaminophen (Tylenol) is the recommended first-line drug treatment for back pain, despite the fact that a recent systematic review and meta-analysis found it to be ineffective for this purpose.1

Chris Maher, a physical therapist and researcher at the University of Sydney in Australia told NPR:2

"We've got this perverse incentive in our health care system where we encourage people to innovate in terms of drugs, but we don't have the same system to get people to innovate in terms of physical activity."

Perhaps if we did, there would be a lot fewer people struggling with chronic back pain.

Exercise Works for Reducing Your Risk of Back Pain

Maher and colleagues reviewed 21 studies, which included more than 30,000 people, to determine what really works for preventing low back pain. Commonly recommended back belts and shoe insoles didn’t help but exercise did.3

Among people who had experienced back pain, those who exercised had a 25 percent to 40 percent lower risk of having another episode within a year than those who did no exercise.

Further, the type of exercise didn’t seem to matter. Strength exercises, aerobics, flexibility training and stretching were all beneficial in lowering the risk of back pain. This makes sense since your body needs regular activity to remain pain-free.

For example, when you sit for long periods of time, you typically end up shortening your iliacus, psoas, and quadratus lumborum muscles that connect from your lumbar region to the top of your femur and pelvis.

When these muscles are chronically short, it can cause severe pain when you stand up as they will effectively pull your lower back (lumbar) forward.

Imbalance among the anterior and posterior chains of muscles leads to many of the physical pains you experience. By rebalancing and strengthening these muscles, you can remedy many pains and discomforts, including low back pain and similar pains, like neck pain.

In one study of neck-pain patients, for instance, 30 percent of those who exercised became pain-free compared to just 13 percent of those treated with medication.4

Staying Active Is the Opposite of Sitting

It’s not surprising that exercise may help rid you of back pain, or that the type of exercise seems to be less important than the mere act of staying active. Pilates is another example.  

A Cochrane systematic review found that Pilates was more effective in relieving back pain and disability than minimal intervention, although it’s not necessarily superior to other exercises.11 What most types of exercise have in common is that they keep you up and active instead of sitting and sedentary.

Sitting puts more pressure on your spine than standing, and the toll on your back health is even worse if you're sitting hunched in front of a computer. It's estimated that 40 percent of people with back pain have spent long hours at their computer each day.

The disks in your back are meant to expand and contract as you move, which allows them to absorb blood and nutrients. When you sit, the disks are compressed and can lose flexibility over time. Sitting excessively can also increase your risk of herniated disks. Also it is important to recognize that continuous standing can also be problematic. The key is movement. 

In Health, 

Dr. Brad Niewierowski 

Exercise Works Best for Lower Back Pain

January 20, 2016  Mercola.com