Low back pain is a common cause of inactivity in adults, however staying active increases blood flow to the area and actually helps healing. Although you should never exercise through pain and avoid direct spine load compression, you can help reduce and even eliminate your low back pain due to postural, structural, and functional damage through exercise and weight training working with a highly experienced and knowledgeable personal trainer like Ray V.
Medications, epidural injections, stem cell therapy, and surgery can definitely help, but often don’t completely fix the underlying source of pain and therefore still require exercise therapy to achieve beneficial long term results.
Due to injuries which I incurred while serving in the military, I also suffered from extremely severe low back pain, and have literally had all of these treatments myself and therefore speak from personal first hand experience.
When suffering from any level of back pain, resting may seem wise but exercise is quite literally the best way to help reduce pain and increase blood flow. The blood circulation helps reduce back pain by delivering oxygen and nutrients that help reduce inflammation and promote healing.
Chronic back pain is often due to wear-and-tear changes, such as a degenerated disc and/or osteoarthritis. Spinal stenosis, disk herniation, and bulging disks can also cause debilitating back pain as well. The most ideal exercise regimen for each really depends on the exact medical diagnosis. This is why I highly encourage my clients to get an MRI so that I can review the radiologist report.
It’s also vital for people with back pain not to do exercise that exacerbates the pain, as exercises should be relieving the pain not increase pain or make it worse. For instance, someone with a diagnosis of spinal stenosis should avoid the cobra pose stretch, which can greatly exacerbate the pain.
After determining the exact types of movements such as flexing forward or extending backward worsens or improves pain, I can then determine which individualized training strategy is the most appropriate to help my clients mitigate back pain. The good news is that most of my clients’ back pain issues have vastly diminished or are completely gone after regularly implementing the various types of exercises I have them integrate into their lifestyle.
Generally speaking, various self-mobilization techniques, targeted stretches, decompression, proper postural alignment, and core strengthening exercises are useful when it comes to reducing and or eliminating back pain. However, activities that help one person don’t necessarily work for another and can possibly even make things worse. That’s why it’s important to have professional instruction from a trainer with substantial experience at successfully helping people to greatly diminish their low back pain.