This education program is designed to help you understand and overcome the most common causes of lower back injury.
Covering how a back is sensitised to pain with aggravating postures and movements, how to avoid those aggravators and how an example exercise program would start and progress.
The Five Principles of Back Pain
The Most Important Principle…
Of the five principles, the most important is to understand is that there is no such thing as “Non-Specific Back Pain”, that is to say there is ALWAYS a cause/causes.
Those familiar with the work of Dr. Stuart McGill will be well aware of the importance of this statement.
Although back pain can seem mysterious, with its causes almost insidious in nature, there is always a cause for the pain or injury.
We must do away with the notion that back pain can seemingly appear for no reason, like some mysterious phantom that attacks at will.
Accepting this statement means that half of our battle lies in identifying and removing these causes, much like letting a cut or scar on your arm heal without picking at it every five minutes.
The causes are known as “aggravators”. They are postures and movement habits that aggravate and sensitise the lower back to pain.
If you have back pain, you have aggravating movements and postures creating that pain.
Although they may not be immediately obvious, they will be there. Understanding this concept gives us a way forward and realise that back pain does not need to be forever, however being smart with how we use and exercise our lower back is.
This flies in the face of those that claim back pain is just a mental issue, a perception of an injury that does not really exist.
When I hear someone make this claim I translate it as “ I don’t know what it causing the problem, nor do I care to find out.”
The simple truth is that if you have back pain, you have aggravating movements and postures causing that pain. Professor McGill refers to these as pain triggers, as without them, you would not have pain.
The Biggest Mistake…
Far and away, the biggest mistake I see my clients make is in not taking the identification and REMOVAL of pain aggravators/triggers seriously enough.
If you have back pain, you have aggravators causing that pain – whether you are just starting out or have been pain free for a while and are in the midst of a relapse.