It doesn’t matter if you are an aging baby boomer with a belly, an office worker, a new mom, or an athlete who has pushed herself too far. You can make your back feel better.
Here is the scary thing. Low back pain is the primary cause of musculoskeletal degeneration, affecting nearly 80% of all adults. (NASM)
To a large extent it doesn’t really matter what is causing your back pain. It could be an arthritic sacrum, a bulging disk or lordosis. It could be sitting too long in the same position or it could be overweight/obesity issue. It could be lack of exercise. The treatment is pretty much the same. That treatment is simple. Simple doesn’t mean easy.
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The concept of running a four minute mile is easy. Train hard and run faster. Only about a thousand people have ever run a four minute mile. If you add in the couple thousand who have the equivalent sub 3:44 minute 1500 meters, ( a much more common race now ) and you still have maybe 4000 people. The world’s population is approximately 7 billion people. Do the math. One out of every 1.4 million people. Simply run faster. Simple doesn’t mean easy.
Making your back feel better won’t be nearly as hard as that four minute mile. It will take some discipline and some knowledge. What will you have to do, in broad brush strokes? Change some habits. Recreate the physical environment that humans were designed to thrive in, not all of the time, just some of the time. And, be mindful when you are in environments you can’t control. If you think you can do that, keep reading and I will help you make your back better. Are you willing to let me help?
Great! Let’s look at why we have some of the issues we have with backs. If you don’t believe in evolution, just fill in the word “magic” or “miracle” for the next paragraph or so. Humans evolved from life forms that walked on all fours and had tails. Then they moved upright. When they did this, to support their new gait, some of their lower vertebrae sort of fused into the sacrum. Ouch. And, our legs got real big so we could walk long distances and run down game.
You can come back now. Fast forward a million years or 7,000 depending on what you believe. Now we sit for long periods of time in chairs or on couches and in cars. We were not designed to sit. We were designed, either by a creator or evolution, to walk and bend and pick things up and run and climb and lay down. We were designed to be physically active.
We are all designed to be much lighter that we are now. Now 36% of Americans are overweight and an additional 27% are obese. This is by modern standards. If you look at the physically active environment of the hunter/gatherer, none of us can probably get this amount of exercise.
So, again in broad brush strokes, we make sure we are carrying nearer the weight we were designed to carry and we move. We can make up for much of the massive amounts of exercise we were designed to do by being scientific in our application of the exercise we can do. And we can protect ourselves in environments we can’t control by controlling our bodies while we are in those “unnatural”environments.
Action Items/Activity Triggers
1. Own the idea that you can, through gradual improvements in a few habits, improve your back health.
2. Own the knowledge that it won’t happen overnight.
3. Right now, if your back hurts, put yourself in a position where it hurts the least. This will probably be standing with good posture or lying on your side with a pillow in between your legs.
4. Now, imagine having your back feel as good as it does right now, most of the time.
5. Ask yourself if this pain-free feeling is a worth a half hour a day of your time.
6. If it is, read part two of this series coming next Tuesday
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