Break Free From Back Pain

Here Is A Daily Stretch That Will Help You Stay Free Of Upper Back Pain And Neck Pain.

This exercise is called the Wall Angel, you start by standing about 6 inches from a clear wall, sit onto the wall so your lower back is comfortable. Then tense the deep neck flexors as you did with the Bruger’s postural relief. Now raise your arms up with the elbows at shoulder height and bent at 90 degrees.

Start position for Wall Angel Exercise

Here’s the side view:

Note the chin is tucked in

You should aim to get the elbows back to the wall and the hands flat to the wall WITHOUT letting your body arch like this:

This is wrong, back is arched too much

Now if you have a tight upper back and shoulders you won’t be able to get flat without the back arching. So you need to gently tense the stomach muscles to make your spine rigid, then just take the elbows back until you feel a stretch. Refer to do’s and don’ts of stretching for more tips before doing this. Remember this should not cause pain. If it does, go back to the previous exercise Bruger’s Relief Position.

Now you should be comfortable, back stiff and relatively flat to the wall, your arms will be somewhere between being on the wall or a long way forward. Now you need to lower the arms to your sides keeping the elbows bent at 90 degrees. As you do so you will feel a stretch on the front of the chest and tension between the shoulder blades on the Rhomboid muscles.

Note the elbows stay bent at right angles

If you have tight shoulders you will feel the hands lift away from the wall. This is fine, the trick now is to keep the spine still, so make sure you maintain tension in the abdominal muscles. As long as you feel some stretch on the front of the chest that is fine.

Note back is still flat against the wall

This shows the wrong way to do it:

Back over-extended, less specific for shoulder

OK, now you should be getting an idea that this is all about control, you really need to focus on the only movement occuring at the shoulder. Got that? Good.

Now you simply bring the elbows back up level with the shoulders, pause for a second or two and repeat about 15-20 times. Always remember quality is more important than quantity and if it hurts you stop straight away.

Within a few weeks you’ll feel alot more freedom in the shoulders.

All the best for now

Steve Oldale BSc, DC                        Chiropractor                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Back In Form Chiropractic Clinic                                                                                                                                                                                                         65-67 Commercial Rd                                                                                              Poole                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   BH14 0JB

Upper Back And Neck Postural Relief Exercise

This simple yet powerful exercise will help reduce the tension that commonly builds up in the shoulders and upper back when sat at a desk, or driving.

When we sit at a desk for prolonged periods we tend to let our heads move forwards, our upper back becomes rounded, the chin pokes out and our lower backs slump. This causes stress and deformation of the ligaments and joints and leads to pain. If it goes on for 30 years there could be obvious postural changes.

Here’s a simple exercise to help:

This exercise is called the Bruger’s postural relief, after Mr Bruger who first developed and recorded it.

First stand up tall, look straight ahead, and then retract your head so that it stays level. Try doing this in a mirror as you should still be looking straight at yourself. If you are doing this correctly you’ll feel tension under the jaw, you’ll have a double chin and if you talk you’ll sound a bit nerdy. See photo for poor posture and correct posture.

Typical slumped Upper Back Posture

Backing away from your hand can help achieve correct posture

It’s Time To Stretch

Now reach up with your arms going in front of you, not to the side. Reach as high as you can with one arm and hold it there, then do the same with the other and alternate until they won’t go any further. This releases tension in the upper back and mobilises the upper thoracic spine.

Reaching Up And Mobilising The Upper Back

Now lower the arms in front of you and rotate the shoulders outwards, then extend the wrists. This stretches the chest muscles, strengthens the upper back muscles and mobilises the nerves into the hand.

Arms are rotated back and hands extended

Note the shoulders are not pulled back, but only rotated

This will help to reduce the effects of creep on the spine, for a full guide on causes of back pain look at our website www.backinform.co.uk 

The most fundamental mistake most people make when they have back pain is to put heat on the painful joint. If you have pain you will have a combination of torn ligament, joint capsule or muscle fibres, this causes inflammation and local swelling. The secondary swelling causes further damage.

What Happens When You Heat It?

Putting heat on an injured joint makes it feel better….for a while, but did you know that you could actually be prolonging or even increasing your pain. How come?

Heat increases blood flow, this makes the muscles less achey but if you have inflammation you’ll make it worse as the blood vessels will become more permeable allowing more swelling and more inflammatory chemicals to be produced. The result a short while after you remove the heat your muscles will tighten up again, as they try to protect the damaged joint. So you feel stiff again and put more heat on. The result a vicious cycle of inflammation.

How Does Ice Help?

If you put an ice pack wrapped in a thin cloth over the joint you’ll reduce the blood flow and the permeability of the blood vessels, you’ll also reduce the production of inflammatory chemicals. This reduces inflammation and also the nerves become less active helping to numb the pain, speeding up the healing process as well.

Why Do We Have Pain?

Pain is an important message, it tells you something is wrong, it also changes the way you move so that you don’t hurt the injured area more. This can be a good thing initially, but unfortunately sometimes the pain can persist or can actually be far in excess of the actual injury.

In other words you can over-react to your back injury or joint sprain. If you move awkwardly for a long period you’ll develop other problems. Have you ever sprained an ankle? Probably, did you limp? Almost certainly, what did that do for your back, make it ache? Now imagine that the pain has gone, but your back muscles stay tight on one side, you now have the beginnings of a back problem.

SO..if you ice the injured joint as soon as possible, you’ll reduce the damage and the pain, you won’t compensate for the injury and you’ll be less likely to affect other joints.

Think of it as fighting a house fire. You get the flames under control with the first ice packs done very regularly, then you continue to pour on water to get the flames out, but the embers are still very hot so you must continue to pour on water for a good while after to ensure the flames don’t take hold again. This is what you do with ice packs.

Now imagine if you came to the injured ankle joint and got it hotter, it would swell more, become more painful, and yet so many people do this to their injured back joints. Imagine putting petrol on that house fire or getting in a big fan, you’d soon have more than your house on fire. The fire would keep burning until you stopped.

So Here Is A Guide To Pain Relief For Back Pain Or Sprained Joints.

If you have any pain, you will have a degree of inflammation. Ice will reduce the inflammation, it is specific and there are no side-effects unless you forget the cloth, then you’ll end up with frost bite and skin soreness.

So wrap the pack up, try to use a flexible pack, if you haven’t got one try peas, just don’t eat them afterwards!!

Place the pack over the joint, do 10 mins for neck pain treatment, elbow pain treatment, wrist pain treatment, ankle sprains or foot injuries, 15 mins for mid back pain (thoracic pain), shoulder pains, knee injuries and 20 minutes for low back pains.

It needs to be repeated after two hours until the pain has gone, then keep going a couple of times a day for another 3 days (put out those embers!!!).

BIG TIP: just because the pain has gone doesn’t mean everything is OK. It takes up to three months on average for a ligament or joint to recover fully, so it won’t be as strong as it was before.

In fact some studies have shown disturbed movements of the lower back even years after an injury. So It’s very important to correct abnormal function and muscle imbalances. More on that later…

Welcome to this blog and thanks for having a look. I have made this to help you understand why you get back pain, how to treat your back pain, what to do to reduce your back pain and back pain treatments that are available. It will also build into a volume that if you follow it will help you to understand and treat your own back pain and your sports injuries or other joint pain too.

Trying to learn about back pain and how to treat it can be very confusing, you have probably come across lots of sites that will claim to give you the answers, some may be spot on, others may actually mean you could be more likely to get trouble. So how do you know who to trust?

Well, I have always aimed to give my patients the very best back pain treatment that can be given, after all if you aren’t doing things to the best of your ability you really shouldn’t bother to do them at all. I am passionate about helping my patients get the best tools to be able to help themselves.

Why have all the knowledge to help people if you keep it a secret that can only be accessed if you pay. If a friend was in trouble I would tell them how to deal with it themselves, if they needed hands on help I would help them reach the longest lasting result, in the quickest most cost-effective way possible, and that is what I am going to give to you.

So in a world of many experts how do you know you can trust me, well you don’t yet, but if you read on you’ll learn so much useful information about back pain treatment that you will end up being your own specialist.

Fundamentally all our spines are similair, we all bend in similair ways as we go about our routine tasks, however the way our bodies react to those tasks is different and dependant on our previous history, how we are made structurally and how we relate to different events. We therefore develop different back pains, these back pains need to be treated differently. So how can following a generic one size fits all exercise program ever be successful for everyone?

In fact did you know 70% of back pain patients will be helped, 10% are likely to get worse and 20% will be patients for ever if you followed a generalised back pain treatment plan. So surely you need someone to diagnose the problem and treat accordingly.

In an ideal world that would be the best plan of action, however if you are trained to learn and recognise the imbalances that lead to the stress on your joints, you could treat your own back pain.

Imagine how good that could be, how much money you’d save,

how much more confidence you’d have.

To take control of your own back pain treatment, no more confusion. Do you know what’s even better, you could get rid of your back pain but also end up with a back that was stronger, more efficient, better stamina, more accurate control. How would that help your golf, running, swimming, tennis?

If you don’t play sports, can you imagine how it would be to feel freer, have more bounce, you might start to feel so good you’d even end up taking up a sport. There’s no better feeling than being able to perform to the best of your ability and get that lift that comes with exercise and good healthy muscles, ligaments and joints.

If you’d like to find out how to help yourself click the RSS feed button at the top and you’ll get updates as they arrive.