3 Common Back Problems

There is an alarming number of people that suffer from lower back pain. My guess? You’re one of them.
Let me show you the 3 most common reasons WHY people suffer lower back pain, show you the SOLUTIONS to these PROBLEMS and help you work towards becoming PAIN FREE…
Whilst also covering off on one thing you need to know about how your nutrition may be affecting your back pain.
There is an alarming number of people that suffer from back pain. In Australia, 1 in 6 people suffer from back pain each YEAR. That’s 3.7 million people in our country. The vast majority however do not develop their back pain due to an acute injury. If there has been an injury, quite often many people suffer from chronic back pain long after the initial injury has healed. Sometimes there was no injury at all.
With my experience I very commonly see back pain that did not originate from an injury.
The majority of chronic back pain I see in my clients was a result of poor movement and muscle recruitment patterns. Either these recruitment patterns caused bad movement which set them up for injury or these bad movements caused inflammation in the muscles, ligaments & tendons of the back, this inflammation causes terrible pain and sometimes the pain is daily.
The GOOD news is that pain due to poor movement patterns can typically be fixed in relatively short periods of time when the right types of treatment, stretches and exercise are introduced. I have recently found out even more ways that can help your chronic back pain is even through some dietary changes which we will go into further on later in this article. The even better news is that I have written down 3 common reasons people suffer from back pain and led with examples on ways you can possibly help yourself eliminate some of these causes to your pain to help you become PAIN FREE!
The most common pain complaint I get as a therapist and trainer is easily LOWER BACK PAIN. Some studies have estimated that as much as 80% of the population will suffer from lower back pain in their life, with that number only increasing due to today’s society trends and occupations. These include a lot of sitting in a vehicle during transit, sitting at the office, extremely common and simple mistakes people make during their workouts and even through today’s common dietary trends.
With back pain being one of the worst places to have sore on your body here are 3 of the most common reasons why people have lower back pain.
In today’s society its common to see people with tight hip flexors.
This is likely due to the fact that we sit for most of the day. When we are in a seated position our hip flexors are shortened, due to the length of time that we sit for in this shortened position, the hip flexors tend to get tight. If we combine this with a lack of overall abdominal, oblique and inner core muscle strength, we have a recipe for back pain.
If you think this may be you, the solution is to NOT go do a bunch of sit ups.
If you do that, all that will happen is you will most likely activate and use your hip flexors while your core muscles play ‘help’ in the background. This will only make your back pain worse which is why sit ups and crunches have a bad name for creating back pain.
Before working the core it is important to ‘disengage’ the hip flexors and activate the core muscles. We can do this through our general hip flexor stretch and then activate the core and glutes through warm-up techniques or we can teach the body to do all of that together through a very simple but effective warm-up exercise which I have demonstrated below.




