5 Top Physio Tips for Low Back Pain

Taking Back Control

Helping you feel more confident with your low back pain

Let’s face it, back pain is rubbish. We are all pretty much guaranteed to get it some time in our lives & the experience can differ widely between each of us. Managing back pain is a multi-million pound industry, with various degrees of evidence & myth vs. truth. Today I wanted to share 5 tips for managing back pain & feeling more confident with what to do if you experience an episode

Firstly, back pain can feel really scary. Our backs are a large area of the body & we can’t really see our back. In order to move our legs, our torso, even our arms, our back muscles, joints & other tissues are required to move/stabilise so its really hard to not be affected by it in day to day life.

Not that it makes it any more pleasant, but back pain is a very common complaint. Backs are strong, but they do still hurt & sometimes that pain might go down our leg, cause numbness/pins & needles or make us feel like our back has frozen up. Often when it hurts we go to move & it hurts more, causing us to hold our breath, avoid movement or adapt how we move & I want to give you some advice on how to change that

Symptoms we need to be concerned about & seek urgent medical assessment would be numbness down both legs, a numb saddle area (e.g. if you wipe after going to the toilet & can’t feel it) or loss of bladder/bowel control. For this blog I am going to assume you have ‘back pain’ in terms of pain in the back & not these symptoms

Managing low back pain effectively involves building confidence in your movement, creating a wellbeing framework to support it & making lifestyle adaptations to enable it to be nourished

Here are 5 tips to help you manage your back pain:

1. Exercise

   • Exercise and mobility work/stretching are vital to support a healthy back. Sometimes we feel like we want to move like a stick & hold ourselves tense. This is both exhausting & doesn’t help the muscles/nerves & other tissues that might be sore from loosening off & reducing the discomfort

   • Walking can be a great way to get the heart rate up, but it does keep us in an upright position, so the back may feel stiff afterwards, meaning we also need to invite other movements into our routine

   • Pilates is brilliant for exploring strength, awareness & flexibility & moving the body with consciousnesss

   • Yoga is great for exploring moving the body as a whole, mobility & strength

   • If there has been no specific injury & you don’t have any symptoms that we would class as ‘red flags’, then sometimes challenging the back can be a really healthy way of improving symptoms, such as more dynamic movement. Of course, this has to be done with considerations, so may be beneficial to consult a physio first, but it offers reassurance that pain doesn’t necessarily dictate capability & the rehab isn’t always linear, in that you may find movements in yoga painful, but you might be fine running or doing a cardio work-out

2. Breathing

   • There are several of ways in which breathing can impact our pain experience, from tension because of pain holding our breath, to using our breath to ease the pain

   • A lot happens within our body in response to our breathing, so by focussing on conscious breathing, we can take some control with our experience & use our breath to support movement & reduce pain

   • Stress can exacerbate back pain. Practice relaxation techniques like deep breathing, meditation, and progressive muscle relaxation to reduce stress and muscle tension

   • Even a simple technique like box breathing (inhale for 4, hold for 4, exhale for 4, hold for 4 visualising breathing round a square) can really help settle our nervous system, reduce our pain experience & enable us to work towards nourishing movement

3. Empowerment

   • Arm yourself with the facts. If we feel like our back is going to snap, and when we move we believe that might be the case, nobody would move. But by starting to understand why it might be hurting, or what it isn’t, can really empower us to work alongside that pain & start to understand how it can impact movement, but how we can still work towards improved mobility & a reduced pain experience

4. Movement is Medicine

   • I mentioned exercise above, but really, inviting mindful, conscious movement into your day is key to managing back pain. When it hurts, the tendency to grip our muscles, hold our breath & create tension to mask the pain may help you feel like it doesn’t hurt so much in that moment, but it wont change the pain experience & doesn’t send very reassuring messages to the brain about what is going on

   • Exploring movements slowly & gently, whether cat/cow (on all fours movement), roll downs, gentle pelvic tilts… whatever it is, finding ways to move into your discomfort & breathe with that movement can build a positive response over time. Practicing this when you go to move from being in one position, e.g. from sitting, from walking or lying

5. Mental Wellbeing

   • Our pain experience is hugely impacted by our mental wellbeing, and vice versa. Noticing how we feel & looking for ways to support our mental health can have a huge impact on our pain experience. It might be as simple as choosing to connect with a friend or watching a comedy, those endorphins & feel good hormones can really help the body which might be flooded with stress hormones from the pain.

   • Taking time to notice how much the pain is impacting your mindset & if possible, taking steps to adjust where you can. That might be feeling like you can’t do anything & the sadness, frustration that goes with it, to instead focussing on something you can do, or exploring ways to do things with some of the new tools mentioned above

I hope this helps you with some ideas to take back a sense of self when experiencing back pain. Finding the balance between offering support for longer-lasting pain & more acute episodes is difficult, but there are more tips available with our online studio, Flow Connected where you can find a whole video library of physio support, plus yoga & Pilates classes designed for back pain

Thank you for reading

Love Katie xx