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back and neck pain

Pain Relief

Why Back Massages Will Never Eliminate Mid Back Pain

Back pain – whether it be mid back pain, lower back pain or shoulder and neck pain – makes life miserable. Even simple activities like sitting at a computer, watching a movie or just hanging out with friends lose their allure when you’re nursing sore, aching muscles. Middle back pain is quickly becoming a common complaint, almost as common as lower back pain.

Unfortunately, as many tension-relieving massages as you get on your mid back and shoulders, they won’t give you lasting relief, and I’ll tell you why. But first, let’s look at some of the causes of mid back pain.

What Causes Mid Back Pain?

Of course, there are several potential causes of mid back pain. Those who have been in any sort of major accident, such as a car accident or skiing incident (think tree meets human, up close and personal), are likely to have structural imbalances that result in mid back pain. But, those aren’t the only potential instigators.

Computers are a prime culprit in causing mid back pain because of the slouched, head-forward posture that most computer users adopt. Your head weighs around 8 pounds. When you shift it forward of the center line, all of the muscles along your upper and mid back contract to support the weight of your head. Try it now…look down at your knees and feet. Feel the strain in your back increase? That’s what happens eight (or ten, or twelve) hours a day when you sit in front of a computer.

Another surprising instigator of mid back pain is the ubiquitous smart phone. Now days, not only are we bent fervently over our computers, we’re also staring down at our iPhones, iPads, Blackberries and who knows what other life-controlling devices. Again, this shifts the head forward of the mid-line of your body, causing mid back tension and pain.

Some sports can also create additional tension and pain in the mid back, such as rowing, which requires heavy use of the large muscles of the upper back and shoulders. Also, those who have limited spinal mobility (i.e. the joints in between their vertebra don’t move very well) in their mid back will often experience mid back stiffness and pain, especially later in life as tissue loses its youthful elasticity. This kind of stiffness can be due to mild scoliosis or simply because you haven’t ever spent time working on mid back mobility.

Middle Back Pain Solutions

As good as they feel, massages on the mid back, shoulders and neck will never completely cure mid back pain. They may temporarily alleviate the discomfort, but as soon as you sit down in front of that computer or earnestly engage with your juicy text message conversation, your head moves forward and the strain comes back.

To understand the root cause of mid back pain, it’s important to know that there are two kinds of muscle tension: those muscles that are locked long and those muscles that are locked short. When it comes to mid back pain, the muscles that are locked long are the ones on the back of your body, where you feel the pain. Stretching these muscles won’t give you any relief because they’re already stretched – that’s why they hurt. To relieve the mid back pain, you have to address the muscles that are locked short – those on the front of your shoulders, like your pectorals and biceps. These muscles pull the shoulders forward, rounding the back and putting strain on your mid back muscles. Once the tension in the front of your body is released, the mid back pain will dissipate.

Posture

Back and Neck Pain Relief: How to Instantly Improve Your Posture

The Back and Neck Pain Epidemic

Back and neck pain are becoming more and more common, to the point that we’ve accepted aches in our spine, shoulders and neck as part of normal, everyday life. The American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons reports that back pain is the second most common reason for doctor’s office visits and the United States medical bill has soared up 65% since 1998 to a staggering $86 billion dollars per year.

Why are we experiencing this back and neck pain epidemic, you ask? Well, because of the bewitching machine that you and I are just now staring at – the ubiquitous computer.

Look around you and you’ll notice a lot of people who sit with their heads forward, rounded shoulders and a collapsed chest. Computers, television, driving, and almost everything else that we do during our daily lives, make us focus forward and forget about the back half of our bodies. We lose awareness of this space entirely and fall into our front halves.

We don’t live in a world where we must constantly be aware of what’s going on behind us. There’s no tiger stalking us in the bushes, no neighboring tribesman hiding out and waiting to kill us. We’re really pretty safe.

About the only people who have this back space awareness are elite athletes in sports like basketball and soccer where you need “eyes in the back of your head” to tell you what’s going on 360 degrees around your body. The rest of us need to work a little harder to regain this lost personal space. Amazingly, just being aware of our back instantly improves posture! How nice, no forced shoulders back and gut-sucking-in, right?

As an added bonus, people with good posture have less back and neck pain because there is less strain on the spine and the muscles surrounding it.

But there is a caveat: when you forcibly place your body into any given position, you really are just overlaying one pattern on another. You’re not correcting bad posture, and once the tight muscles holding your body upright are released, you’ll resume your previous slouchy ways. We take on postural patterns of tension like layers of an onion.

When it’s totally relaxed and in perfect balance, your body will naturally find a place of ease in gravity, and that will give you beautiful posture.

So, here’s how you can instantly improve your posture and get back and neck pain relief: I want you to lie on the floor (you can put a bolster or pillow under your knees if it’s too much strain on your back) and take a few relaxing breaths. Now, spend some time breathing into your spine. See if you can feel the floor with the entire length of your back – without pressing it into the floor. Really give yourself time for this exercise, a minimum of twenty minutes. With each breath, try to fill more of the lung space in your back.

Ask yourself what else in your body you need to let go of in order to relax your back – chest, stomach, thighs, feet. Don’t judge. Remember, your entire body is intricately connected. While it might not make any sense to you that relaxing your feet could change your breathing in your back, your body understands it.

Play around with breathing into shoulders, hips, even knees and feet, seeing if you can let your body go entirely and be completely supported by the floor. It’s amazing how much we want to hold ourselves up and how much energy can be saved when you let go of excess tension!

When you’ve spent a good amount of time breathing into your back, slowly stand up, close your eyes and check in to see how you feel. You may notice less tension, a feeling of lightness and reduced neck and back pain right away from this exercise.

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