Whole Body Revolution

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back pain

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Simple Exercise to Decompress Your Spine

Are you stuck at a desk job, sitting all day long?  That’s probably THE biggest complaint I hear on a daily basis.  You go to work and sit for eight hours, getting up just long enough to fetch lunch (if you’re lucky) and then right back to sitting again.  And at the end of the day, you’re so tired from sitting, you collapse on the couch and sit some more!

Believe it or not, sitting still is exhausting, especially if you’re doing it wrong.  I definitely know all about this.  Before I went off to Rolfing School, I pretty much worked exclusively in offices, answering phones and managing a never ending tornado of paper.  My back has never hurt so much as it did daily when I was working in front of a computer all the time.

Of course, you should have a good strength and stretching program in place to make sure all your muscles are getting worked on a regular basis, but if you need a little quick relief for your aching back, try this simple stretch.

Sidenote: the brilliance in this stretch (called Child’s Pose in yoga) is not in flopping down into it, limp as a noodle.  Reach out behind you with your tailbone while at the same time stretching your fingertips further in front of you on the mat.  This gives your spine a gentle traction and creates space between each of the vertebra.

And for an extra bonus, I show you how you can get some very gentle spinal traction just using the ground and nothing else.  Basically, you start from a seated position and roll your back down on to the floor, imagining that you’re setting down one vertebra at a time and then stretching as much as you can before setting the next one down.  By the time you’ve got your back all laid out on the floor, you’re getting a gentle stretch down the length of your spine that you can hold for five to ten minutes, or longer if you like!

Of course, if you have spinal injuries of any sort, check with your doctor before doing any type of exercise, including these.  You don’t want to put yourself in danger of further damaging your back!

Pain Relief

How to Fix Rib Pain with Self Myofascial Release

ribpain

Do you ever have a sharp pain in your side when you breathe?  Do your ribs ache after you sit for a long period of time?

Ribs are actually very  mobile little bones.  In fact, they’re supposed to roll around when you breathe just like venetian blinds open and close; however, if you’ve injured your ribs through impact or even by breaking one, it’s likely that you have scar tissue or tight, restricted intercostal muscles – the tiny muscles between your ribs – that are causing you some discomfort.

Also, your ribs are plugged into your spine in the back.  They articulate with the vertebra, so every time your spine moves (which is often, by the way) your ribs move, too.  Therefore, if you have tightness and pain in your ribs, it directly affects your spine and back.  Alleviating tight, twisted ribs will also help relieve back and neck pain.

Check out this video for a simple walkthrough of releasing tight or twisted ribs and their surrounding tissue.

Posture

How to Stretch Your Inner Thighs (a.k.a. Adductor Muscles)

Most people are well versed on the fact that they need to stretch their hamstrings, and some people regularly stretch their quads and hip flexors (the muscles along the front of the leg and hip), but few people – save for elite athletes and dancers, really – dig into their adductors.

The adductor muscles are the big ones along the inner thigh.  They are an entire group of muscles unto themselves, separate from your quads and hamstrings.  Although, tight adductor muscles WILL restrict your range of motion and make it hard to get really flexible in either your hamstrings or quads, so if you stretch constantly but aren’t getting anywhere, try working your adductors a little more.

Also, these muscles have fascial connections deep inside the pelvis that can pull on the lumbar spine, causing low back pain and, yes, even neck pain!  It’s one of the areas that I consider a gold mine when I’m working with anyone who has pain in their hips and back.

So, if you want to increase your hip flexibility, or you are looking to alleviate back and hip pain, try this easy dynamic stretch.  It’s basic enough for even a beginner to try, so don’t worry if your hips feel locked up like they’re bound with steel cables!  They’ll loosen in time.

Go for it!

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Pain Relief

What To Do For Pain in the Neck and Mid Back

Your neck is so stiff you can barely look over your shoulder. The space between your shoulder blades feels like someone’s got your spine in a vice grip.  Your shoulders are so close to your ears it looks like you’re trying to start a new fashion in earrings.  This is not a pleasant situation.

And yet, despite all the neck and shoulder stretches you do, in spite of all the neck massages you receive, the pain continues to persist.  You may even have had an MRI or x-ray that showed “nothing is wrong” with your back.  But if nothing’s wrong, why the heck does it hurt so bad it wakes you up in the middle of the night?

Here’s the secret…there really is nothing wrong with your neck and mid back.  The pain is coming from somewhere else – your hips.

This makes absolutely no sense when we look at the body from the western medical perspective which divides the body into parts and pieces.  If your neck hurts, they look at your neck, from C1 (the first vertebra in your spine) to C7 (the last “neck” vertebra).  But this is kind of short sighted when you consider that C7 connects to T1 – the first thoracic vertebra – and T1 to T2, so on and so forth, all the way down to your sacrum, the triangular shaped bone at the bottom of your spine.

Lo and behold, your sacrum lies between your (drum roll, please) hip bones!  So, if your pelvis is restricted, tilted, shifted or imbalanced, it’s going to travel upward, right into your neck and mid back.

Now it’s all starting to come together, right?  The body is a system where each piece and part is dependent on every other piece for function and balance.  So, neck and back pain sufferer, how do you address the restrictions in your hips?

First, stretch your quads.  Hip flexors – the muscles the bend your knee to your chest – get really tight when you sit a lot, which pretty much everyone in western society does more than they should (yes, even if you go to the gym every day).  These guys drag your pelvis forward and cause a “swayback” appearance in your lower back.  Lacking support from below, your neck and mid back get really tight to keep you upright.

Second, make sure your glutes and hamstrings are working.  Do glute and ham exercises, but NOT the ones that require a machine.  Machines are for rehab and they don’t really give you functional movement.  The best way to train your body is with body weight and free weight exercises that force you to use deep postural muscles to support the movement.

Some good examples of glute and hamstring exercises are deadlifts, squats and kettlebell swings.  Body weight squats can be quite effective for anyone who has lazy glute and hamstring muscles, but I like to add in a kettlebell at chest height because it forces you to keep your upper body back over your heels.  When you kip forward and point your chest at the ground, you’re just feeding the tight hip flexor pattern.

Third, get good bodywork from a structural practitioner who can help you learn your physical imbalances.  It’s pretty hard to change something you’re not aware of, so if you’re blithely going about your day with a crooked pelvis for 23.5 hours, seven days a week, half an hour of glute and hamstring exercises aren’t going to change anything.  Repatterning your body is all about changing your habits, and the exercises you do should carry over into every aspect of your daily life.

Posture

If You Must Sit at a Computer, At Least Do This…

I hope you’re sitting down for this because I have some news….your office chair is killing you.  No, seriously, it is.  Sitting is now a proven health risk, as you might have guessed from the chronic aches in your back, neck and shoulders.

Peter A. Levine, an obesity specialist at the Mayo clinic, states, “What fascinates me is that humans evolved over 1.5 million years entirely on the ability to walk and move. And literally 150 years ago, 90% of human endeavor was still agricultural. In a tiny speck of time we’ve become chair-sentenced.”

We already know sitting is bad for the back and neck, but did you know that within a couple of hours of sitting, healthy cholesterol plummets by 20%?  There is a physiological change in the body chemistry when you sit.  Postural muscles that should be active as you move around during the day are completely relaxed which decreases enzyme activity.  These enzymes are responsible for mobilizing fat out of the blood stream, so if they’re not active, you’re likely to wind up with a bad case of obesity.

And what about that posture?  Can sitting really be so bad for our spines?  “When you’re standing, you’re bearing weight through the hips, knees, and ankles,” says Dr. Andrew C. Hecht, co-chief of spinal surgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center. “When you’re sitting, you’re bearing all that weight through the pelvis and spine, and it puts the highest pressure on your back discs. Looking at MRIs, even sitting with perfect posture causes serious pressure on your back.”

And worst of all, simply going to the gym for an hour a few times a week does not offset the negative effects of sitting.  You can’t out-exercise a sedentary day-time job.

So, what do you do if you’re stuck at a desk all day?

First, make sure you have a proper ergonomic set up.  Don’t waste money on an expensive ergonomic chair, by the way; it’s just as easy to slouch on a fancy $700 seat as it is on a $15 chair from IKEA.  Ideally, you should sit on a flat, firm surface (my favorite is a wooden bench).  Any contour will affect the alignment of your pelvis, which causes tension and pain in your back.

Make sure your seat is high enough that your hips are higher than your knees.  If your hips are below your knees, all the weight of your body sinks into your pelvis, but with your hips elevated, you can use pressure from your feet on the floor to support your spine.  In fact, a “perching” set up where you merely lean against a stool that is about bar stool height is ideal because it allows your legs to continue supporting most of your weight.

Your monitor should be at eye level or slightly above so you don’t collapse forward into the ever-popular “computer neck” syndrome where your head is a good six inches in front of your shoulders.

Make sure you’re perched on your sitting bones and not on your tail bone.  Rocking back on your tail bone will cause your sacrum to jam up.  Since your sacrum is the bottom-most vertebra of your spine, if it can’t move, neither can the rest of your back.  That results in a lot of pain.  When you are sitting forward on your sitting bones, you should have a slight arch to your lower back – this is normal.  You do not want your back to be straight.  You need that gentle s-curvature of the spine!

Perhaps most importantly, take lots of breaks.  Get up, go get a glass of water.  Walk over to the mail room.  Visit a coworker instead of sending an email.  Take a lap around the office.  Go outside and get some fresh air.  If you’re going to take a coffee break, maybe head out to the shop that’s a block away instead of stumbling two steps to the cafeteria.  The more you can get up and get moving, the better off you’ll be.  Remember, just going to the gym doesn’t counteract sitting.  You have to reduce your total time in a chair to get any measurable results.

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