Back pain can be persistent and the root cause may not be fully understood. Some causes might include, abdominal or pelvic organ inflammation, injury, and surgery, causing pain in the back and surrounding areas as well as excessive lengthening due to pregnancy. Poor posture can also be a contributing factor to back pain. Prolonged hunching whilst working on a laptop or poor alignment when standing can negatively impact the healthy functioning of your back, core, and abdominal muscles. Creating weakness, discomfort, pain, and reducing their blood supply, Hense stiffness and weakness develops in the trunk and lower back.
Six sessions to help you:
- Learn skills to help reduce and manage pain.
- Improve mobility, flexibility, and stability.
- Learn skills to improve posture and alignment in the body and to adopt better, more healthy movement patterns. This can involve developing a better understanding of unique habitual holding patterns and improved awareness of the position and movement of the body. Our habitual holding patterns which create our everyday pose are very much related to muscle tension in the body.
- Learn to notice muscles that need releasing or strengthening to restore healthy movement patterns.
- Emotional health and stress also play a part. Learn some stress management tools, to calm the mind, (nervous system), reduce stress and develop better coping strategies.
- Develop a better understanding of how your body works, function of muscles, joints, and how stress, emotions impact back pain.
Handouts and home practice provided.
When asked what causes back pain, the first, most obvious answer that springs to mind is that pain is caused by a structural problem in the back itself e.g. spinal abnormalities, disc degeneration, herniated discs, and other forms of ‘physical proof’ of pain. However, the research and science behind pain suggests the exact opposite. In summary, there is no reliable correlation between physical abnormalities in the spine (like slipped/ herniated discs) and levels of physical pain. In actual fact , over time, most herniated discs can spontaneously de-herniate on their own, without medical intervention. Our attitudes, feelings, and beliefs about back pain have a measurable impact on the level of physical pain we feel. Mindbody treatments like Yoga Therapy, (designed to change these attitudes, feelings, and beliefs about pain) can measurably reduce back pain over time.
