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You're determined to heal your back and are open to doing something intelligent that's different from what you've already tried. |
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How to Self-Relieve
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Have you dispaired because nothing done to you or for you has freed you from the grip of back pain? No need to worry.
Something you can do (with the right guidance) can free you from back pain -- and from ongoing adjustments and therapy. "Free you" means exactly that -- free you. You'll even sleep better.
Here, I explain why and how that "something" (somatic exercises) works better, for most people who do them, than any manipulative therapy to recondition your back so you can move and exert yourself like a young adult, again. After reading, test my words.
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This is not about "strengthening and stretching, and then holding a neutral spine position", but about reconditioning your back so you don't need to hold a neutral spine position -- or to hold any position. It's about freedom to move.
I call the idea that "standing upright causes back trouble", "The Great, 'It's Evolution's Fault -- We Were Never Meant to Stand Upright' -- Excuse". It's not standing upright, but excessive back tension -- that causes back pain and degenerative changes.
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Before you buy a self-relief program, you should:
Do the FREE three-day test -- exercise #1 ("Spine Waves"), once daily.
That's long enough to feel a worthwhile difference.
Click above for Free One-Week Tryout Period - followed by two payments of $48.50 levied every two weeks. (electronic download - See "Item Description" on your Subscription Acknowledgement from PayPal.)
Click below within one week to quit your tryout period,
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Experts hold fairly uniform opinions about how to cure back pain -- strengthening and stretching, adjustments and massage. Typical results follow: a long, slow recovery process with a still-delicate back.
Has that been your experience?
I'm in the fortunate position of being able to offer you something different from what most doctors and experts have to offer. Test my words with The 3-Day Test -- the only definitive way to evaluate what's written, here.
The track record of most accepted (and alternative) therapies bears scrutiny. I say more about this situation in my essay, "Diagnosis and Treatment". Here and now, I say that clinical somatic education (movement education for flexibility, self-control, and resiliency through mind-body unity/applied brain 'plasticity') provides the kind of experience and results you may hope for through conventional (and even alternative) therapies: relatively fast recovery and the ability to lift heavy objects, to twist, and to bend down and stand up quickly without pain or fear of pain. The 'proof' of the 'pudding' is in the 'eating'. Results are telling. Be informed by direct experience.
Between 200 and 300 clinicians practice this approach (Hanna somatic education®), worldwide. Read about my own history of injury and recovery. Then, test my words.
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NEXT: a preview and explanation of somatic education and access to a self-relief program that makes back pain diminish and vanish in days or weeks, not by dulling pain or making adjustments, but by altering underlying causes of spinal misalignment, disc compression, and muscle spasms -- brain-muscle conditioning -- so that your back pain diminishes almost immediately and soon disappears.
The video below provides explanation and is not intended as full instruction. That comes soon, below.
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Quick Answers to Ten Basic Questions:
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The DifferenceMost approaches to back pain treat the body as if it were a machine that can be adjusted, as if back muscles are unresponsive objects that, if stretched, will stay stretched.
If you've had treatment based upon this operating assumption and it left you still hurting, it's not that you're an exception. You've just seen the limitation of approaches based upon this operating assumption. It's why treatment for back pain is expected to take a long time, and why you may believe that you'll have to be careful of your back for the rest of your life.
The "body as machine" idea misses an essential point: your brain regulates the body, which also means your back muscles and spinal alignment. If you get a spinal alignment adjustment or do stretches or get massage, your brain soon resets your back muscles to the high state of muscular tension that caused the back pain to begin with, and you're back where you started, or close to it.
If you have had therapy that treats your body like a machine without regard for your sensibilities (as in surgery, strengthen-and-stretch therapy, electrical stimulation, heavy massage or fast adjustments), you may have experienced a cringe response -- a rebound spasm and even more pain. If the rebound pain lasts for more than a day or two, that's not "par for the course"; it's a setback.
Maybe you need another, more sophisticated -- and more humane -- approach -- and maybe you would prefer a more humane approach, if you believed it would work as well or better than what you've had.
Your back is already sensitized and reactive; you want ease. So what if, instead of treating your body like a machine (or with a machine), we bring you to ease with a non-invasive, self-controlled, "low-tech/high-touch" procedure similar to yawning? What if we can free you into a lower-stress, more easeful state, even under desperate conditions such as severe back pain with disc bulges or nerve entrapment, and do it so completely and so reliably that you no longer have to return for treatment or be concerned about a recurrence of symptoms?
This is not a casual, fanciful, speculative "what if" question. It's a germane question with consequences.
The approach presented here has helped thousands of people (not millions, yet) who have already had unsuccessful back surgery or other procedures to end back pain and recover freedom of movement. The results are highly reliable and predictable.
The video, above, shows one such person. This is a good time to take a moment and view it.
What to do, next? The video, below, shows you -- or read on.
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"Left untreated, the damage could get worse." ~ Nexxium commercial
[ commentary ]
see also:
"Understanding and Overcoming Lifting Injuries"
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When prescribing a treatment for back pain, the first question a health-care provider must answer is, "What is the cause?" Is it muscular? skeletal? disc? nerve? or something more? While always involving one or more of those four, the deeper answer is, "something more", as you will learn.
Pain in the back, itself, usually comes from muscles going into spasm; the pain is the "burn" of muscle fatigue. When not muscle pain, pain in the buttock or leg(s) (sciatica) comes from tight muscles that compress the sciatic nerve where it emerges from the spinal column, or passes through the buttock. Pain in the upper back comes from muscle fatigue or spasm, which sometimes displaces of rib heads from their seat(s) between vertebrae. Disc herniation (bulge) or rupture, most commonly caused by tight muscles, leads to nerve root compression that shows up as nerve pain distant from the location of the disc, itself. Although some experts and practitioners cite "ligament strain" as the cause, that's rarely the case, and in any case is a consequence, not a cause. All of these conditions trace back to that "something more", which I will explain in detail. |
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Still, according to one physical therapist, the likelihood of a back pain patient returning in another episode of back pain is about 80%. Back surgeries have a success rate of about 15%. The most commonly used approaches to muscle spasms, including massage therapy, help, but typically bring only partial relief. Has this been your experience?
Patients also face a quandary: money concerns. If you limit yourself to methods of treatment covered by health insurance, you are, in effect, choosing a longer recovery period. Is the money saved worth it? Maybe it is, to you.
However, "somatic" back exercises of the type described and shown here potently support all forms of conventional treatment,
with complete recovery in days or weeks, instead of months or years of treatment, for those who follow the instructions and practice daily. Your trying something new will be rewarded by faster improvement.
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Unless you have had a violent accident, your back pain, sudden or chronic, has been coming for a very long time. Muscular tension builds up for a long time before crossing the point of no return and becoming a back spasm. Then, like the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back," a small movement can trigger a crisis: muscle spasm -- and all the accompaniments.
So, we return to the therapists' quandary: back spasms. What causes back spasms? What controls muscular tension?
The answer may be obvious to you: your brain, the master control center for your muscles; your brain causes your muscles to go into spasm.
Why?
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Here, the answer may not seem so obvious -- until you understand it: conditioning. Apart from momentary reflexes, your brain controls your muscles. Your brain gets conditioned through repetition: repeated overuse, repeated overstrain, repeated stress. Your brain learns to hold muscles tight "on automatic". It's what is meant by "nervous tension." At that point, your tight back no longer comes from bending or lifting, but from a tension habit stored in your brain. You're always tight, on the verge of spasm or in spasm, and having gotten used to it, you probably don't even know how tight you've become. The problem isn't exactly "all in your head" -- but it is in your brain.
With tingling or numbness, the muscles of your back are so tight that they are pulling your vertebrae (the bones of your spine) so close that they trap and pinch nerves.
So the problem is simpler than you might expect. You probably do not have a medical problem; you probably have a conditioning problem. By relaxing those muscles, you end the pain of spasms. You also free the nerves from pressure and end the symptoms of a pinched nerve.
With the new methods, a muscular conditioning problem can often be cleared up fairly quickly -- past experience notwithstanding.
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This view is understandable when we consider the following: Tight muscles are tired muscles, and tired muscles feel weak and seem to need strengthening. Tight muscles are shortened muscles, and shortened muscles seem to need stretching. Tight muscles cause postural changes, and postural changes imply the need for strengthening and stretching.
However, if stretching were the answer, people who stretch their back muscles would no longer have back problems. It begins to look as if "The Stretching 'Emporer' has no clothes."
The problem isn't weakness or muscles in need of stretching; it's muscular overactivity and muscle fatigue (tiredness and soreness).
It's simple: When muscles relax, they rest and get refreshed (feel stronger); they lengthen out (no longer seem to need stretching). With normalized muscular functioning, spinal alignment improves, movement normalizes, comfort returns.
A more direct approach, then, is to improve muscular control. People with back pain generally need a brain-muscle approach -- either to avoid surgery or after surgery.
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By concentrating on muscles instead of on the brain-level control of muscles, common therapeutic methods -- spinal and soft-tissue manipulation, surgery, spinal decompression/inversion therapy, and most therapeutic exercises in general -- work on effects (muscle spasms and spinal alignment), rather than the underlying cause (brain-level control).
When you've had therapy, did your doctor or therapist give you therapeutic exercises to do? Did he or she teach you, step by step, how to do them? Did he or she teach you to do them slowly and to keep constant awareness of the sensations of movement? Did (s)he give you abdominal strengthening exercises, i.e., crunches, and tell you, "These exercises will strengthen your back"? Did you go for strength or well-regulated control of the movements? Did you go for effort or ease? That's why most therapeutic methods don't work as well as they might. To the extent that they do work, they do so through gains of muscular control at the brain level. Progress comes slowly, at best, often from working too fast and too mechanically (if not too hard).
If you can't feel how to control your muscles, you can't control (and relax) them. You need to improve your ability to control your muscles and that involves your ability to feel yourself controlling your muscles (not merely feel the pain of muscles in spasm).
As you do, you recover comfortable freedom of movement; you recover the ability to relax; you stay more relaxed without thinking about it.
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Muscle weakness is not the issue. Tight back muscles aren't weak; they're tired (and very sore). Try as you might, you can't remedy muscle fatigue by strengthening tight muscles.
Spinal alignment is not the central issue. Spinal alignment is maintained by muscular pulls; bones go where muscles pull them. Your muscles aren't controlled by skeletal alignment; your muscles control skeletal alignment, regulated by your nervous system. Tight muscles don't keep themselves tight; your nervous system keeps them tight as a reflexive action. Despite best intentions, you can't change reflexes by stretching.
Free control of muscles and movement is the issue. When you have control, you have freedom. You can freely tighten muscles and you can freely relax them. Right now, you can't relax your back; you're in the grip of a postural reflex of stress, known as "Landau Reaction".
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The approach, here, is to free your back by improving your muscular control. Now for the proof: direct experience of somatic exercises. Click to get free instructional video to relieve back pain. |
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NOTE: If your problem is severe, (numbness or tingling in your extremities) see your doctor to rule out conditions that can be addressed only by surgical means, such as a disc tear.
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Health Census
The Institute for Somatic Study and Development
Lawrence Gold, C.H.S.E.
This article may be reproduced only in its entirety. |
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