Back Pain

Imagine the scene. You’re at work and sitting comfortably at your desk. It’s a warm day and you’re thirsty. You filled up your water bottle a few hours ago and you’ve finished it. You go to get up and, suddenly, you get an unbelievable pain in your back.

The pain is like nothing you’ve ever felt before. You feel stuck and like you will never be able to change position. Depending on the severity of your pain, you might even need to lie down on the floor.

This pain that has suddenly entered your life could be a constant companion for the foreseeable future.

Your life as you know it has changed. You are going to struggle with all your daily tasks. Getting the children ready will be more of a challenge than usual. Sitting comfortably on the sofa will be fun, but getting up will be nearly impossible. All the things you did and took for granted have become difficult. Your back pain has stolen your independence.

Most back pain is preventable. We tend to ignore the warning signs that our bodies give us throughout the day (and night) and soldier on because we think that we can get through it. We spend our days hunched over our desks, as we haven’t taken the time or effort to set up our workstations properly. When we lift heavy objects, we lift using poor technique that adds stress to our backs. We sit in unnatural positions on our beds or sofas, and this adds to the strain we put on ourselves.

When you have your moment and put your back out (and if you have poor posture then it will happen), you reflect on it to think ‘if I hadn’t got out of the chair like that, then I wouldn’t have done my back in’.

That’s not true. It was inevitable and if it hadn’t been that particular moment, then it would definitely have been later. Years of poor posture or poor technique led to a weakening of the back muscles and the injury that you have is not a result of the movement you made that brought on the pain, but more a result of years of poor technique.

You have 3 distinctive areas to your back, called the cervical spine (top), thoracic spine (middle) and lumbar spine (lower). They all have different characteristics and can be injured in different ways. The effects of these injuries will have different influences on how you live your life.

The worst thing that you can do for your back pain is nothing. The smartest move is to give the best Physiotherapy Clinic in Chester, Relive Physiotherapy a ring. We have experts in back pain and use the most up to date techniques and technologies to put you back on the road to recovery.

The earlier you consult on your back pain, the quicker the recovery. The best success we have is always with people who have come to see us just after injuring themselves. People who have left or even ignored their pain and tried to manage it either through medication or rest find that their recovery time is significantly longer.

Another important method that we use in your recovery is specific, targeted exercises. You can find exercises on the internet and that there are millions of pages dedicated to them. But please consider, you could be doing yourself more harm than good if you are doing the wrong exercises. Unfortunately, not all of the exercises are clearly labelled which part of the back they are targeting and are simply labelled as ‘back exercises’. Put simply, if you are doing exercises that favour your thoracic spine and your injury is not there, it is putting more strain on the part of your back that is injured.

If you have poor posture, a quick trip to Relive Physiotherapy can help you correct this, and ward off any future back pain. Prevention is always better than cure!