This answer relies on a few more questions before we can to the exercises that will make a difference for your back.
The first question is: why is your back sore?
The answer to this requires you to see an Osteopath who is able to diagnose what is occurring under your skin.
Put simply things tend to break or get irritated when they are placed under more pressure than they can bear.
Go for a 10km run without any training = pull up really sore the next day
Why?
Not because you’ve broken anything but you placed heaps of pressure on muscles that are not used to doing the activity.
What about lifting heaps of lawnmowers for someone that does that for a job?
Most likely they’ll fine because their body is used to that amount of pressure.
Exercises to help backs will depend on what you’ve done as they will need to be specific to the reason your back is sore in the first place.
Buuuuut that isn’t why you’re reading this, you want some nice simple overarching clues?
Low backs tend to get sore when more pressure is placed on them than they can bear.
So why would low backs have more load placed on them than they can bear?
Often it is because the bits of the body above or below the low back aren’t working so well.
If your hips are really tight or restricted and you are lifting a lot, or walking a lot, or sitting a lot then rather than the movement coming through your hips it will go through your low back.
So what is a good exercise for my low back?
Anything that gets your hips moving.
This could include spiky balling your glutes, doing squats or deadlifts in a gym, pigeon pose in yoga, or any other stretch of your glutei (bum) muscles.
What is a good way of preventing your back getting sore?
The evidence is pretty unequivocal, movement and exercise is good for your health and particularly your back.
This could be mean seeing one of our excellent Exercise Physiologists and then developing an easily achievable program.
Or it could mean going for a walk every lunch break.
One other thing…. that is a bit more challenging
If getting rid of low back pain was as easy as what we have written then not only would our osteopaths have no clients, but the world would have less people in pain.
When you cut your skin, a scab forms, new skin forms underneath it, the scan falls off and the new skin is more or less as good as the old.
Well the same happens under your skin. And for almost everything it happens within 3 months.
So why then do some injuries hang around for 10 years or more?
This is the challenging bit.
In essence the brain/body can become overly protective of an area the more times it is injured.
When someone has had a bad back for 10 years or more often what that means is that the brain/body is over reacts to little things and goes into spasm.
In cases like these a good osteopath working in combination with an exercise physiologist and maybe a psychologist will help the brain/body build confidence again in the area that is sore.
Read more about pain and what it is here.
Or if you'd like to read about a really weird example of how pain works click here
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