Low back pain: what causes it and how to fix it

Low back pain can be caused by a variety of different factors. However, most of the time the cause is straight forward: your hip flexors are too tight.

Tight hip flexors are an epidemic in Western Society and the cause of most low back and hip issues. Why is this? Because everyone in our society spends a significant portion of our lives seated in chairs – during school, at work, in the car, on the couch – instead of doing what the human body is built to do: standing, walking, and running.

The thing about chairs is that when you sit in them over long periods, our body begins to mold to them. Specifically, the muscles on the frontside of your hip, the hip flexors, become chronically shortened while the muscles on the backside, the glutes, become chronically lengthened.

Why is this a problem? Well, for starters, the glutes are the most powerful muscle in the body – or at least they’re mean to be. But when the glutes are unable to fire because they’re chronically lengthened – and thus unable to fully contract – the muscle atrophies and the low back muscles, a comparatively weak set of muscles, are forced to pick up the slack.

As a result, you get a chronic gripping in the low back muscles because they’ve been asked to do vastly more than they’re capable of. And eventually, this excess pressure on the lumbar spine leads to all sort of chronic pain issues: muscles spasms, disc degeneration, disc herniations, disc bulges, sciatica and other forms of nerve inflammation.

Okay, so now that we’ve outlined why your low back hurts, how do we fix it?

Step 1: Stretch the hip flexors and release tension in the low back via myofascial release.

Step 2: Strengthen your glutes to counteract excessive pulling of the hip flexors muscles.

Step 3: Strengthen your abs to counteract excessive pulling of the low back muscles.

Step 4: Rinse and repeat.

Is fixing your chronic low back pain really that simple? For the majority of cases: yes, it is.

If you’re a Santa Monica resident who’d like get on a program to address your pain once and for all, click the link below.