How Can Flexibility Help My Back Pain?
Thank you for joining us for today’s livestream where we talked about how flexibility can help back pain. Today we launched our Flexibility protocol as part of the Phase 3 Back In Shape program! In some cases, doing flexibility exercises can make recovery more difficult, which is why it’s important to do the right exercises at the right time.
Flexibility, generally speaking, can be helpful – especially in the hips. The requirement for your back to have good range of motion can be made easier with good flexibility in the hips. If you have stiffness here, you’re going to make your back worse as your spine has to compensate. This also means your healing in the lower back can be disrupted less.
We’re not really looking to increase flexibility at this stage but rather just improve mobility. In Phase 1, you will have just started to do the right rehabilitation, you’ll be learning how to engage your core and improving the function of your body. Too much mobility in the case of hyper mobile patients means that it makes life more difficult. If you do have hyper-mobility, your body has to work harder to stabilise itself.
Generally someone struggling with this may also have a lower than average muscle mass. You may find that you struggle with relapses more throughout the recovery process but initially make faster progress. Generally you’ll need to build more muscle than the average person to get out of the woods. Timing is everything with flexibility. If you have muscle spasms, pain or weakness can all interfere with stretching with the aim to increase flexibility. You’ll tighten back up very quickly so there’s little reason to do it at this stage of recovery. Doing it later on when you’re more out of the woods is going to be beneficial, which is why we put it into Phase 3.
If you’re focusing intently on flexibility in the early stages of recovery from back pain, you’ll be better served by building muscle to improve your stability. Most cases of back pain occur in conjunction with muscle weakness. If you’re a gym-goer with a lot of muscle mass, you may be back to normal quicker than normal because your body’s in a better position to heal and you have that stability.
