Lower Back Pain When Lying Flat On The Floor?
If you’re experiencing lower back pain when lying flat on the floor there could be something going on in your lumbar spine that should not be ignored. It could be that you experience immediate sharp local pain at the bottom of your spine, it could also be a more general ache in the lower back area. For some with certain conditions in the lower back, such as a herniated disc, it could be that you’re trapping the nerves as they leave the spine giving rise to sciatic symptoms down the leg too.
Understanding the Causes of Lower Back Pain When Lying Flat
As touched on above there are going to be deeper reasons for why the back is sore when you lie down and this will be something worth investigating further. There will normally be two factors that will often make one another worse. The first factor will be the stiffness in muscles, particularly for those of you spending too long sitting every day, the hip flexors. We spend too long sitting these days and this can lead to real tightness in these muscles. When you life flat, they pull your spine, particularly the lower segments of your spine, into an extended position. This can create some irritation in the lower back, it also changes the sizes of the holes where the nerves leave the spine.
Secondarily, certain injuries to the lower back that lead to instability can make it so the joints in your lower spine shear or move in an otherwise abnormal way, creating irritation and changing the shape of the hole where the nerves come out. Additionally if there are changes such as that from a bulging disc, stenosis or degenerative facet joints, this can further exacerbate the issue.
The impact of sitting on lower back pain when you’re lying down
As mentioned, sitting for extended periods tends to lead to tightness developing in the hip flexors. More seriously however, is the effect that sitting for extended periods has on your lower back health and stability. This concept was discussed extensively using cycling as an example, and you can check out the full episode of the podcast on whether cycling is a help or harm for lower back pain, if that is of interest for you. Sitting for extended periods essentially puts a stretching effect through the lower lumbar segments, particularly at the L4, L5 and S1. This laxity can then be exposed when going from a load bearing position to lying down, as discussed in the previous section.
The importance of maintaining a normal lordosis
We’ll discuss strategies to help you maintain a neutral, normal lordosis later on. For the time being, understand that when our lordosis is lost or changes as a result of repetitive actions or strains it can affect the way in which our spine works. The development of areas of stiffness and areas of hinge-like hyper mobility can contribute to issues such as pain when lying down on your back. The normal lordosis allows for all the movement, bending, straightening and twisting, to flow smoothly through all the many joints of your lower spine. This fluidity reduces excessive strain from focusing at any one segment.
Why lower back pain intensifies when lying flat
Ultimately it is often a combination of factors that leads to the pain intensifying when you lie flat on your lower back. The spine is a mobile structure and it will move when we change position. Everything from the health of the spinal vertebra and joints, to the spinal alignment as a whole will influence the healthy and pain free functioning of your spine. Often it is no one thing, but a combination of factors that lead to the pain developing on such a low strain activity. The important thing is that you do not dismiss what can be an early warning sign of things in the lower back not quite being as healthy as they should be.
Taking this as a warning will trigger you to start taking the next steps to improve your lower back health and avoid catastrophe and more serious back pain or sciatica.
The role of exercise in alleviating lower back pain
Whether it is a minor strain or a more severe injury such as a disc herniation causing sciatica pain, the right exercises and the right plan of action makes a monumental difference to where you end up. Incorrect exercises such as the cat-cow stretch for lower back pain are commonly prescribed exercises by individuals who quite frankly do not properly understand the lower back. Avoiding such exercises or stretches is vital. Instead you should be focussing on a program of exercise that is teaching you to restore strength and stability to your lower back and spine, as well as training you to move in a more back-friendly way. This is the sort of things we teach our members of the Back In Shape Program, and you can read more about this in other areas of the website. Suffice to say, the membership as well as our Back In Shape Podcast are great places to get the support you need either in a paid or free capacity.
The one stretch you should be doing right now for your lower back health
The towel stretch is one of the best exercises you can do for your lower back health and many will find that doing so helps them normalise spinal movement when they lie on their back. This stretch is simple and everyone can do it. You simply roll up a bath towel tightly, and lie over it so the towel is supporting the normal, natural lordosis in the lower back. This can often be quite strange at first and you might need to modify the size of the towel, but we discus this in the program as well as on numerous videos on our YouTube channel. If you’re not sure, you can always contact us and we’ll be happy to point you in the right direction.
Ultimately if you’re getting pain in the lower back or down the leg when you’re lying flat on your back, it is a sign something’s not quite right, hopefully this article and the video above give you the initial guidance you need to make a start and get some relief from this back pain.
