5 Things To Fix Your Back Pain Without Relapse & Break Through Plateaus
For any back pain rehab to be successful you have to have progression. With progression it is inevitable that plateaus will come and sometimes we can push a little too hard, and get caught out. The result, a relapse or aggravation of our back pain. However with a sensible approach, a plan to follow and strategies to break through these plateaus, you can successfully rehab your back!
After your back pain workout
One of the simple things we can look at would be the post work out routine. Modifying actions post workout to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to enhance the workout. For example, if we finish up with our leg based workout we should spend time on a good post workout routine to help prevent those muscles from seizing up after the workout.
The main reason we’re doing this workout is to strengthen the lower body and its ability to transmit forces into the lower back safely. It’s simply no good to immediately go and sit at the desk for a couple of hours right after you’ve finished this workout. Your legs will stiffen up and lead to trouble in your lower back.
Provide the right nutrition for your back injury recovery
You might be doing the perfect rehab program to help your lower back pain recover, but if you’re not providing your body the correct nutrition you’re missing a major piece of the puzzle. The purpose of your workouts are to strengthen structures that support your back. The strengthening takes place after your workout. This process of strengthening is one which requires resources to complete. Our food is the way we deliver these essential resources to our body to use intelligently.
Nutrition is also going to fuel your body as it is undergoing the healing and remodelling process. If we take the opposite example, running a nutrition deficit will lead to significantly more injury and lower performance. That is because your body is literally less robust and having a difficult time recovering after training. This is probably one of the most overlooked aspects of recovery.
Create smaller progressions for your back program
One great strategy to help you as you progress through plateaus is to slightly modify the way in which you progress. Sometimes adding a 4th set to your workout can just be too much and trigger trouble with your back. Instead of going immediately on to your 4th set, you can give yourself a few minutes rest between the 3rd and 4th set. You can also try, on occasions when you’re doing one extra set, to have 30 to 60 seconds rest between all of the sets. This makes for a workout that is a little harder than doing 3 straight sets, but not quite as difficult as doing 4 straight sets.
Rest days to help your progress
In the early days of your program, for example, Phases 1 & 2 in the Back In Shape Program, you will workout daily. When you reach workouts akin to our Phases 3 & 4, rest days can be a helpful tool. These rest days are used to give your body the time it needs to recover between workouts. This tip works fantastically when deployed in tandem with the earlier nutritional point.
Our workouts are when we create the stimulation for our body to change, rest and sleep is when the change takes place. As the intensity is increased, before our body has adapted to this intensity, it can be necessary for us to give our body that extra day here and there to recovery and regenerate. Sometimes, less is more.
Progress your rehab with weight and resistance
Your back is a load bearing structure, and it fails or succeeds when it is required to bear load. With this in mind any reasonable program must include the incorporation of resistance and weight as you progress. Combine this principle, the employment of weights, with the earlier tip on smaller progressions.
Sometimes going from a 5lb weight or resistance, to a 10lb one is too much and we do not have a 7.5lb option to break the gap down a little. Here we can be creative and modify things perhaps using the heavier option for fewer reps or a few sets only.
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