Boost Your Back Pain Recovery: A Proven Strategy For You

When things go wrong in our body, and it starts to affect our day to day life, there is often a motivation to do whatever we can to expedite the process of healing and recovery. This sense of urgency is sometimes more pronounced when you start to make progress as you see you’re on the right track and want to boost your progress further as you eagerly anticipate getting back to the things you love to do, without lower back pain or sciatica in your leg and foot holding you back! 

Recently we’ve had a number of members with this question, diligent in their approach and wanting to do whatever they can to get that edge in recovery. We discussed this in brief in a recent weekly coaching call and thought it would be a fantastic topic for a deep dive, expanding on the answer and giving you, our readers and listeners more information, no matter where on the recovery path you are, strategies to build on to enhance your recovery from low back pain. 

These strategies are cumulative and we will see as we move through them, like foundations of a house, it’s no good trying to put the roof on before you’ve built the foundations! 

Understanding your back pain recoveries foundation

There are two important parts that must underpin any successful recovery from lower back pain injuries. The nature of lower back injury is very different to other injuries in that the cause is not a sporting injury or an accident i.e. a sprained ankle from missing a curb. It is often a cumulative strain that steadily builds over time and reaches a critical point, often as a result of a minor movement, such as putting the socks on in the morning. 

As such the first of these critical components is education. An understanding around how the lower back works and fails, as well as having principles that we can use to evaluate and modify our daily activities to make them more back friendly. 

Think about this in the same way a child might not realise that constantly skidding with their back tyre every time they break is leading to the accelerated wear and tear on their back tyre specifically, and that this increases the likelihood of failure of that tyre and a resultant puncture. Once the child knows this, they have the choice to incorporate that knowledge to reduce the recurrence of flat tyres and therefore an inability to use their bike. Failure to incorporate this knowledge into their day to day actions will mean they keep getting the same problems. 

This is just like the lower back issue that keeps coming back for seemingly no reason. 

The second critical component is a plan or strategy to rehabilitate and strengthen the tissues around the lower back and further afield. We talk about this principled approach at length in other areas of the podcast as well as in depth in the program. Unfortunately too many of us are weak and lack appropriate movement, this is only made worse when an injury occurs. 

Following a program to rebuild strength and teach you how to move correctly in the most basic of movements that are applicable to your daily lives is essential. This is then progressively built through the incorporation of resistance exercises that guide the regenerative process and build a body and back that is resilient to the strains of life. For many who do this properly, regardless of age, their body will end up more robust, and in better condition than it has been in many years, decades or even since childhood!

If you have a back injury that you are working to improve, having a program of exercise and education is a non-negotiable, and you must have this in place first if you’re to have any kind of long term results with elimination of your low back pain. 

Nutritional aspect of recovery from back pain: fluid intake and protein

This next step is on equal footing with the previous one, in so much that the goals of education can be achieved without adjusting nutrition, although there is rationale to suggest that better nutrition will help your mind too. More importantly though, the goal of rehabilitation is a regenerative one. Your body requires resources to rebuild the tissues that are injured and certainly to make the significant changes to your musculoskeletal system that your exercises will be triggering. Without proper nutrition, all you’ll do is end up going in circles and making no progress on your resistance exercises. 

Fluid intake is of course vital, making sure that we are adequately hydrated is vital to a properly functioning body. Dehydration is not a strategy, and it takes such a small amount of effort with zero additional expense to drink more on a daily basis. 

Understand that the tissues in your body that are injured are derived in a significant part from protein, they’re not from turmeric, they’re not vitamins or minerals, they’re not anti-oxidants, or other fad approaches to nutrition that are supposed to be good for you.  Granted vitamins and minerals are vital for a properly functioning body, these various herbs, roots and spices have a place in the health of our body without a shadow of a doubt but they are extras. 

Simply put they are like the lights, fittings and fixtures of a house, they make it pretty. But you’ll have a pretty lousy house if you have no walls, built by bricks to adhere to the beautiful fixtures to!

Protein is the bricks, the building blocks, it does much more than that and going into the directing functions of particular amino acids is a whole topic in itself. However, the simple fact of the matter is that the tissues you are trying to heal, the collagen in the ligaments that are damaged, the discs that are herniated and the cartilage that is worn is all derived from protein. The muscle tissue that you’re trying to build and get stronger, the tendons that need to adapt to the new strength of the muscles.

It’s ALL PROTEIN. 

The great thing about protein is that it’s not complicated and it’s readily available! We wrote more extensively in the episode on the “best supplement for low back pain” as well as in various parts of the Back In Shape Program to help you more effectively evaluate precisely how much you should be getting per day. 

These first two areas we have covered are non-negotiables, they are there to positively aid your recovery every single day. They are the biggest needle movers and at the same time the least expensive avenues to take. All too often people are looking for shortcuts, and if spending a little extra means they don’t have to put the effort in, they’ll choose the former over making real changes. The thing is, real change and effort is what you need. 

So before you go any further, take a long hard think about whether you really want to get better.

Whether you actually want to fix your back pain.

Or whether you just kind of want to. 

Actions speak volumes more than words, if you are not seriously changing these things that you have 100% control over, I would suggest that you do not want to get better. 

Granted you might want a little more help or guidance to make these changes and that is completely fine, but to simply not change the way you eat, or at least evaluate to check, is not good.

Once more, to the degree you execute on the above two points you will forge a better body, that will mean the more expensive options that we’ll start to introduce next, will have a greater benefit. You will be a better canvas upon which these devices, practitioners or technologies can act.

This will increase your probability of being an “over responder” to intervention, as opposed to an “under responder”.

Enhancing your recovery with devices at home

Technology is a great thing, and nowadays breakthroughs have meant that many of these devices have become so much more affordable for us to invest in. We’ll take two specific examples here of devices that we recommend to our members as well as the reasons why. These are there to enhance aspects of the healing, or rehabilitation process. For those of you who are members of the Program, you’ll notice these are “enhanced versions” of activities you’re doing already.

Massage guns to optimise muscle adaptation and function

Massage or vibration guns are now so affordable, compared to 5 to 10 years ago when the good devices were cumbersome and thousands of pounds, the lightweight handheld devices now can come in on amazon at under £100 with more premium brands such as hyperice’s hypervolt series as little as £129. These devices help you work directly on the muscles from home, once bought once, you can use them daily as part of your rehabilitation routine, either to help you with stretching, help you “warm up” before certain activities, or to aid in the cool down afterwards. 

If you have one of these devices you might find this short video routine for the lower body a helpful starting point.

In your program or plan of action stretching and strengthening will be key components, both of these involve you improving the quality, health and function of the muscle tissue. The use of a massage or vibration gun is simply helping you further enhance this process. Additionally, for some with sciatic or referred pain, the vibration over the “sore area” can also be pleasant and relieving, not that it is doing anything long term, but doing so for a moment’s relief is a “side-effect-free” version of painkillers.

At home decompression with a Teeter table to unload your lower back

All back pain is fundamentally a failure to bear load effectively, the back has been compromised in some manner in its ability to carry out its primary function. The best stretch you can do for lower back pain, in our experience is the towel stretch, this provides you a way to regularly decompress the lumbar spine and orient it correctly. 

The Teeter table is a form of inversion table and perhaps considered to be the industry leader when it comes to these tables, having one of these at home offers you the opportunity to provide regular intervention and decompression to your lower back at no extra cost, once you’ve bought the device. It therefore allows you to oppose the load that daily life exerts on an injured lumbar spine. Using these devices correctly is important and that is why we recorded a video a couple of years back to help you better understand how these can be used to complement your recovery process at home by using an inversion table for back pain.

To recap so far, we have the program and education with nutrition as the bedrock of our strategy to fix back pain. This is helping us every single day. We’ve now added in a massage gun to aid in the muscular adaptation process as well as a form of inversion table to unload our spine daily, for relatively low cost. These would be considered the “second layer” of the approach, they have short lived effects like the areas that we will discuss next, but for a relatively small investment, we can do them as much as we like, daily, or multiple times a day to punctuate the strain of daily life. 

Now we’ll move onto more expensive options in the third layer of this strategy. 

Professional support for your recovery & healing

This segment is comparatively the most expensive, we’re moving into the realms of treatment. From our experience clinically, we would always ensure that patients have the education and rehabilitation to go alongside treatment at our clinic, however like so many busy clinical practices, the ability to deliver on this, compared to what we are able to do nowadays with the Back In Shape Program was far inferior. 

This stands to reason as with a fully booked diary you simply do not have the time for out-of clinic support when you’re delivering treatments from dawn till dusk. This is why we find more and more Consultants, GP’s, Osteopaths and Chiropractors are referring their patients to the program to run alongside the hard work they’re doing in their clinic. 

Manual therapy: Osteopathy, Chiropractic and Physiotherapy

There is one thing working yourself on 

your own body, but having a professional work on your body, through the muscles, mobilizing certain areas of the spine and peripheral joints like the hips and knees can be a great help. Every day from the way we use our body repetitive actions place strain on the system. Tension will build up and often things do not move as well as they could. Let alone when you have a low back injury, The pain can cause you to move a little differently, and these abnormal movements and rigidities that develop certainly do not help the recovery process. 

Try not to get caught up on the specific profession as nowadays there seems to be more cross over than in years gone by. It is more important that you’re seeing a practitioner with the right philosophy and technical skill, rather than whether they’re a chiropractor or osteopath. There is extreme crossover in the techniques used, particularly between osteopaths and chiropractors. Perhaps with physiotherapists you’re less likely to see someone who is as skilled hands-on wise as they tend to work more with exercise prescription but this is not always the case. 

The important benefit here is that a good practitioner will be able to help work periodically to get your body moving in the best way, and this will be a boon to your recovery. As discussed earlier, to the degree you have taken on board the previous segments of this article, and are strictly adhering to them day in day out, you will respond better to these treatments. 

Having daily treatments often isn’t possible for financial reasons, and perhaps monthly or fortnightly might suit your budget more, this offers you a routine way of “cleaning out the system” as you continue to progress. With time you should find that the treatment outcomes last longer and longer and your body “soaks them up” better!

Spinal Decompression: IDD Therapy For Lower Back Pain

Considering the nature of lower back injuries and the compression involved it would be wrong of us to not include IDD Therapy as a therapeutic intervention. This involves a large table and pulley system to gently and rhythmically unload your lower back. This treatment formed the basis of our approach in our clinical days and we stand by the great benefit this treatment can have for those with back pain. One of the mistakes we have seen in recent years being a little more aware of how other clinics use this great technology is that sometimes there is either an absence of exercise prescription alongside the treatment, or the wrong exercises, which undermine the very benefits of the treatment itself. One of the weaknesses of the manual approach to treatment that practitioners mentioned previously can offer is that much of their work is on areas around the injured region as opposed to the injured tissue themselves, such as a bulging or herniated disc.

Although it is possible to perform rhythmical spinal decompression manually, it is not repeatable or reliable and certainly not practical for a professional to do for 15 to 30 minutes at a time, this is where the IDD therapy outshines. Although we no longer offer this treatment we do have a great short video that you can watch that explains what to expect from IDD therapy in a little more detail.

There are other sophisticated therapeutic options that we won’t get into here such as K-Laser therapy which we used in our clinic, as well as more involved and expensive procedures such PRP injections which can all work together to formulate the most robust in treatment approaches but remember, without the basics in place, these fancy treatments will be a flash in the pan. An expensive flash in the pan at that, if you leave the clinic only to undo all the good work because you’ve failed to educate yourself, work on strengthening your back and body, and aren’t fueling your body properly.

If you do need help with the foundations and are interested in learning more about the Back In Shape Premium Membership then you can learn more by clicking the image below.