Results that last?

Do you want results that last a long time? What a silly question, of course you do. When it comes to back and neck pain, most people suffer constantly.

The key to long term pain relief in the lower back and neck is to improve muscular endurance. It’s not to increase strength of the muscles, it’s to increase the time that the muscles can contract. This means that it is not important to lift heavy weights for your spine, but rather you must be able to lift light weights for a longer period of time. In fact many exercises don’t even require weights. Your own body weight is enough.

The goal is to hold a position and be able to maintain that position without movement for a couple of minutes. Think of it this way, stop doing crunches but rather hold the top position for one minute.

People that lift heavy weights all the time still can suffer with back pain. Strength appears to have a very weak correlation with lower back pain. Just because you can lift heavy weights doesn’t mean your back may not hurt. You have to be able to do an exercise that lasts a long time to help the correct muscles in your lower back.

The correct exercises are extensions on a gym ball, stability exercises on the floor, higher repetition deadlifts, squats, and good-mornings. We can show you these in the office.

The problem is that most people that have repetitive constant back pain have weak muscles that get quickly tired and have shrunk. To compound the problem, the muscles don’t contract at the right time. For example, when you go to lift a box in the garage, the back muscles should work, but they take a split second too long to contract. Just enough time to sprain your back. OuchThey also had abnormal activation patterns.

The muscles of your lower back quickly shrink after an episode of lower back pain. The muscles don’t recover after the pain is gone. This sets you up for the next episode of back pain.

It takes 8 weeks of endurance training to increase endurance ability by 100%- 150% in patients that are out of shape. This means that AFTER the back pain is gone, it can take 8 weeks to fully recover the muscular endurance to prevent the next episode. As you can imagine, some patients never follow this advice. They figure that the pain is gone so they must be alright only to experience pain again. It’s a vicious cycle.

Exercises can be done daily or even twice daily because they don’t produce muscle soreness. Usually with chiropractic, the pain will begin to reduce within 1-6 weeks depending upon the case. After this, it is important to continue with the treatment while exercising for at least eight weeks.

This is the reasoning for the treatment recommendations that we make.