Pain is an unavoidable part of life. If you avoid all activities that are painful, you will develop new pain from resting too much. Do not take this as a recommendation to just keep doing all the same things without any modification. That is just the other end of the spectrum. Try to fall somewhere in between – where you work through some discomfort, recover, and then try to do a little more the next time.

Two very much underestimated factors, especially with persistent/chronic pain, are fear and apprehension. If an activity is painful several times, it doesn’t take long to make the association, both consciously and subconsciously, between that activity and feeling pain. This can cause pain to be more intense or persist even after recovery. 

Potentially the most powerful tool for beating fear is exposure. Graded exposure to be precise. A controlled dose of the aggravating activity that you can easily recover from. Then a slightly larger dose, and so on. This process will start to build a new association, or rather disassociate the activity from a pain response. It takes time, and work and it will be uncomfortable. But you don’t really have another choice if you want to get back to your best self.

Resting Too Much

Rest in this case is not referring to sleep but inactivity. If you have been working like crazy at a physical job, or training super hard for a competition go ahead and rest. Most people with lower back pain, however, are likely not doing enough exercise which is part of the reason why they are in pain in the first place. 

So resting is just going to perpetuate the issue, even though resting feels good temporarily AND exercising can be very uncomfortable. There is no way around it, you need to exercise to be healthy. You can wait until the pain is gone to start exercising again or you can start now. If you wait, you might be waiting forever. 

If you want to have success, with getting rid of your back pain or otherwise, you will have to endure some discomfort and do some things you don’t want to do. The LBPfix program has exercises to meet you where you are at in your recovery. It has progression built in so you can progress safely and consistently.

Over Stretching

We get it, stretching feels good. It usually won’t do any harm, so you can keep stretching if it helps. The problem is when people focus on stretching, sometimes to the exclusion of other more helpful exercises. It is pretty rare for flexibility to be a limiting factor for day to day activities or even most sport performance goals. So focusing on stretching is just not likely to help much with your goals.

The things to focus on are resistance training, cardiovascular exercise and specific sport or occupational training as needed. These will of course have many benefits for your health in general, but also specifically for reducing pain and improving function. Exercise improves mood and cognition which can help to decrease the sense of suffering even without changing anything else. Exercise also has direct analgesic (pain relieving) effects, an all natural pain killer!

Resistance training will help to build muscular strength, so that you will be able to do work more easily. It also improves the strength of your bones, tendons, and other connective tissues. Cardiovascular exercise will improve your endurance, so you can do things for longer without getting tired. Mistakes are much more likely if you are tired.