Lower back pain can really shake your confidence. When you can’t get comfortable no matter what your posture or how you move, it can seem like the pain will never go away.
Rebuilding confidence after lower back pain starts with understanding what pain is. You might be surprised with the rate of progression once you have a little bit more knowledge.
Contents
- Understanding pain
- Building confidence after lower back pain
- Case examples
- Progress metrics
Disclaimer:
This article is for educational purposes and is not meant to replace an assessment, diagnosis, or treatment from a qualified professional. Note; no doctor patient relationship has been formed.
Understanding Pain
Pain is a much more complex phenomenon than it might seem. But we can simplify it massively for easier understanding.
Pain is a warning.
A warning that there is some sort of problem in the body. The complexity comes from the number of different things that can trigger the alarm. We can roughly categorize the potential causes to further simplify.
- Mechanical pain
Pain can come directly from tension, compression and shear forces placed on the body tissues. This can happen well in advance of significant damage to the tissue. If you think about it, that is a great thing! If we did not feel pain early on, we wouldn’t have any warning before having a more severe injury.
All else being equal, more repetition, more load, or longer duration of these stresses will be more likely to cause (more) pain. With this information we now have not only a chance to prevent pain, but we now also know how to respond.
Prevention would be attained by minimizing the factors listed above, but only in the short term. Your body will adapt over time with repeated exposure and proper recovery. More on this in the next section.
Your response to pain would involve modifying the factors listed above to decrease the specific stress on the body that is causing pain. Again, this is a short term response and may actually invert in the long term.
The LBPfix program has all of these things built right in. It has helpful modifications and progression to help you manage pain in the short term, and reduce your risk of injury in the long term. It also has information about how to recover quicker and be healthier in general.
- Chemical / Inflammatory pain
Inflammation is the body’s response to damage or infection, and can be the result of many different disease processes. Despite how you probably hear the term inflammation used in popular discussion It is not all bad.
It is the necessary first step in fighting infections and repairing injuries. The problems come from prolonged unrelenting inflammation. This starts to interfere with normal cell and organ functions. This chronic inflammation is usually as a result of health problems like obesity or autoimmune diseases. Too little inflammation would also cause major problems.
The chemicals that are released by damaged tissue and the immune cells that show up in response, can irritate nerves which is then experienced as pain. This is why you get sore after exercise – because the immune cells are there to help the muscle recover. Direct heat or cold can also irritate or damage these nerves too, which is obviously painful.
Again, knowing what is going on here can help you make good decisions and reduce fear. If you are sore from doing something strenuous – now you know why. If you have body aches from an infection, you now see that as a result of your immune system doing a good job.
Rebuilding Confidence After Lower Back Pain
The most important concept to master to not only help you gain confidence after lower back pain, but also help you improve your fitness is graded exposure.
Graded exposure is the term used to describe, among other things, a movement progression in the context of pain. It basically means you expose yourself to small, but increasing amounts of the painful movement over time so that your body can recover and adapt. With the proper dose and progression you will increase your tolerance to that stress and decrease the pain you experience with that movement over time.
This is very simple with exercise where you just increase the range of motion, the number of repetitions or the loading of an exercise gradually over time. It can be a little bit more complicated when it comes to work or other daily activities. In that case total duration may be a more helpful measure.
This really is the best way to increase confidence after lower back pain because when you do a movement or activity without pain, then you can be sure you can do it in the future without pain. Anything else leaves at least a little room for doubt.
Case Examples
Traumatic Injury
If you have had a significant injury, it is best to go see a professional to get assessed. They will likely clear you to do some very light exercise and activity, but it is best to make sure. Better safe than sorry.
Acute pain
If you have a new pain, but no obvious mechanism of injury, you can maintain more activity right from the start. If you start with something that is usually very safe and easy to do, it is very unlikely to cause any harm, though it might be somewhat painful.
Stay as active as you can without causing significant pain. Discontinue activities that are causing the pain to worsen consistently over time. As the pain subsides, then you can intentionally try to progress the movements or activities that were initially painful with graded exposure. This process will likely take a few weeks to a few months.
Chronic pain
If you have been in pain for a very long time, especially in the absence of a specific injury, things get a little trickier. You might have to push through more pain and work on other aspects of your health to see improvement.
For chronic pain, try working through a manageable amount of pain as long as it is safe, and see how things progress over several days afterwards. Often what can happen is that pain can be present during exercises or activity but then is improved immediately afterwards or the days following.
Your exercise progression should be complemented by a very careful examination of your lifestyle and habits – sleep, diet and stress, substance use. Small problems can be made much worse or perpetuated by an unhealthy lifestyle or habits. This process will likely take several months, depending on the individual.
Progress Metrics
The possible metrics to track are many. You can track anything that is important to you like your ability to do daily activities, sports or hobbies. You can track the things that you are working on like range of motion or average pain level.
The simplest thing to start with is what we call a personal index test. It is basically the simplest way to reproduce pain. For many people with lower back pain, this is simply trying to touch their toes. If it hurts, don’t repeat all the time! Just retest it every few days or week as a way to measure progress.
The LBPfix Program again has all of this built right in. It starts with a self assessment, and categorizes you based on your pain type. It then gives you strategies specific to your category to modify your, and exercises to help build your capacity and get back to normal quickly. No more guesswork with what to track and how to progress.
Our Framework: How LBPfix Can Help
1. Identify Your Pain Driver: We classify your pain into one of four movement intolerance types
2. Prescribe the Right Movement Strategy: Once we know your pain type, we match it with corrective movements
3. Build Long-Term Resilience: As pain settles, we help you:
Move confidently without flaring up
Rebuild core control and lifting mechanics
Return to work, sport, or life without setbacks
Ready to Fix Your Low Back Pain?
Take our 2-minute quiz to find out if you’re a good candidate to our program – no strings attached!
