Relieve That Nagging Lower Back Pain

The combination of poor posture and a sedentary lifestyle has greatly increased our generation’s experience of body aches. Spending long hours at our desk is commonplace in today’s working environment. Even with ergonomic office chairs, we are still potential victims of this modern-day epidemic if we don’t offset poor posture with corrective exercises.

Humans are designed to move and be physically active, but instead we train ourselves to sit for long periods of the day. According to the World Health Organisation, we should clock in at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise.

Sitting for long periods not only predisposes us to habitual laziness, it also changes our physiology and posture. Our hip flexors shorten and tighten up and we lose functionality in the muscles we sit on as they become weak and inhibited. By the time we reach 20, we typically have spent more than 30,000 hours sitting and have developed our own unique sitting posture that loads our spines in a very specific way.

When you sit on a chair, you’re at a position of roughly 90 degrees of knee flexion and 90 degrees of hip flexion. This makes the tendons of the quadriceps shortened at the hip and long at the knee, and the tendons of the hamstrings are lengthened at the hip and shortened at the knee.

Physiologically this tends to pull the pelvis forwards into anterior rotation when you stand, and the knees into a slight flexion that often leads to lower back and knee pain. This is a posture termed: Lower Crossed Syndrome by Dr Vladimir Janda, who is a Czech neurologist and physiatrist who has done extensive clinical research on the pathogenesis and treatment of chronic musculoskeletal pain.

And while it isn’t unusual for your lower back to feel a little sore from sitting down, you shouldn’t be experiencing prolonged pain that leaves you incapacitated. Failing to do something about it, can lead to health complications such as rigid mobility, lower back discopathy, and inflamed joints. When physical symptoms like back pain, shoulder stiffness, and poor sleep start to creep up on you out of nowhere, it’s your body signalling to you that it’s time to pay more attention to your physical health.

If you are experiencing such symptoms, you could try some of my recommended stretches listed in Chapter Three for temporary relief, and make the effort to get up from your chair at least every 45 minutes, or see a specialist to realign your spine, which is the main source of most chronic lower back pain.

For now, it’s important to know what’s causing the misalignment so that you can build better habits.

Poor Posture is Like a Slanted Building

As you’re reading this, have a look at your physical posture. Your musculoskeletal posture works much like a building: a slanted building is structurally unstable. And yet, we sit forward, round our shoulders, drop our heads forward for hours every day and it's putting great stress on the stabilising structures.

From a structural engineering perspective, we are holding our body weight against gravity. The straighter we sit, the more direct will the energy be distributed into the chair or the floor where we are standing on. If our posture is slanted, deviated forward, backwards or to the side, muscles on the opposite sides of the body have to tighten up and take that load or stress. This is based on Newton's third law of motion: whatever force you act on a body, there is an equal opposing force.

If your head is leaning forward, the muscles on the back of the neck have to work harder to hold it up. For example, if you hold a cup of water with your arms stretched all the way out, it will start to feel heavy really quickly. This happens as the length of the lever changes, which requires greater force or muscle strength to hold the object still. So if you do get neck pain or lower back pain, you really need to take that stress off your muscles by changing your posture.

Poor Posture Displaces Your Natural Alignment

The pelvis is a floating bone, which floats between the hips and the lumbar spine. When the pelvis is moving naturally, it takes the pressure off the spine. However, if you sit with your legs crossed, it can cause your pelvis to be fixated in one position.

For example, when you cross your right leg over your left leg, the pelvis rotates forward to the right on one side. Suddenly, your body’s alignment system has gone out of place. This places more load onto the muscles that are stabilising the pelvis, and transferring load from the hips and pelvis to the spine and back again. After sitting like this for an extended amount of time, your pelvis gets locked and is no longer neutral: it is rotated forward. And that is how people get lower back pain.

Once your pelvis alignment is skewed to one side, the position of your spine will be affected as well, which results in more stress on your lower back. This means that if you reach down to pick something up, you’ll end up pressing onto your disc space with over-tightened muscles and feel pain in your lower back.

Even when you’re standing, you should adopt a good posture. Leaning on one hip as you stand causes your body load to deviate from your natural plumb line. Once again, you're putting more stress on the muscles that stabilise your unbalanced position. So, if you stand in this position for long hours, your right knee is going to be sore, and the muscles that keep the pelvis neutral are going to tighten up.

A chiropractor can realign your spine, but it is poor posture and muscle tension that pull the spine out of alignment. Even after realigning your spine, the alignment can shift again if you continue to sit cross-legged. Also, sitting with your legs crossed adds even more dysfunction to the hips and pelvis, increasing pressure on the lumbar discs and causing lower back pain.

So, after you see a chiropractor, the goal is to do some exercises to stabilise the spine. You can do this by changing your posture from the way you walk to the way you sit, and to stop putting that pressure back on the same weak link (wherever you feel the pain) in the kinetic chain of your spine.