What To Do When You "Throw Out" Your Back
If it hasn’t happened to you, it’s happened to someone you know. You’re grabbing a pan out of the oven or picking up your kid and you “throw out” your back. What happens next is vital. If you lay down, you will not be able to get up. If you lay down you will be in pain for days or even weeks, barely able to walk.
Follow these simple steps and you’ll be back to normal significantly faster, saving yourself days of pain and days off work.
Step One: Walk
Don’t lay down! Stand up straight and start walking. Check in with your body…is this a normal walk? Normal walking means hips and shoulders move slightly, and freely in opposing directions with each step. Normal walking means standing up straight and letting your arms do their natural swing. Keep walking until you can breath easy. You should be able to let your core relax, not brace or hold your breath.
Step Two: Primal Patterns
When walking no longer causes you to hold your breath you can try primal movements. Think back to the basics. When we were babies, before we could walk we first had to learn how to roll over and how to get up and down from the floor.
Rolling patterns allow for unloaded spine twisting, and a chance for the muscles around the spine and hips to engage lightly after being seized.
When getting up and down from the floor, try incorporating other primal movements like twist, hip hinge and lunge.
If you’re feeling better you can now try body weight hip hinges and squats (neutral spine)…if your muscles still feel seized then move on to the next step.
Step Three: Relax seized muscles.
Most of the time this kind of acute back pain is caused by the QL (and possibly erectors/multifidus) bearing down to protect the spine. Take a foam roller or lacrosse ball to the wall and gently lean against to find the spot that is the most tight/hot/pulsing (never on the spine!). Don’t go for deep tissue just yet; take it slow and breathe easy.
If you can get in to see a massage therapist, now’s the time. Be sure that the therapist you choose understands what’s happened and knows that now is not the time for brute force pressure point release.
Other practitioners can help too. A chiropractor or osteopath may be able to assist if this is a one-time occurrence. If you have chronic episodes like this then a physiotherapist is likely more equipped to help. For any practitioner, ask for a referral from someone you know and trust.
If this happened doing a task you will never do again, then you might not need long term movement retraining. However, if this happened doing something you do all the time (like bending down to pick up your child) then you likely need help retraining that movement pattern.
If you need help retraining movement patterns, email me at info@keylifestylesolutions.com