Your Back Pain May Not Be All About Your Back

You’ve been working out.
You have a strong core. You eat
right. You take breaks at your office job.
But your back is still killing you.
What is going on?

As a second generation chiropractor, I’ve learned that your diet and emotional health can play a big
role in your back pain. In short,
stress in your mind and around your digestive system can cause the muscles
around your back to tighten up, causing pain.
Yes, the basic structural causes of back pain may not be the primary
sources of it.

Take for example one of my patients who tells me she has
been very healthy and “juicing” to lose weight.
In my head I thought: “So she thinks it’s good for her just to drink
juice and not eat a variety of healthy foods?”

Therein lies a problem.

Too much of the same thing can really tax your digestive
system. The all-juice diet (which can be
laden with sugar) was irritating her stomach and causing her unbearable back
pain. So please eat healthy, but in a
varied, sensible way. Switch it up and try to stay away from excess sugar and
caffeine.

Another patient told me that aside from his back pain, he
was doing great in life. He was eating
healthy food and exercising five-times-a-week.
He was a top executive at a midtown firm with a loving and supportive
family.

So I went through my assessment, which involves muscle
testing where I push against my patient’s arm as they hold it up. This test shows what areas in our lives are
strong points and what are weak ones.
When I asked him if anything was bothering him at work, his arm fell
weak.

“Whoa! What’s going on?” he asked.

The more we talked we discovered that one particular
co-worker had been stressing him out. So
he worked on how to deal with this person and came to a solution on how he
would manage this relationship. Sure
enough, when I saw him again in a few weeks, his back was feeling much better.

But structural causes are also very real…

If you are reading this blog, there’s a high probability you
are into working out. So my message to you is to pay close attention to how
you work out. Muscles do not work in
isolation, so it’s important to make sure that support muscles and opposing
muscle groups get equal attention in your workouts. (See some of our Top
5 Functional Training Mistakes).

For every pushing move, make sure you are counteracting that
with a pulling motion. A deadlift is
powerful pull that is best balanced with a squat, which is a superb pushing
motion. If you bike, mix it up with running too. Many of us favor moves that we are good at,
so work extra hard at the moves or disciplines you don’t excel at. That effort is worth it and is a great way to
discover balance in your workout.

All this balancing promotes a healthy back, which is central
to how your entire body functions. I
talk to my patients a lot about core imbalance, which is caused by long hours
sitting at a desk. To reverse the
effects of the forward hunch or C-shaped forward curvature of the spine, I
recommend stretches such as the Cobra Pose in yoga or using a device called the
BackBridge, both of which promote extension and stretch the back in the
opposite direction that the forward hunch puts your shoulders in.

The Takeaway

Before you immediately try to treat your back for your back
pain, consider what you’ve been eating as well as if there has been some
emotional stress in your life recently.
People tend to forget how important it is to eat in a balanced, healthy
manner as a key to overall health. Here
are some daily tips to ward off back pain:

1. Keep a food diary and figure out what
   foods upset your digestive system.
2. Try yoga, meditation or tai chi to calm
   the mind and relieve tension and anxiety.
3. Stretch often.
4. If you sit in a chair all day, take breaks
   around the office.
5. Take walks.