How to Finally Get Rid of Back Pain for Good

#Backpain #Pilates #physiotherapy
First off I’d like to state that I’m not a doctor and there are different levels of severity of back pain, so if you have pinched nerves or disc issues this may not be the video to help you. This video will help people who generally suffer from back pain but may not have had a direct injury that caused such pain.
To give you a bit more context, starting about 10 years ago, I started having muscle spasms multiple times a year that would happen in different parts of my back, but the most common was the lower back spasm that would happen at the most unpredictable of times. I had a few spasms before that but it wasn’t frequent enough for me to notice that this was leading to a more serious issue.
10 years ago, when I was doing barbell squats at a 24-hour fitness in New York City, I had one of the worst lower back spasms I’ve ever had. Since then, I had them frequently.
These muscle spams were sometimes triggered slightest bend and could be from something as simple as bending down to unload the dishwasher.
After a spasm, I would struggle to do anything for about a week, even something as simple as sitting or standing was incredibly painful for about a week.
To deal with the pain, I would then take muscle relaxants and painkillers until I was better and then I would carry on with my usual routine until it happened again a few months later. This is the cycle that I lived in and for about 10 years I assumed that this was due to a bulging disc in my lower back from that day of squatting.
3 years ago, I went to see an amazing physiotherapist in Singapore named Diego for some shoulder pain that I was experiencing, and after the initial consultation and examine my biomechanics, Diego told me that the reason I was having this pain was because my muscles had become so tight from all the years of sports and lifting weights that my muscles could not glide over each other when doing normal movements. You can imagine this as your muscle being glued together so when I tried to bend, my lower back muscles would spasm to protect my spine.
In a normal functioning movement, there are many muscles involved so your muscles should be able to glide over each other, and during a specific movement, it should transfer the effort from one muscle to another to give you that full range of motion.
My muscles weren't able to glide over each other as they meant to for normal movement and functioning. While I was doubting that he could fix the issue, he said he could and we set out to work.
For every hourly session that I went to see him, we started off with anywhere from 15-45 minutes of muscle tissue release which felt similar to a deep tissue massage of any extremely tight muscles, and then spent the rest of the time using different types of pilates machines to bring back movement into those muscles and teach those muscles to glide again. doing the Deep tissue release was crucial because it helped release the tension in the muscles that we were going to work on during the Pilates session.
The thing about back pain is that it can be caused by so many other things. Lower back pain can be caused by having a tight and stiff upper back. It also can be caused by any muscles that connect to the hip flexors. My hamstrings and my inner thigh muscles were also extremely tight and the machines that we used helped me to go deeper into stretching these muscles out than you would normally be able to do by stretching on your own. The purpose of the machines was not to stretch, but to increase the range of movement of each muscle and to teach the muscles how to glide over each other as they should, rather than being one big chunk of muscle that is all stuck together.
From the very first session, I had to trust my physiotherapist to not only push me past my limits but also to challenge me and help me build trust in my body's ability to adapt and open up to this sort of retraining.
I remember at times being so nervous that I would have another spasm during the session because I was starting to gain movement back and was bending in ways I hadn’t in a very long time.
Since I started physiotherapy 3 years ago with Diego, I’ve not had a single back spasm. I have also stopped physiotherapy 6 months ago and I continue to stretch a few times a week for 30mins to an hour to make sure that I never go back to how things used to be.
So if you are having back pain that wasn’t caused by an injury and now you have restricted movement, I would highly recommend seeing a physiotherapy to see how you can work on bringing movement back into your muscles, but definitely consider doing some form of reformer Pilates because it’s extremely helpful in strengthening your muscles while in a stretched position without overloading your body with too much weight so that you can make slow and steady consistent gains in loosening your muscles and increasing your range of movement.