The Importance Of Cardiovascular Fitness For Your Back Health

Welcome to the Back Pain Solutions Podcast – The Importance Of Cardiovascular Fitness For Your Back Health

If you like the show, we would be grateful if you would consider leaving the show a review on iTunes as well as Stitcher Radio. A couple minutes of your time can help the show immensely! Thank YOU!

Listen To The Episode Below

Episode Introduction

The last thing many people think about when they’re suffering from a lower back injury, or any injury for that matter, is whether their fitness levels are good enough to help with the recovery process. Our fitness levels are increased by the amount of cardiovascular intensive training we perform and this is increased by regularly challenging the cardiovascular system through exercise. There are numerous ways to train the cardiovascular system effectively but when suffering from injury we want to make sure that we do this in a way which does not make the injury worse but instead helps to support the healing process.

In this episode we talk about the things you can do to safely ensure that you maintain, and even increase, your physical fitness levels. We explain why this is so important and how it affects the injury in a positive way. We also discuss which cardiovascular training exercises will help you increase your cardiovascular capacity safely.

Some of the things to consider:

Have you honestly taken action to do some daily exercise to support your back and mental health?
Could a proactive approach make you more resilient to future infections?
How important is movement to your back health?
Have you established a healthy morning routine to support your health and well-being?
Do you want to come out of this pandemic better than you were at the beginning?!

Episode Highlights

Understanding why your cardiovascular fitness is important in your recovery to injury is often overlooked and yet it can have a positive effect on tissue healing. Not only can you maintain your current levels of fitness but you can increase your fitness levels if you make wise decisions during your rehabilitation.

GET OUR FREE EBOOK

Start taking control of your back health today! Enter your details below

Episode Transcription

Intro 0:00
When we’re young, we move with freedom and confidence with a great resilience to injury. But somewhere along the line, we develop poor habits and become more vulnerable to back pain, back pain solutions features evidence based and practical advice to help you take back control of your health and get back to the activities you love. This is your guide to better back health through movement. So join us as we demystify some of the commonly held beliefs about back pain and build your confidence to a stronger back the smartway.

Jacob Steyn 0:28
Hello, back to the show. This is Jacob, and today I’ll be doing a solo. So I hope to tell me more about why it’s important to hold on to your physical condition, in this case, your cardiovascular fitness level when you have a lower back injury. So that’s, in most cases, the last thing we think about when we get injured, we don’t think about the fact that we have in some cases, if we’re doing sport already a fitness level, we focus on the fact that we have an injury, we think, Okay, what can we do to get that better. And that would usually be either to relax the low back or to do specific exercises, in general, usually isolated exercises to assist and speed up the recovery. So you may want to ask yourself, why would it be a good idea to do some sort of cardio when you’re recovering from a low back injury? It’s very simple. If you think about it, we we want to speed up the metabolism of more or less everything in the body. And that’s going to speed up the recovery of the tissue. But it’s also going to make sure that there’s more fluids coming to the area more blood, which means no more nutrients. And we also want to make sure that we get function into that area, because there’s a good old saying going that form follows function. And if we, depending on the injury, end up with some scar tissue formation, or, you know, we had a break or a serious tendon or ligament tear, there’s a there’s a big responsibility on the body to heal, ideally back to the same point or strength that we had before in those tissues. And so not moving means that we we might end up with a poor scar tissue formation, which might end up in either more stiffness in that joint or less proper function. So we want to move but we also want to make sure that we move enough, so we increase the basal metabolic rate. And so we take care of cellular repair, and we get the nutrients there by making sure we get lots of fluid pumped into the area that can really really speed up the rate of recovery. So before we continue, we have to speak about a few things that you might consider, especially if you have a low back injury. You know, and if you’re not being coached by a professional coach doing a high level sport, maybe you know you have a day job and you’re a runner or a cyclist or you have a hobby and and you’ve got injured and now you’re wondering what to do, then hopefully I can ask some questions in this podcast. So the first thing you want to do is make sure that you just have a quick look at your body, like how are the rest of your body doing besides your low back injury. So if we don’t have any knee problems, we don’t have any shoulder problems, then it opens up more possibility to do other things, where we’re not going to maybe put so much load onto the lower back. And so if there’s something you have to keep in mind, like a poor knee or something, we want to not embark on a different exercise where we’re going to keep up our cardio level, we’re going to put more load through the knee and we might end up with another injury. So we have to be a little bit smarter than the way we approach it. And so we have to look at this from the perspective of Have you been doing a sort of cardio training before? Or are you listening to the podcast and you now have a low back injury? And now you think okay, I would like to start doing some form of cardio because I I hear over here in this podcast that it’s a good idea. If you’re from the last group, then you have to take precaution and you have to slowly build up the the level of fitness without injuring the back further So that we’re not going in the opposite direction of the whole of our aim. If you’re in the first group, and you’ve been doing some form of exercise before you had some base fitness level, then it would be a real shame to lose that, because we have a lower back injury. And so for both people, there’s an incentive to, to take on some form of cardio to make sure that we get better, faster. And so then we want to, we want to build it up slowly. So in anything, if, if if you are already, someone with a high level fitness, background, even if you are used to doing a lot of cardio, a lot of training throughout the week, now you have a lower back injury, depending on the type of injury, you still want to take it slow if you’re going to be doing something that you’ve not been doing before. So you’ve been running and now you’ve decided, Okay, I’m gonna get on the assault bike, because I heard it’s a great way to make sure that I’m not putting a lot of load through my low back, but I can really go hard on your salt bike and, and still get my body working. But like anything, you have to build it up slowly. So don’t jump in there and do a heavy session. To start with, I would suggest the first week, do a couple of times with only a few minutes and see how your body responds if you’re not used to it, and your body’s already using a lot of energy to get through the day, because you have to move in a compensated way. And now you get on an assault bike, and you go all out, you might not have enough energy to take care of the basic quality movement, getting through your day. So it’s build it up slowly get used to it, see what effect that has. And then you You carry on building it up even further. So then you have to remember that your lower back injury dictates what you can and can’t do. So. Myself and Ben, we always tell people to think about the the what you can do the cans and the don’ts. And that is basically, like I said dictated by your type of injury. So you have to know Am I flexion? intolerant, I’m extension intolerant? Can I bear bending forward, ideally with a neutral spine? Or is my injury of such that I have to be very careful with specific movements. So you have to understand what can I do at this point with my low back injury and what I can’t do, you might need help from a professional. And if you find a good professional, I would suggest you find somebody who’s very well aware and acquainted with McGill’s Stuart Miguel’s work would be able to tell you what you should stay away from. Because if you, if you end up triggering the injury constantly, then we we don’t progress we stay in an injured state. And so hurt does not equal harm. The other thing we have to understand is some things that we do, we might feel a little bit, but it’s not gonna throw us back, it’s not gonna make it worse. And so we, at the same time, that we keep in mind that the injury dictates what we can or can’t do. We don’t want to be overly cautious and try to not do anything in harm’s way. Because if we do too little, we might end up with a lack of the necessary movement to get better. So the exercise I would suggest we do depending on what you’re already doing is, first of all, if you can go for a walk marching powerfully, is a very good way to increase your heart rate, low level cardio, fantastic for healing, breaks down stress hormones, as well. So it’s a great way to take a break from work. So if we can twice a day, half an hour, you know, go for it. Depending on what your your low back allows you an hour might be too long, maybe even half an hour depending on where you are in your recovery phase. climbing stairs, another great way to make sure that you get a lot of work in there and you know, climbing stairs we live on the fourth floor. I’m often quite surprised how much work I have to do on my 39th year of living on this planet compared to what I used to be able to do so it’s a great way to get your heart rate up. And if you have stairs and you want to really make a workout out of it, you know go up and down numerous times you break it up into little sections and or do it a couple of times a day. Another safe way of making sure you get in to that cardio state is Aqua jogging. And I specifically say Aqua jogging and not swimming, because in some cases swimming might not be so good for your low back injury. Because there’s a lot of aberrant movement, uncontrolled movement movement, when you swim, not good for creating stability. And depending on your type of injury, might actually take you further from home. Aqua jogging is where you upright in the water in one spot, you’re actually jogging or walking at a fast pace. And you can control the movement just as you would walking on land. Except it’s a lot lighter, so you might be able to go faster. Also, depending on the type of injury you have. Another very good exercise I’m recommending to a lot of my patients is the assault bike. Now you’d have to go to a gym that has an assault bike. CrossFit gyms generally have assault bikes, it’s a bike where you sit upright, and you have it. You have it in your hands, you have that sorry, you have the you have the handlebars in your hands, and they move separately forward and backwards, together with pedalling. So there’s no free pedalling, you basically have to keep pedalling, it’s forcing you to keep pedalling and push forward and backward with your hands. So you get a very good upper body workout together with the core together with your lower body. And you bet you’re, you’re fairly upright. So you really get knackered very quickly. So you can do a few intervals, when you get your heart rate up, feels great, also very good for a warm up. And depending on the injury, most back injuries will do really good with us. And the last one is running. So if you have a very good tolerance for axial load. In other words, if you’ve done a heel drop test, which is something I do with patients standing upright, knees locked, and you drop the heels onto the floor with your full bodyweight, and there’s no pain. If your posture is good, you know you’re not over arching or you’re not changing your posture in a way when you run, so that you put unwanted load and low back, meaning that you’re able to cope with that load, then running might already be something that you’re able to do all depending on your type of low back injury. And again, keeping in mind, we don’t want to do something where we’re actually taking ourselves further from home. Things Generally, we want to avoid what I tell a lot of patients, because a lot of them have a rowing machine at home is indeed rowing. So it’s not something I recommend, because there’s a lot of flexion going on knees or going up towards the chest, bending in the low back, pulling something in a flexed position. If you’re not a professional rower, the chances that you’re doing it properly is fairly slim. Unless you’ve had someone telling you how to do it properly. And you’ve been training it that way, there’s a good chance you’re using muscles that are putting more load than what you’d like through the low back. So it’s not the ideal exercise instead, I would generally recommend you don’t do that if you’re somebody who’s sitting a lot behind a desk and and you’re prone to flexion based low back injury. rowing is definitely something that’s not going to help your posture or correct your posture when it is being in a flexed or poor posture behind the desk all day. So take care if you’re rowing. And the other thing I generally recommend not to do to patients is actually getting on the race bike. So I live in the Netherlands. And here we have a lot of people going on road bikes and they love their road bikes. But if you have a flexion based injury, or for that matter, any injury where you get move, fast moving through the low back, causing pain, getting on a race bike or a low mountain bike, it’s just not a good idea. So I hope that this podcast has helped you guys. please head over to iTunes to all the other platforms and give us a rating. Give us a thumbs up and please share this podcast and look out for the next small strong podcast. Thank you for listening and have a good day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai