Back Injury: Understanding The Importance Of Spinal Hygiene & Why It’s Fundamental To Your Recovery From Back Pain

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Welcome to the Back Pain Solutions Podcast – Back Injury: Understanding The Importance Of Spinal Hygiene & Why It’s Fundamental To Your Recovery From Back Pain

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Back Injury: Understanding The Importance Of Spinal Hygiene & Why It’s Fundamental To Your Recovery From Back Pain

Previously in this series of four episodes we discussed the importance of taking an active role in your recovery. Every day, across the world, people are doing things, people are moving, in ways that are having a negative impact on their back health. What movements are you doing each day that could be impacting your back health and causing discomfort? What are the things that you’re doing each day which you haven’t ever considered that could be aggravating your problem? Have you ever considered the things you do every day that could be impacting your back health?

In this third episode of the four-part series we introduce the importance of spinal hygiene and why this is fundamental in the recovery process. We discuss the concept of spinal hygiene and the active role you need to play in your recovery! You will learn some of the fundamental movements you need to be aware of, and the ‘back saving’ things you can do in order to avoid aggravating damaged tissue. You will be empowered to take control of the discomfort you are experiencing and start to feel in control of your recovery, which will give you the confidence that you can overcome your injury. 

Some of the things you’ll discover…

• Why spinal hygiene is so important for building tolerance
• The importance of spinal hygiene for ‘breaking’ the chronic back pain state
• The importance of moving well
• How to reduce unnecessary movement through the injured tissue
• Why keeping the end goal in sight and not focusing on the immediate pain?
• The corrective movements which focus on stabilizing the injury site
• Why strengthening the connection between the brain and hips plays a key role in low back recovery?
• Why being careful of popular yoga moves is important to your spine health

Show Highlights

Taking ownership of your back health is a key step to recovering from long term back injury but you need to understand the things you can do to help. That involves moving well and taking a considered approach to the things you do each day. Only then can you break the cycle of chronic back pain and start building up your tolerance to injury because enables the tissues to recover effectively. Only by consistently taking this approach can you enable the problem to resolve. 

Interview Transcription

Unknown Speaker 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 smart way.

Jacob Steyn 0:28
Welcome back to the back pain solutions podcast. You’re listening to your hosts today, Jacob Steyn. I’ll be doing a solo today and we’re in the third episode of a series of four, where we’re talking and looking at building tolerance when we’re thinking of low back injuries. So today we’re going to look at the topic of spinal hygiene and why this is so important. When we want to build tolerance, and we want to get out of that chronic low back injury state. So, the previous video we talked about the sensitizing first. So we mentioned that the sensitizing is the absolute very first step that we want to become aware of what we need to do to desensitize. Quite often that disc injury or what we refer to as neuropathic pain, in other words, the pain system, and not only the injury site, becoming sensitive to very little pain stimulation, which causes us to feel a lot of pain. And so once we’ve done that, we move on to the next step. And that is spinal hygiene. In other words, understanding the importance of moving well and what do I mean with moving away Well, I mean, in a way where we’re isolating the injury site, so we don’t have unwanted or unnecessary movement through the injured tissue, which will cause a pain trigger. In other words, keeping that injury going on and on and on. So, that’s the main aspect of spinal hygiene is to learn to use your body in a way where we’re where we’re allowing the desensitization, and we’re not looking up the pain trigger. And so, I want to remind you if you have a low back injury, to always keep the end goal in sight, and for a lot of us, I’ve been there as well. We we struggle to see the end goal because we’re so far down the line, we’ve got such a bad low back injury. If we have a Burning hernia. And we’re just in a completely flared up state where we so sensitized. We can barely move without causing a pain trigger, then we, we find it very difficult to see the end goal. But I’d like to encourage you to gradually start seeing that more and even visualizing pain free movement. Because if we make this visualization strong, then we have something to work towards. And we can, we can help ourselves three to remember what it felt like to have a healthy back and to enjoy the movement without having to think about how am I going to make this movement not causing pain.

So, the The other thing I want to talk about is what we call corrective movements. And so these are isolated exercises, which focuses on stabilizing the injury site. So we want to stabilize that area and not only that area, but also the areas around it to enable the body to move in a more secure or more safe way. And so, to give an example, if I have a low back injury, especially if I’ve developer developed a hernia without trauma, it most likely comes from too much repetitive movement, similar types of movement, which now caused the injury or caused the tissue to become injured. And so now I have a, I have, for example, a burning hernia. So, what I would be doing then as I would stabilize the areas around it, so I would go and work especially on my posterior chain, my glutes, my glute Meade. In other words, I would strengthen my hips. I would strengthen the communication between the brain and my hip joint muscles so that I can start moving through those and not move through my lower back. And so that would be a good way to look at spinal hygiene. And an example of that as if I brush my teeth. And I lean forward, I can either bend through my low back, or I can keep my low back in neutral, slightly shallow hollowing and I can bend through the hip joints. I have had a lot of, for example, yoga instructors or people who practice yoga daily. And I always find it very interesting. They are very good at balancing on one leg, really incredible control of the body. And mainly I think that comes because they’ve, they do it every day. When I ask them to find a neutral spine, they have absolutely no clue what a neutral spine is. And so then we go into the drills of establishing the neutral spine and how to maintain a neutral spine and bend through the hip joints. And I’m not using this example to, to speak bad of yoga. I use this example because a lot of people who practice yoga, they’re actually a very good example of people who are very aware of their bodies. And so it’s, it’s always surprises me to see that they do not understand the concept of a neutral spine. And so we have to go and work with bracing techniques, teaching them how to use the diaphragm, to create pressure in the low back while we maintain that low back, natural curve, and then giving the work to the hips. So when we think of spinal hygiene, we need to understand The importance of why are we doing it. So we need to, we need to remind ourselves that every little movement we make throughout the day can either make it worse, or can make it better. And we make a lot of different types of movements. And like we discussed in the previous episode, you need to work out a strategy for those movements that you make many times a day. So here and there, there’s going to be a movement that you find yourself doing and you realize, Oh, I could have done that better. And that’s most likely a movement that you’re not doing repetitively all day. So we want to first focus on those repetitive movements to figure out a strategy where we are not sensitizing or triggering that low back injury over and over and over. And if we have more capacity, in other words, we’re not that busy. We don’t have five children to take care of. And we have that extra energy and capacity. To look at all the smaller finer movements, then my suggestion is taking your time before you make a movement, especially a new movement, maybe stepping into the car or having to reach over a table to pick something up. Or if you work with if you have kids who are really small, take your time, find a strategy to maintain the neutral, low back curve. Learn how to brace the abdomen and give the work to the big lever. So in other words, the knees the hips in the shoulders.

So together with that spinal hygiene would also include what we discussed in the very first or the very second episode of the series. And that would be to desensitize. So making that part of your routine depending on the severity of your complaint, would mean either once or twice, three, four times a day using a strategy to decompress the spine. So I hope everybody understands what is meant with spinal hygiene. We do not only use spinal hygiene when we have an injury, but we also do that once we’re out of the injury. So we can, we can understand what is good or bad movement in terms of taxing the joints in the spine. So we can figure out a way to maintain good form, build strength in the right places, and make sure we don’t fall back or use it as a preventative strategy. So we don’t have to always think about movements that are not going to hurt our back. But instead, if we do this, we can find a way to make sure that we don’t look up repetitive movements that will causing injury and eventually cause us to become more sensitive and sensitized in the low back again. So, in our next episode of this series, we’re going to look at the isolated exercises we do to stabilize the spine. And we’re going to talk a little bit about the bracing techniques and strategies we can use to make sure that we don’t fall back because we we’ve discussed a few points today. And I have to say with all of these points, there’s always a overlap. But I would like to try and break them down so that everybody is aware of the different things that we need to focus on. And when we when we have an overview of what we need to focus on, much better equipped at making sure that we’re heading in the right direction because I see so many people who are turning up in my practice and they think that they’re doing a good thing by stretching out their low back injury in the morning and blaming it on short hamstrings or, you know, being upset with our bodies because they’re not getting better. And so they plow through with the injury, thinking that it just kind of got over. And I have to remind them that that’s not actually taking ownership of their recovery, but that’s making sure that they’re keeping themselves in that injury state. So, thank you for listening to me. Like always, please head over to iTunes and give us a rating there. You’re very welcome to have a look on the website. Download the free ebook. And I hope to see you in the next episode, where we look at stabilization of the low back

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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