Reasons Why Your Exercises for Back Pain Are Not Working

We know how frustrating it is when the exercises you have been doing for your back pain are not working. Back pain is consuming and prevents you from being productive at work, present with your family and friends, and enjoying and overall high quality of life.

If the exercises to help your back pain were prescribed by a professional, this is especially true.

We see this happen frequently at Striation 6. Many of our clients try to resolve their back pain on their own or with professional help to no avail. This is not a criticism of our medical and paramedical colleagues! It is simply something we notice and, using a collaborative approach, do our best to solve using our Muscle System Work service.

I have personal experience dealing with body pain, including searing, sharp, high-level pain in my back. I can relate firsthand to how frustrating it is when the pain cycle just won’t seem to break. However, I can also tell you firsthand that there is hope – especially when it comes to the exercises you can do for your back pain.

We would love to help you figure out the right exercise strategy for your back pain

One of my Muscle System Work colleagues or I would love to meet you to discuss a potential solution for your back pain. If you are not ready for that yet, no worries. Read through this post and see if the guidelines here are helpful towards improving your exercises for your back pain.

Openly, these are general guidelines. Since we do not know you or your specific situation or history, we cannot make specific recommendations. However, the principles here should help guide you towards improving your situation

Feel free to click the button below to learn more about Muscle System Work, too! I hope you enjoy this post and find it helpful in improving your exercises for your back pain.

You Are Overly Dependent on Stretching As Exercise For Back Pain

Exercises for back pain (for many different kinds of pain) will frequently include various “stretches”. I put that word in quotation marks for a particular reason, and will elaborate on it shortly.

The thinking behind this tends to be that these “stretches”:

• can be helpful a certain percentage of the time;
• are easy to do in a variety of locations; and,
• are gentle enough that you often do them even if you’re in pain.

However, there are many problems with stretches as an exercise solution for your back pain, or for any pain. Stretching may not work to resolve your pain issues for several reasons.

What do you mean by stretching?

There are so many different ways to “stretch” that it is hard to define all of them as one kind of exercise.

For example, think of the “stretch” typically associated with waking up in the morning. In this scenario, a person sits up in bed and actively reaches their arms over their head while yawning and taking in the morning sunshine. The “stretch” happens through entirely active means by the person performing it.

Contrast that with a typical upper-body warm-up “stretch” where one might use their left forearm or hand to passively pull their right arm across their chest. The “stretch” happens through passive means for the “stretched” area.

We don’t have to get into deep analysis here to understand that these two scenarios are very different. And if you’re dealing with a pain issue, each might have very different effects on your pain situation.

So, what unites these (and other) various forms of stretching since they can be so different? In my personal opinion, it is as simple as sensation. These exercises, though they can vary in intensity and specific qualities, all have that same “stretchy” feeling to them. If you are unaware of how they might differentiate, then it is easy to unite them under the same banner purely based on that “stretching” sensation that they evoke.

Now, to be fair, medical and paramedical practitioners are usually specific about how they want patients to perform these exercises. However, the specifics of such a prescription are easily compromised by factors such as failure of memory or a lack of understanding on the part of the participant.

Key Takeaway: Ask the right questions and get specific about how each stretch executes before performing it.

You are stretching the wrong area of your body

You might be stretching the wrong area of your body to solve your back pain issues. This generally happens for two different reasons.

1. You perform the exercise incorrectly, or with a significant variation. Or, at least, differently from the intended version of it. And, in doing so, you have changed the exercise. Depending on your specific situation, that might render it useless or even harmful.
2. The focus area of the stretch is inappropriate for your situation. Different stretches target different areas of the body. Your specific back pain situation will call for specific targeted areas to garner pain relief, and those areas could vary from the “norm”. I will elaborate on this further later in this post. Essentially, if the wrong area of your body is in focus for a particular stretch (or any exercise!) it will have a null or aggravating effect on your pain situation.

Key Takeaway: Do your best to ensure that your chosen or prescribed stretches are targeting the right areas of your body.

The stretching is only helpful temporarily

Certain exercises and stretches can help your back feel better, but the relief is only temporary. Mild stimulation of the muscle system often has a pain-relieving effect. But, in my opinion, that doesn’t mean they “worked” to solve your problem.

Pain relief through exercise is possible. We’ve seen it happen time and time again at Striation 6. However, it only happens on a progressive, process-oriented basis, where your relief:

• lasts;
• gets progressively better; and,
• leads to you having better body confidence – less inhibition about using your body in your desired activities.

Of all the forms of exercise out there, stretching is most likely to have an analgesic effect. If you only feel better for a short period of time – minutes or a couple of hours – then you should not consider them an effective pain solution.

Key Takeaway: Monitor how long your stretches as exercise for back pain

Your Exercises Back Pain Are Either Too Hard or Too Easy

As strange as it sounds, exercises for your back pain that are either too easy or too hard are both ineffective. It is important to explore this so you understand how you might change what you are doing to solve your back pain problems.

The Goldilocks Zone

Have you ever heard of The Goldilocks Zone? Intuitively, you might understand what it means: when something is “just right”.

The term originally referred to the range of orbits around a star within which a planet could be habitable. Ie., how close or far could a planet be before liquid water would either boil or freeze and, therefore, become uninhabitable.

Why am I writing about this? Because it applies to exercise. This is especially true for exercise that applies to a specific, sensitive goal, such as resolving back pain. “Too Hard” and “Too Easy” each come with their own foibles.

If your exercises for back pain are too hard . . .

This is the more familiar of the two scenarios. If you are going through a bout of back pain, then you will know rather quickly if the exercises selected to help you are too hard. Some signs of this are:

• The pain or discomfort of doing the exercise are intolerable.
• The pain consistently gets worse after doing the exercise.
• You begin to have pain in adjacent areas to the original pain site (Eg. pain in your hip in addition to pain in your back)
• The exercise drains you or causes excess fatigue.

Sometimes the issue is not the exercise, but the way you are doing it that makes it too hard. In other words, you might be doing the right thing, but doing it in a way that is inappropriate for your current status. Here are some simple changes to help makes back pain exercise go from being too hard to (potentially) just right;

1. Slow down. Moving quickly through an exercise literally increases the forces that your body has to handle. This can render a great exercise ineffective. Progress your speed gradually and as it is appropriate to do so.
2. Use less load. If a back pain exercise requires you to use added load, consider lowering the load until you can perform the exercise comfortably and effectively.

Key Takeaway: If a back pain exercise is too hard, then it will not be effective in solving your back pain problem. Consider altering it so that it is appropriately challenging, and then progress it slowly as you feel better.

If your exercises for back pain are too easy . . .

If the exercises for your back pain are too easy, then there will not be enough stimulus to cause the change needed in your system. In other words, they will seem ineffective. Finding the appropriate level of effort and load to make up an exercise to help with a pain issue is nuanced. While it is better to be risk-averse with this kind of exercise, being so risk-averse that you are under-training yields no progress. Furthermore, just as when the exercise is too hard for your pain situation, you might get a false negative on whether the exercise was effective in solving your problem. Ie., It will come across as ineffective as a problem solving tool (negative), but that might have been because you were performing it in a way that was too easy to cause a change in your pain situation (falsely giving you the ineffective result).

Your exercises for back pain might be too easy for a number of reasons. Here are a few to consider.

You are afraid of making your pain worse, so you don’t make an appropriate effort.

While this is totally understandable, taking your back pain exercises too easily based on fear of increasing pain is not helpful.

You have limited or insufficient access to the right exercise tools.

Whether or not you are a “gym person”, a good gym has tools that most people cannot access from home. This should include the tools that help people like you address their back pain. If someone has told you that everything you need to solve your back pain problems through exercise is available at home, then that is most likely a lie. Not because the person is malicious. It is more likely that they are following a “belief” system or are just unaware of how the tools at a good gym can serve to create optimal exercises for your back pain.

This is the knowledge base that separates a Muscle System (Work) Specialist from other kinds of practitioners who deal with pain.

Key Takeaway: The effort and intensity of your exercises for back pain must be appropriate – neither too difficult nor too easy – to be effective.

Your Exercises for Back Pain Are Overly Focused on Your Back

Read that again.

It might seem strange to read at first, but it refers to an important point for your consideration.

There is a very good chance that the pain in your back is not being caused by anything wrong with your back! Our body view at Striation 6 is summarized as follows:

• The brain and central nervous system (CNS) govern the body.
• The muscular system is one of many sub-systems within the body governed by the CNS. The muscular system gives to and receives information from the CNS along with every other sub-system in the body.
• Dysfunction anywhere in the muscular system can create unwanted pain at its site or anywhere else in the muscular system. It can also create dysfunction (or be the result of dysfunction) in other body sub-systems.
• The CNS is plastic and can adapt positively to appropriately dosed and administered exercise.
• Therefore, improvement in dysfunction anywhere in the muscular system can positively affect the system as a whole.
• It follows from these tenets both that: a) exercises for your back pain should not necessarily focus on one particular area of the body, including the back itself; and, b) exercises that amend dysfunction in areas of the muscular system adjacent or even distant from your back have the potential to amend the unwanted sensations in your back, too.

If that is too much, think of it this way: the whole body is connected, so appropriate improvement anywhere can help the body everywhere.

The crucial component to this is identifying which parts of the muscular system need attention and improvement. If you or your practitioner of choice has defaulted to exercises that target the back and you don’t see any improvement, then targeting other areas of the body.

“But, which areas should I target?”

Well, that is the question. You could guess. You could make an educated guess based on studies or one of the thousands of articles about exercises for back pain from major media outlets. Or, you could go through a personalized, data-driven process that identifies areas of concern and attention in your system. The choice is yours.

Key Takeaway: Strengthening adjacent or distant parts of your muscular system from your back has the potential to solve your back pain problems. The key is knowing which parts to tend to.

The Right Exercise for the Win

Searching out exercises for your back pain is certainly worthwhile. The right exercises at the appropriate intensity can feel miraculous as they eliminate unwanted sensations and pain in your back.

I hope that the challenges and solutions presented here illuminate the process for you and guide you towards pain-free living and full body confidence.

If you have been nodding along or are curious about the information presented here, we offer a free initial Muscle System Work consultation to discuss your pain problems, find out more about your goals, and get an idea about whether or not we can help you.

We will only take on clients we are confident that we can help.

Click here if you would like to read more about Muscle System Work. If you are ready to book your consultation, click the button below.

We look forward to meeting and, hopefully, helping you along the path to pain-free living through customized, data-driven exercise.