4 Reasons Your Lower Back Pain Keeps Coming Back

Have you ever noticed that even when you’re trying to relax… your lower back never quite relaxes? Or maybe you suffer flare ups of lower back pain a few times a year, or… Maybe you had lower back pain, and it improved, but it seems to be hanging around still… just at a lower level?

You might stretch, rest, or even do regular strengthening… but it just seems to linger.

For many people, lower back fatigue, tension and pain persists, because the lower back is compensating for weakness or dysfunction in onther parts of the body. If these other areas don’t get dealt with. Then even though the lower back tissues that originaly were injured, but now seem to have healed… symptoms just stubbornly seem to stay.

Ever wondered why? There are 4 specific areas of dysfunctions, that if they remain dysfunction become the reasons your lower back pain keeps coming back!

Want to read the transcript instead?

here it is…

4 Reasons Your Lower Back Pain Keeps Coming Back

How the rib cage, pelvis and fascial systems influence the spine

Ever Had Lower Back Pain?

If you’ve ever had lower back pain, you’ve probably been told something like, you’ve strained a muscle, your disc is bulging, you just need to stretch more.

And sometimes those things are true, but here’s the part that most people don’t get told. In many cases, the lower back isn’t actually the main cause of the pain. It is simply the area that’s ended up doing too much work and therefore caused a disc bulge or a muscle strain because other parts of the body aren’t functioning well. So the back becomes tight, irritated, and painful. But the real issue maybe somewhere else entirely.

Hi, I’m Alexis Weidland, osteopath and nutritionist at Blossoming Me and Healthy Learning Lounge, and in this video, I’d like to help you to understand why lower back pain actually happens, why it often keeps coming back, and why looking at the whole body is the key to improving it.

Lower back pain

Is one of the most common health issues in the world. Around 80% of people experience it at some point.

It can show up in very different ways:

• After lifting something heavy,
• Maybe after bending over to pick up something, probably even light , or
• It slowly builds over time due to posture, stress, and reduced movement.

But one of the most confusing parts for people is that scans don’t always explain the pain.

The Problem with Scans

There are three general situations that we can see with scans

1. Pain, but nothing significant on imaging.
   • You may suffer real, significant pain, but your scan doesn’t actually show anything useful.
2. Findings on a scan, but you doesn’t actually have any pain in that area at all (maybe found incidentally).
   • You may have disc bulges or degeneration and arthritis, but you feel completely fine , or
3. Both findings on a scan and pain are present, but these are not clearly linked.
   • If you have both pain and findings on a scan – we can’t confidently say that what we find on the scan is the cause of your pain.

So what does it tell us then?

That the pain is not just about the structure, the missing piece is load and our capacity.

A helpful way to understand this is. Pain is often about the relationship between the load placed on the body and the body’s ability to cope with that load.

You can think of it a bit like if the body is distributing load well, adapting well and has overall good capacity, it will tolerate a lot.

Sometimes even when there are structural changes that would often expect to cause pain, but if the body is already under strain, then even a small additional load can trigger pain.

So instead of asking only what structure is damaged?

We also need to ask why did that area become overloaded in the first place?

What Causes the Lower Back to Compensate?

The lower back is a load transfer hub.

It sits in a very important position in the body, and it connects the ribcage above the pelvis and hips below and the legs that move us.

Because of this, it’s designed to share load, not carry it alone. When everything is working well,

• Our hips move comfortably, freely, easily, and fully.
• The ribcage moves, expands side bends, rotates easily.
• Our diaphragm and the thoracolumbar fascia both stabilize the lumbar spine and the forces then transfers smoothly through the body.

=> Movement feels efficient, comfortable.

But when the system isn’t working well, the lower back has to start to compensate. And that’s when irritation and pain can begin to develop.

Most back pain tends to involve a combination of three main factors.

Local tissue irritation

Sometimes the pain is coming from those structures in the lower back itself. This could include:

• Joints,
• Muscles,
• Ligaments,
• Discs
• Nerve irritation.

For example, a disc may bulge and irritate a nerve leading to pain or symptoms down the leg, as well as in the back.

But even here, we still need to ask

Why did that area become overloaded in the first place?

The second one is movement and load transfer patterns.

The lower back doesn’t work in isolation. It relies on coordination between the hips, the pelvis, the ribcage, the spine.

Modern life often leads to

• prolonged sitting,
• reduced movement and activity,
• shallow breathing and stress levels,
• stiff hips,
• stiff rib cage.

When these happen, the lower back often ends up doing too much, either:

👉 moving too much, or

👉 being stabilized and protected too much.

So this can create tension, fatigue, irritation, and over time it increases risk of injury.

There’s another layer that often gets missed. The nervous system.

When the body is under prolonged stress:

• the muscles need to stay guarded
• you get increased pain sensitivity, and
• our healing capacity also reduces.

👉 You get breath changes, posture changes, tension changes, and the body shifts into a more protective state.

👉 This protection is helpful short term, but over time, it can become excessive, and this is where many people get stuck.

What Does Stuck Look Like?

They might regularly stretch the back, do strengthening of the back and massage their back, and it all helps at least temporarily. But if the underlying system hasn’t changed, the same patterns rebuild the pain returns. And one of the most important and often overlooked contributors to this system is…

How does the body manage – breathing, load transfer, and fascial connections?

Structures like the:

👉 diaphragm,

👉 thoracolumbar fascia,

👉 psoas and

👉 rib cage.

They play a major role in how forces move through the body. And if these aren’t functioning well, the lower back often ends up compensating.

The key points here are:

=> The lower back isn’t necessarily weak.

=> Pain doesn’t necessarily mean something is damaged or broken.

👉 Often, it means that – the system around it needs better support.

👉 When we start looking at the body as a whole, instead of just focusing on the one painful area, things begin to change.

In the next video, I’ll start by identifying what factors might be contributing to your own back pain because different people experience back pain for different reasons.

So that’s it for today. Did it raise any questions or aha moments? If so, I’d love to hear them. So please put those in the comment section. I love answering questions. I hope you found today useful. And if you know someone who could use this information, please share it. Remember to comment, like and subscribe.

Until next time and in health, bye for now.

Click the Button Below for my RibCage Reset min-course

Interested in further reading?

1. 1. 1. Postural function of Diaphragm altered with Breathing Requirements
      2. Functions of the Thoracolumbar Fascia
      3. The Diaphragm, spinal stabilisation and Lower Back Pain
      4. Altered Diaphragm position & Function with Chronic Lower Back Pain
      5. The Diaphragm is a central conenctor, affecting organs, the nervous system and the musculoskeletal system
      6. The Diaphragm Functions together with the Lumbar Multifidi and Thoraculumbar Fascia

About Blossoming Me

BlossomingMe offers a fully integrated approach to your wellbeing. Located on Sydney’s Upper North Shore. Sarah is our Cranio-sacral and Remedial Massage Therapist and health and lifestyle coach. She can help relieve those problematic knots, tightness and other specific ailments to promote a healthy recovery. These complementary massage therapies can be combined to suit your needs, and include: craniosacral therapy, shiatsu, acupressure, reiki, remedial, swedish, and body-mind-massage. 

Our qualified Osteopath, Alexis, offers a drug free, minimally invasive, “hands on” treatment focusing on the musculoskeletal system with its associated muscles, tendons, ligaments, membranes, bones and joints. Alexis takes a functional approach. This means that she focuses on the way a component (body part, tissue or group of tissues) performs its role, as well as the way the body works, performs and integrates as a whole. Our team can support you to improve your posture and therefore your overall health.