Can exercise help low back pain?

Can exercise help low back pain or could it make it worse?

Dr Dustin discusses how it can help your low back pain!

TRANSCRIPT OF VIDEO BELOW

Today I wanted to talk to you guys about if exercise can help or hurt low back pain. A lot of y’all know that I’m also co-owner and coach of Crossfit Barbell Republic. We always find that line of should I send somebody here to work out, immediately?

Is that gonna help, or do I need to wait, or should they not ever do it? Whenever we have people working out we send them over to see me at my office. Are patients usually getting something corrected or are we working on it here? It really plays into a couple of different things that could be going on.

One, exercise is essential to life. It’s essential to movement, it’s essential to keeping your body good and not having pain. But sometimes you can have some underlying issues. Here you may want to hang off a little bit before you get in, or you may want to work yourself in slowly. I always give the example of deadlifts. Deadlifts are one of the best exercises. Do this for strength, stability, and for being able to live a long life without getting hurt.

But let’s say that I’m doing a perfect dead lift. If I’m set from the side and my coach can see that I’m keeping perfect form, but inside my spine is curved to the side. Muscles on one side are gonna be tight and the other’s are going to be stretched out. So my body’s gonna pull abnormally. I do deadlifts, they say that form is perfect, but then my low back hurts afterwards.

Sometimes we’ll find while we’re testing the waters that someone isn’t moving forward. Especially with exercises and it’s irritating things. That’s when we send them into the office so I can take an x-ray to see if there is something else going on. Also if we’re working on someone in the office, once they’re getting stable we want to send them in to start exercising. We want to build some strength and stability around their spine because that’s essential. Exercises like deadlifts have gotten demonized, but they’re essential. We HAVE to train a deadlift if we don’t want to get hurt picking up a potted plant or a grandkid or something similar. So actually getting with a good trainer and having him teach you how to do that properly is really important.

I hope that answers some of the questions and I know some of these answers can be yes and no, and it’s because the questions are really dependent on different variables of what’s going on. I always encourage everybody to exercise and practice perfect form. If someone’s practicing perfect form with a coach and there’s still some problems lingering around, get it checked out.

It’s better to know for sure exactly what’s going on than it is to risk hurting yourself more and then not being able to get things corrected. If you have any other questions feel free to reach out to me directly. I’d love to see you whenever you come in to Denison Chiropractic and if y’all need a place to work out, we’re always glad to have you here at Barbell Republic.

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