It seems easy to blame our “new” back pain on the fact that we raked leaves yesterday or the heavy wet snow we just shoveled or the heavy brick we just lifted the wrong way or that we slept in the wrong position last night.
You can look at this as good news or bad, but - No one single event, activity or “thing” can do all that damage - These activities are merely the last straw that breaks the camel’s back...
The fact is your back is giving you trouble not because of one single event but your lifestyle - your sedentary postural habits and motion habits.
…It's the way you sleep every night on your side or with one leg straight and the other knee bent and dragged up in a semi-crawl position. It's the way you sit in your car leaning on the center consul. It’s the way you crash on your couch and watch television every night. It is the way that you carry your briefcase in the same hand every day. It's the way you sleep on the train when commuting to your job every day. It’s the way you sit slumped over your computer.
And. it’s the way you always lean forward in your chair to stand up. It’s the way you basically do a straight-leg sit-up to get up when you’re lying in your bed. It’s the way you neglect to bend your knees when you bend down to pick something up.
Sedentary postural habits and motion habits throw your body out of structural symmetry and balance. They cause ligaments on one side of your body to become more elongated and relaxed than their balancing counterpart on the opposite side of the body.
And - They cause the muscles on one side of your body to become longer, more stretched out and weaker than their stronger, balancing, counterpart on the other side.
The overall effect of this is your body slowly, incrementally, goes out of balance.
Once we are out of balance and symmetry, the motion of the joints, which is completely muscle and ligament tone, length and shape-dependent, must also become out of balance. Joints become stuck and cannot move freely.
Joint motion that is missing or simply out of balance will always trigger a cascade of neurologic signaling events throughout your nervous system.
Once that happens – a number of things begin to occur:
Your brain / computer takes those signals and translates them to what we interpret on a conscious level as -
pain.
It also takes those signals and alters the function of one organ / area of your body or another depending upon which nerve pathway is involved, it almost always results in your health deteriorating or failing to one degree or another.
It's takes a while, but yes, there is also... always a last straw
And it is that last straw that we tend to say caused our back problem…
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