How to test your body posture

A relaxed, balanced posture is the key to a pain free back. To make sure you achieve this healthy stance, a key group of cells called the proprioceptors send messages to the brain regarding the correct alignment of muscles. In our hectic lives, we often don’t listen to the signals our body sends us. The more we ignore these signals, the worse our pain and posture becomes.

 

To test your own body posture, complete this exercise. Stand on one leg with your arms outstretched at either side. You will notice a wobble, but normally nothing you can’t control. Now try doing this with your eyes closed. The better your mind-body connection, the longer you will be able to maintain this position. This demonstrates that the mind is a vital part of maintaining a healthy balance in the back. Whether it is from persistent poor posture, repeated chair sitting or the effects of aging, back pain is all too common. The good news is that there is help for chronic back pain and a good way to do this is bay undertaking pilates and yoga based lower back exercises.

 

Understanding your spine and back muscles

To understand why our backs hurt, it helps to investigate this area of our body in more detail. The back is made up of layers of interwoven muscles that wrap around the ‘S’ shape of the spine. The back is made up of 24 vertibrae that are joined together by discs that are filled with fluid and are designed to absorb shocks. When we are born, these discs contain 80% water, but as we age, this reduces in water content, making our backs much less flexible than before and more susceptible to back pain. This natural aging process combined with our chair bound lifestyles contributes to our increasing back pain epidemic. To combat these effects, it is important that we undertake lower back exercises so that we can increase our overall flexibility.

Asia, Eastern cultures and lower back exercises

In Asia and eastern cultures it is much more normal for people to sit in a cross legged position or posture. This is much better for us as it aligns the hips and spine and forces our back muscles to work harder. The less flexibility you have in the hips, the more likely you are to begin to have back pain. As a result it is essential that you do everything to increase your hip movement.

Lower Back Exercises – an introduction to my readers

Hello and wecome to my back health website.

A few years ago I started getting back pain. Being a typical office worker, this started from sitting all day in my chair and basically not moving around enough. We sit in a seat of some kind most of the day. On the way to work, when we arrive at work, when we eat our lunch, the pattern continues. This is gradually reducing the strength and effectiveness of our core muscles and particularly our back and reduces our overall hip flexibility. It has been clinically proven that this is a major cause of lower back pain.

What I’m trying to do with this site is provide an online resource where most of the information that you’re going to need about your lower back and how to improve your back pain can be found.

I hope you find some of the content useful. It would be great to get your feedback about some of the information that I have on here. If you’ve tried some of the lower back exercises and have some more to add, please send them through or make a comment about how they have gone.

Best wishes,

Marie-Anne Davidson