New issue of The Back Coach Newsletter is up. Check out article Three-Step Plan for Regaining Lost Activities and information about the Introduction to BACKCoach Series.
http://backcoach.net/site/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=45&Itemid=53
If you experience persistent or periodic back pain, it may seem like the best thing to do is to stop doing activities that seem to harm it. But it is important to understand that your back and your body need to move regularly to function at its best and that participating in regular physical activity is an important step in recovery. In fact, “protecting” you back through inactivity may be contributing to the pain.
It may also be important to step back into physical activity gradually, both to get your body used to activity again and to convince yourself that it is beneficial to be active.
If you’ve been inactive for a prolonged period of time, you may need to use a gradual approach. Your muscles and joints may be tight and your cardiovascular system may not be at its best. Try this simple, three-step plan to regaining all activities, adapted from Dr. Ronald’s Siegel’s Back Sense program.
Step One. List all of the activities that you’ve stopped, modified or restricted because of the pain you’ve experienced in your back. It may take awhile to compile this list if it’s been a long time since you began protecting your back. Be thorough and complete, including all areas of your life, from sports and leisure to housework and personal care.
Step Two. For each activity, rate how much you enjoy the activity and how difficult you perceive the activity to be. You may wish to use a scale such as enjoy/ok/dislike and easy/moderate/difficult.
Step Three. Next, review your list and select an item to resume. Begin with an activity that you find both enjoyable and easy to do and make a plan to do this activity in the next 24 hours. Remember to take slow, deep breaths during the activity because previous pain experiences may be signaling to your brain that it needs protection (by tightening muscles) and this response could make movement uncomfortable. Direct deep breaths to any muscles that may be resisting activity. Walking is a great activity to start with for most people.
Over time, make your way through your list until you can do everything that you wish to do and have fully regained all desired activities. It may take some time, both from a physical standpoint and to convince you that it is all right to move again. Each time you regain an activity you will be building self-efficacy and have more confidence that you can go on to the next activity.
Enjoy all of the benefits of physical activity, including stress relief, a healthy spine and body, enjoyment of activities and a full, active life. Being physically active will also help you in many other ways, from the physical to the social and psychological and by using the byproducts of the stress response and bringing your metabolism back to baseline after prolonged stress.
Start the process of doing everything that you wish to do – today!
This is a great video that shows how making things fun can engage people and change their health behaviors.
It’s great fun to watch…
There are sooooo many ways this concept can be applied, and on so many levels, from city planning to our daily walk.
Mary Williams, MSEd, CPE’s Contributor Profile – Associated Content
http://www.associatedcontent.comuser/635729/mary_williams_msed_cpe.html
When people first experience back pain, many will respond by cutting back on activities. This is a natural reaction and very useful in other circumstances such as breaking a bone or coming down with the flu. There are many circumstances for which resting and taking some time off from physical activity is recommended and useful for recovery and to allow the body to heal.
Unfortunately, this is an approach that rarely works with back pain, especially after the first day or so following the initial onset of pain. Here’s why. (more…)
As a BACKCoach working with clients experiencing chronic back pain, I notice that people’s beliefs about back pan often serve as obstacles to relief. The prevalent societal belief that experiencing pain in the torso can become a part of one’s identity or personal description is interesting to consider both from a sociological standpoint and from the standpoint of relief and recovery.
It is interesting to note that when many of us experience back pain, we mentally put ourselves into the category of having “a bad back.” It’s as if the world is divided into two types of people, those with bad backs and those without. And that once you enter the former group, the latter is no longer available.
Why is this? When we sprain an ankle, catch a cold or break a bone, we don’t wear these events as a part of our identities in perpetuity, so why do we do this with back pain?
If we want to relieve back pain and get back to going back to doing everything that we wish to do, we need to first challenge this underlying belief. What exactly do we mean when we say we have a bad back? Why do we put a label on our backs and not other body parts? Why do we think that our backs are so fragile and poorly designed that one pain experience equates to permanent damage? (more…)
From UMass…
The chance of becoming obese increase by 450% (!!!) if you regularly skip breakfast. Also goes up, to lesser degrees, if you wait 3+ hrs after waking (43%), eat out (137%), or go to bed on an empty stomach (101%). Enjoy your breakfast!
Our bodies are remarkable in their efforts to protect us, and one of the ways that it does this is through muscular bracing. Let me explain what I mean by this through a personal example, The Speed Bump.
My back pain started after an auto accident back in 1988. I was a passenger in a car that was hit twice on the drivers’ side and reacted at the time by bracing my arms and legs against the car windows and floor. After that event, I was a pretty nervous passenger for quite some time.
In the days, then years, after the accident, my brain told my body that it had to protect itself. During the accident this was an all-out stress response, but subsequently it was in more subtle ways. When I was a passenger, I would get nervous and my brain kept telling my muscles to brace for impact by tightening my back muscles. (more…)
Our bodies are designed to move and when we allow our bodies movement, we begin to feel better. We can’t help but feel better because we are doing what we were designed to do and born to do. Once we have the experience of feeling good, our bodies will always remember this feeling, on a cellular level, and it will want it again.
Self-efficacy is an impression that we have of how successful we will be in the future based on similar experiences from our past. We have negative self-efficacy when we look back on negative experiences to predict the future. We build positive self-efficacy, or the belief/confidence that we can do something when we create successes for ourselves. Each successful experience, no matter how large or how small, will convince us of our ability to be successful again.
When a person experiences chronic back pain, chances are that they are in something referred to as a Cycle of Pain. It goes something like this…
A ‘triggering event’ leads to an initial experience of back pain. For most people this pain resolves itself within a few days to a few weeks, regardless of what they do. However, for others it continues. This is called chronic back pain. When back pain does not quickly resolve, negative thoughts start to emerge, thoughts like, I’m damaged, I won’t/can’t do the things that I enjoy, I’ll never get better, or This must be serious!
Mary Williams, MSEd, CPE’s Contributor Profile – Associated Content
