Explanation of fine points for relaxing spastic muscles to recover comfort and free movement. Gentle somatic back exercise for lower back pain, from LESSON 1, The Cat Stretch.

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This is a recording after a session with a client, so you can hear her feedback as the session ends.

ON THIS PAGE: A NEW AND MORE SENSIBLE EXPLANATION OF WHAT CAUSES BACK MUSCLE SPASMS, SUBLUXATIONS, DISC HERNIATION, AND PAIN HOW AND WHY THIS ALTERNATIVE APPROACH WILL GIVE YOU FAR BETTER RELIEF THAN YOU'VE HAD BEFORE A METHODICAL, FAST-ACTING, AND SUFFICIENT WAY TO RECONDITION YOUR BACK FOR ALL ACTIVITIES

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The referrals that I have made to Lawrence were people that I felt were suffering from complex motor behavior abnormalities that had to do with muscle imbalance and the lack of motor control. His utilizing Hanna Somatic Re-education has allowed these patients to regain what the chronicity of their injuries has taken from them. We know that muscles can be pain generators. Muscles suffering from neurologic altered input can react in two ways. The first is by becoming hypertonic and short, and the other is by becoming reflexly inhibited and flaccid. Lawrence's treatment techniques and keen eye in evaluation have been a key modality in which to use in order to restore balance to these altered systems. Lawrence's ability to both diagnose, educate, and restore a better understanding with patients is his best attribute. He is well written, well-spoken, and is an asset to have as a key staff member in a multi-disciplinary approach to musculoskeletal injury and chronic pain. -- Janine Talty, D.O., M.P.H. Biomechanics Watsonville Community Hospital Wellness and Rehabilitation Center Watsonville, CA

RELEVANT KEYWORDS: back pain lower back pain back muscle spasms tight muscles beyond strengthening and stretching the cause of spinal alignment the cause of skeletal alignment severe back pain back muscle tension GLOSSARY OF MEDICAL BACK PAIN TERMS explained clearly in layman's terms, excerpted from Free Yourself from Back Pain | Nine Movements to Recondition Your Back for Any Activity

Quick Answers to Ten Basic Questions:
click here.

Click links to topics:

• The Cause of Back Pain - Are You Sure It's What You Think?
  
• The Medical Quandary -- Patients' Quandary
  
• Why Back Pain Comes on Suddenly
  
• Muscle Spasms -- Usually a Brain-Conditioning Problem
  
• Therapeutic Methods to End Back Pain
  
• The Brain-Muscle Connection Runs the Show
  
• A Key
  

Do the FREE three-day test -- exercise #1 ("Spine Waves"), twice daily. That's long enough to feel a worthwhile difference.

If you've had treatment based upon this operating assumption and it left you still hurting, it's not that you're an exception. You've just seen the limitation of approaches based upon this operating assumption. It's why treatment for back pain is expected to take a long time, and why you may believe that you'll have to be careful of your back for the rest of your life.

The "body as machine" idea misses an essential point: your brain regulates the body, which also means your back muscles and spinal alignment. If you get a spinal alignment adjustment or do stretches or get massage, your brain soon resets your back muscles to the high state of muscular tension that caused the back pain to begin with, and you're back where you started, or close to it.

If you have had therapy that treats your body like a machine without regard for your sensibilities (as in surgery, strengthen-and-stretch therapy, electrical stimulation, heavy massage or fast adjustments), you may have experienced a cringe response -- a rebound spasm and even more pain. That's not "par for the course"; it's a setback.

Maybe you need another, more sophisticated -- and more humane -- approach -- and maybe you would prefer a more humane approach, if you believed it would work as well or better than what you've had.

Your back is already sensitized and reactive; you want ease. So what if, instead of treating your body like a machine (or with a machine), we bring you to ease with a non-invasive, self-controlled, "low-tech/high-touch" procedure similar to yawning? What if we can free you into a lower-stress, more easeful state, even under desperate conditions such as severe back pain with disc bulges or nerve entrapment, and do it so completely and so reliably that you no longer have to return for treatment or be concerned about a recurrence of symptoms?

This is not a casual, fanciful, speculative "what if" question. It's a germane question with consequences.

The approach presented here has helped thousands of people (not millions, yet) who have already had unsuccessful back surgery or other procedures to end back pain and recover freedom of movement. The results are highly reliable and predictable.

The video, above, shows one such person. This is a good time to take a moment and view it.

What to do, next? The video, below, shows you -- or read on.

see also: "Understanding and Overcoming Lifting Injuries"
"The Psoas Muscles and Abdominal Exercises for Back Pain"
"A Functional Look at Back Pain and Treatment Methods",
published in The Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients.

Pain in the back, itself, usually comes from muscles going into spasm; the pain is the "burn" of muscle fatigue. When not muscle pain, pain in the buttock or leg(s) (sciatica) comes from tight muscles that compress the sciatic nerve where it emerges from the spinal column, or passes through the buttock. Pain in the upper back comes from muscle fatigue or spasm, which sometimes displaces of rib heads from their seat(s) between vertebrae. Disc herniation (bulge) or rupture, most commonly caused by tight muscles, leads to nerve root compression that shows up as nerve pain distant from the location of the disc, itself. Although some experts and practitioners cite "ligament strain" as the cause, that's rarely the case, and in any case is a consequence, not a cause. All of these conditions trace back to that "something more", which I will explain in detail.

The Medical Quandary -- Patients' Quandary: How to Control Back Spasms

Click to get free instructional video to relieve back pain.

Why Back Pain Comes On Suddenly

Why?

Muscle Spasms -- Usually a Brain-Conditioning Problem

Here, the answer may not seem so obvious -- until you understand it: conditioning. Apart from momentary reflexes, your brain controls your muscles. Your brain gets conditioned through repetition: repeated overuse, repeated overstrain, repeated stress. Your brain learns to hold muscles tight "on automatic". It's what is meant by "nervous tension." At that point, your tight back no longer comes from bending or lifting, but from a tension habit stored in your brain. You're always tight, on the verge of spasm or in spasm, and having gotten used to it, you probably don't even know how tight you've become. The problem isn't exactly "all in your head" -- but it is in your brain.

With tingling or numbness, the muscles of your back are so tight that they are pulling your vertebrae (the bones of your spine) so close that they trap and pinch nerves.

So the problem is simpler than you might expect. You probably do not have a medical problem; you probably have a conditioning problem. By relaxing those muscles, you end the pain of spasms. You also free the nerves from pressure and end the symptoms of a pinched nerve.

With the new methods, a muscular conditioning problem can often be cleared up fairly quickly -- past experience notwithstanding.

Perspective on Therapeutic Methods to End Back Pain

This view is understandable when we consider the following: Tight muscles are tired muscles, and tired muscles feel weak and seem to need strengthening. Tight muscles are shortened muscles, and shortened muscles seem to need stretching. Tight muscles cause postural changes, and postural changes imply the need for strengthening and stretching.

However, if stretching were the answer, people who stretch their back muscles would no longer have back problems. It begins to look as if "The Stretching 'Emporer' has no clothes."

The problem isn't weakness or muscles in need of stretching; it's muscular overactivity and muscle fatigue (tiredness and soreness).

It's simple: When muscles relax, they rest and get refreshed (feel stronger); they lengthen out (no longer seem to need stretching). With normalized muscular functioning, spinal alignment improves, movement normalizes, comfort returns.

A more direct approach, then, is to improve muscular control. People with back pain generally need a brain-muscle approach -- either to avoid surgery or after surgery.

The Brain-Muscle Connection Runs the Show

By concentrating on muscles instead of on the brain-level control of muscles, common therapeutic methods -- spinal and soft-tissue manipulation, surgery, spinal decompression/inversion therapy, and most therapeutic exercises in general -- work on effects (muscle spasms and spinal alignment), rather than the underlying cause (brain-level control).

When you've had therapy, did your doctor or therapist give you therapeutic exercises to do? Did he or she teach you, step by step, how to do them? Did he or she teach you to do them slowly and to keep constant awareness of the sensations of movement? Did (s)he give you abdominal strengthening exercises, i.e., crunches, and tell you, "These exercises will strengthen your back"? Did you go for strength or well-regulated control of the movements? Did you go for effort or ease? That's why most therapeutic methods don't work as well as they might. To the extent that they do work, they do so through gains of muscular control at the brain level. Progress comes slowly, at best, often from working too fast and too mechanically (if not too hard).

If you can't feel how to control your muscles, you can't control (and relax) them. You need to improve your ability to control your muscles and that involves your ability to feel yourself controlling your muscles (not merely feel the pain of muscles in spasm).

As you do, you recover comfortable freedom of movement; you recover the ability to relax; you stay more relaxed without thinking about it.

A Key

The approach, here, is to free your back muscles from spasm. That's the "difficult" thing to do that, with somatic education, occurs quickly and directly.

The Benefits

• rapid improvement
• stable elimination of pain
• elimination of fear for your back
• full capacity for lifting and twisting
• full flexibility and strength
• no need to maintain "neutral" spinal position
• sets the stage for healing of spinal and disc degeneration
• no further need for therapy or adjustments
• exposure to a method that can improve your physical prowess in other areas

Now for the proof: direct experience of a somatic exercise. Click to get free instructional video to relieve back pain. Test my words.

Skeptical? You should be. I was. Test my words -- risk free. Invest 90 minutes. The 'proof' of the 'pudding' is in the 'eating'. Consider the alternative.

Do the FREE three-day test -- exercise #1 ("Spine Waves"), twice daily. That's long enough to feel a worthwhile difference.

Click above for Free One-Week Tryout Period - followed by two payments of $48.50 levied every four weeks. (electronic download - See "Item Description" on your Subscription Acknowledgement from PayPal.)

Click below within one week to quit your tryout period free of charge (bookmark this page). You'll know within three days if it's making a difference.

First Aid for Back Pain

NOTE: If your problem is severe, (numbness or tingling in your extremities) see your doctor to rule out conditions that can be addressed only by surgical means, such as a disc tear.

1. Do somatic exercises as a way to create sensations of movement that your brain can use to develop muscular control.
   You need to feel what you are doing. If you do these movements mechanically (i.e., without sensing the muscular effort), you deprive yourself of the sensations needed to gain control over your muscle tension.

2. Move slowly and smoothly.

   If you do them too quickly, you miss the lesson.

3. Be easy on yourself. Work within the range of sensations you're willing to experience. Done gently, this exercise is safe to do even with disk problems.

   Never cause yourself to cringe from fear or pain (some soreness is inevitable); if you cringe, do a smaller movement. Move more slowly, more gently. You get better results by doing "too little" than by doing too much.

4. Always separate repetitions of a movement with complete relaxation.

   NOTE: Cycle through three times, the first day (36 minutes). If you get soreness, the next day, it will pass by itself in 24-36 hours. Evaluate the effects by your improvement of movement and posture and the decrease of the main pain. With repetitions, the soreness and the main pain decrease.

   If in doubt or afraid, consult your doctor or therapist before proceeding. Print and bring this page.