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<\/a>If you want to know how to get lower back pain relief, you need to learn how to get your back muscles, which never relax, to relax. That’s exactly what’s necessary and is usually entirely sufficient. I explain, below.<\/p>\nTo relax your back is not something someone can do, for you; you have to learn to do it, yourself. It’s not difficult, but you have to do it entirely differently from the usual way you try to relax.<\/p>\n
To relax your back this way brings lasting relief faster than the usual therapies and without need for long periods of repeated therapy sessions.\u00a0 It comes from\u00a0a new discipline in the field of healthcare, called clinical somatic education.<\/p>\n
I explain this new way of getting muscles to relax, and the differences between the usual back pain therapies and clinical somatic education, in this piece.\u00a0 If you’ve been frustrated by the lack of lasting relief from the usual therapies, you’ll like this approach.<\/p>\n
Searching For A Solution<\/strong><\/p>\n I’ll start with a listing of approaches you may have tried, so you know that I’m taking your experience into account.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n There are strengthening and stretching exercises, pain meds, muscle relaxants, skeletal manipulation, spinal decompression devices, acupuncture, bodywork of various sorts, yoga and laser therapy.<\/p>\n You may be familiar with these therapeutic approaches. You may have found that they bring relief that lasts no more than a few days or a few hours. Practitioners end up administering the same treatment again, and again and, if asked, tell you that’s what you should expect.<\/p>\n Of the approaches I listed, the ones that sound like they come closest to relaxing your back muscles are stretching and massage. Neither of these approaches works any better than the others because any relaxation they produce is temporary. It’s temporary because your brain controls your muscle tension and your brain is conditioned to maintain your muscular tension at a “set point” to which your back muscles return: always tight.<\/p>\n So, what you need is a way to change your brain-conditioning to change the resting state of your back muscles to relaxation, instead of to, “always tight.”<\/p>\n Another way of saying, “change your brain-conditioning” is, “relearn control of your muscles.” “Conditioning” and “learning” are the same thing.<\/p>\n If, after reading this article, you still want to explore some of the usual therapeutic approaches, perhaps you’d best bookmark this page. You can come back to it after you’ve finished your tour (and testing) of those other approaches. I expect you’ll be back.<\/p>\n WHAT ALL THE USUAL THERAPEUTIC APPROACHES HAVE IN COMMON<\/strong><\/p>\n What the usual approaches have in common is that they all attempt to\u00a0counteract<\/em>\u00a0 or\u00a0oppose<\/em>\u00a0symptoms<\/u>\u00a0that keep reappearing. They address\u00a0symptoms, not the causes of those symptoms. \u00a0“Symptoms” include back muscle pain, spinal mis-alignment,\u00a0subluxations<\/span>, disc bulges, facet joint irritation, muscle spasms and sciatica; these symptoms are\u00a0effects, not causes.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n For example, misalignment doesn’t cause muscle spasms; it’s the other way around: muscle spasms cause misalignment. Bones (vertebrae) go where muscles pull them.<\/p>\n While counteracting symptoms may seem reasonable (and is all many people care about, as long as they get some relief), it’s ineffective in the long term and leaves you having to limit your activities to protect your back.<\/p>\n That’s what happens when therapy doesn’t address the underlying cause.<\/p>\n What’s necessary is not to\u00a0counteract, oppose, or suppress<\/em>\u00a0symptoms, but to\u00a0undo<\/em>\u00a0their underlying cause<\/em>, altogether.\u00a0Counteracting, opposing<\/em>, and\u00a0suppressing\u00a0<\/em>are\u00a0different from\u00a0undoing the underlying cause<\/em>, as I will explain, shortly.<\/p>\n Let’s slow down, here, and make that point clearer.<\/p>\n SYMPTOMS vs. CAUSES<\/strong><\/p>\n People often mistake symptoms for causes. The usual therapies all treat lower back pain symptoms as if they’re a sign of something\u00a0happening to\u00a0the body<\/em>, rather than\u00a0something that the body is\u00a0doing to itself<\/em>\u00a0that causes the symptoms.<\/p>\n In that view, misalignment and\u00a0subluxations<\/span>\u00a0“just happen”; discs bulge and degenerate because of\u00a0“degenerative disc disease” (the cause of which, therapists wrongly attribute to aging, to your genes, or can’t explain). Sciatica “just happens”. Lower back pain is supposedly caused by conditions beyond our control.<\/p>\n But these symptoms\u00a0are within your control — if you take the approach that addresses the underlying cause.<\/p>\n The Underlying Cause<\/strong><\/p>\n Tight back muscles cause most back pain. The usual causes of tight back muscles are<\/p>\n In an accident,\u00a0the pain, violent motions, and shock of the accident cause\u00a0muscular cringing, or tightening, a reaction that sets in long-term.<\/p>\n In repetitive bending and lifting movements,\u00a0we get so ready to do those movements that we never relax completely, and strain patterns form.<\/p>\n In long-term stress, we get tense and stay tense for so long that we get used to being tense and stay tense, automatically.<\/p>\n These situations lead to abnormal\u00a0brain conditioning. Muscles stay tight, from then, on.<\/p>\n (A “lifting injury” isn’t an injury, at all, but a sudden spasm triggered by an increase of muscular contraction in already-too-right muscles. Contraction – burn – pain – cringe – tighter contraction – worse pain — sounds like a spasm, doesn’t it?)<\/p>\n Abnormal brain conditioning causes overly tight back muscles. Another term for “abnormal brain conditioning” is “abnormal habit”.<\/p>\n Habit keeps the muscles tight, automatically. Habit is what makes the way we move move different from the way someone else moves. Habit controls posture. Habit controls spinal alignment. Habit keeps the muscles in the state of tension originally triggered by injury, repetitive movement, or stress.<\/p>\n Habitual back muscle\u00a0tension makes muscle spasms more likely; the tighter the habit, the more likely spasm is to occur.<\/p>\n Habitual back muscle tension causes most back pain.<\/p>\n Relief of\u00a0 habitual tension can’t be done by stretching, manipulation, or any of the usual approaches I mentioned because those approaches only\u00a0oppose<\/em>\u00a0the habit that keeps muscles tight. They don’t\u00a0change it<\/em>,\u00a0don’t\u00a0<\/em>normalize<\/i>\u00a0it. They try to counteract it. They “resist” it.\u00a0The tension habit persists.<\/p>\n Symptoms return shortly after the usual kinds of therapy.<\/p>\n Where muscles are concerned, habitual patterns of muscular tension have a special name: muscle memory (more properly called movement memory).<\/p>\n Ring a bell?<\/p>\n THE ALTERNATIVE: CHANGING MUSCLE TENSION HABITS<\/strong><\/p>\n When chronic muscle tension ends, pain ends. Pressure comes off discs. Nerves come free from entrapment. The facet joints of vertebrae no longer rub together. Alignment corrects itself to a healthy flexibility. If tissue healing is needed (such as for irritated facet joints of vertebrae) healing can now occur.<\/p>\n Why Did Your Back Muscles Start To Hurt?<\/strong><\/p>\n Simple answer: muscle fatigue, “the burn” they say to go for, in athletics. What “the burn” is, is oxygen starvation of the muscles from being too tight for too long.<\/p>\n Make sense?<\/p>\n If you pay attention to what happens in you when you’re in a hurry or in a state of intense attention (“stress”), you’ll notice that your back muscles always tighten up.<\/p>\n Over your lifetime, that kind of situation has happened over and over\u00a0so often and for such prolonged periods of time (in your “way of life”) that you stayed tense and\u00a0formed a tension habit.<\/p>\n You may never have noticed that you were tense that way until your back muscles started to hurt — and it may not have occurred to you\u00a0that your symptoms (i.e., pain, etc.) came from your muscles being tight\u00a0all the time<\/em>.<\/p>\n Other Conditions of Low Back Pain<\/strong><\/p>\n Tight back muscles pull neighboring vertebrae closer together,\u00a0squeeze the discs in between, and cause a host of problems commonly regarded by therapists as different “disease entities” called by different names, but all from the same cause:<\/p>\n The cure for all is the same.<\/p>\n Clinical Somatic Education<\/strong><\/p>\n The purpose of clinical somatic education and somatic education exercises is to for you to relearn control of overly tight muscles,\u00a0to create a new movement memory free of the muscle-tension habit. Your back muscles come free and symptoms disappear. It’s a long-term change that occurs relatively quickly, in this approach.<\/p>\n Clinical somatic education has two forms: clinical techniques and somatic education exercises. You may resort to either or both.<\/p>\n How it Works<\/strong><\/p>\n What makes somatic education different from the usual therapies\u00a0is that it uses an action related to yawning\u00a0to relearn control of muscles.\u00a0That action is called, pandiculation.<\/p>\n\n
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