Physiotherapy for back pain

What is a physiotherapist and how can they help people experiencing back pain? A physiotherapist help people to overcome pain and injury. To demonstrate how a physiotherapist can help you, we recorded a video that guides you in identifying and fixing 3 common causes of back pain. This article was written to supplement the video. You can view all of our educational videos on our YouTube channel.

Exercise Thought’s physiotherapists help more people to overcome back pain than any other pain or injury. The most common causes of back pain that we see are:

• disc bulges (which may or may not press on a nerve),

• muscle spasm &

• bone overload.

Disc bulges often hurt more with flexion activities such as sitting, driving and bending. Symptoms of a disc bulge improve with extension activities such as walking, standing and sitting in upright postures. These symptoms may be contained to the lower back and may also include nerve pain referring down your leg. Exercise Thought’s physiotherapists can personalise extension exercises that will relieve your pain and quicken your recovery. We will also help you to identify the lifestyle factors that predict a better long-term outcome so that your back remains healthy for the long-term.

Muscle spasm is less common but still something we can help you with at Exercise Thought. The back-strap muscles that run parallel to the spine can spasm when overworked or if we are overprotecting our back. You may be feeling muscle spasm pain if relaxing your lower back gives relief and arching your back hurts. A physiotherapist can prescribe exercises that relax spasming muscles and deliver massage which also often helps.

Bone overload is even less common and typically occurs in athletic teenagers or young adults who play sports that repeatedly extend the spine. In a maturing skeletal, this movement can overload the bones on the back of the spine. Worse case scenario is a stress fracture, but this can be prevented with early intervention. A physiotherapist can help you to identify this bone overload early and help you to continue sport while also allowing the bone to recover. Sometimes a reduction in sport is necessary for a short time. A physiotherapy can enable you to resume your full sporting load while recovering.

You or a loved one may related to 1 of these 3 types of back pain. Feel free to comment below with your questions or thoughts so that Exercise Thought can integrate them with our next article.