Wait…Your Lower Back Pain When Sitting May Continue Unless You Read This!

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Do you sit all day with your “perfect” chair and still suffer from lower back pain?  Sitting is one of the biggest culprits to lower back, hip, knee and all sorts of chronic pain.  As human beings, your  body’s design and “blueprint” is for motion, whether for walking, running, even skipping.  It’s amazing to imagine how the desk job has only existed for a “blink of the eye” compared to how long us humans have been around. The high-tech and computer revolution has created the desk job with a number of chronic pain conditions to boot.

The Source of Your Lower Back Pain When Sitting is a Locked Spine!

The source of the problem with lower back pain when sitting is that your spine remains locked and in a fixed position all long without movement.  Sitting all day long in the typical office chair in fixed position deactivates and “shuts down” your pelvic and lower back postural muscles.  Basically, your postural muscles go on vacation for awhile and start to atrophy and waste away from lack of use as they turn to jelly.  This is a huge problem, as you need these very same muscles to stabilize your lower back and keep it strong.

Throughout civilization, human beings have constantly trained their postural muscles  to be active  with functional activities such as walking, squatting, lifting, and lunging.  Before technology, the hunter and gather, cave man, cowboy, and every other time period people needed to be very active to survive.  Now, it’s a whole society that goes from the computer  desk, to the car, to the remote control on the couch.

So why do you need your pelvic and lumbar  postural muscles to be so active? Well, you see, it’s your postural muscles that hold you  vertically upright, strong and stable, balanced, and keep you out of lower back pain when sitting.  Without these muscles active throughout your day while you focus for hours typing away at your computer, these muscles basically turn to mash potatoes just like Gumby.  That’s why elderly people often fall, and  lose their balance and stability.  Their postural muscles have gone become too weak.

If you do sit for hours upon hours each day, there are highly effective postural exercises exercises you can do to keep your postural muscles engaging over time

However, the first thing you must do is get the right chair that doesn’t lock your spine all day and gives it the movement it needs.  There’s so many expensive chairs on the market, the majority still keeping your spine locked all day long.

Finally, sit pain-free for hours and work in comfort!

If you want to finally sit comfortably all day without lower back pain, I highly suggest this chair, which is the best back relief chair on the market after testing the great majority of most expensive ones sold. It maintains your correct posture, freedom of natural movement, true lumbar support and less pain. It allows your pelvis, spine and body to move freely in its natural position, keeping your spine and muscles more fluid and relaxed all day so you have no more locked spine.

Check out the Best Office Chair for Lower Back Relief by clicking here.

The worst thing for your back, body, and nervous system is to lock your spine in place for hours sitting. Your muscles, tendons, ligaments and discs get tight, compressed, and rigid over time. Even subtle movement provides benefits to your back. This ergonomic chairs unique, patented design facilitates movement. The chair allows your spine to move all day long, keeping your spine loose, supple, and flexible.

Here’s Why Cave Men Didn’t Have Back Pain

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Have you ever heard the saying “just lose a few pounds and your low back pain will disappear?” While it’s fairly common knowledge that too many extra pounds often leads to back pain, there’s certain diets and food to avoid that help too!

Yes, weight loss is important, and you’re flooded daily with every type of weight loss program imaginable, especially right here in Los Angeles, California.

Since even with all our modern day advances we’re very similar genetically to our Paleolithic ancestors, the cave man, let’s take a brief look into their diet, what food they avoided, for a more balanced diet.

Lean meats, preferably grass fed, with fruits and vegetables made up the vast majority of the cave man diet. Even today, our bodies break down and assimilate these foods with a minimal inflammatory response to your system. It’s inflammation often at the root cause of illnesses such as back pain, candida,  and muscular skeletal conditions, initiated from your abdominal wall and digestive system.

So, what’s the secret to why cave man didn’t have back pain in Los Angeles?  The answer is they didn’t eat gluten! This protein is found in wheat, rye, and flour products such as pasta, bread, cakes, cereals, beer and more.

Too much gluten in your diet causes an inflammatory response and immune reaction in our bodies that ends up damaging the small intestine, leading to gastrointestinal distress and nutritional deficiencies. Over time, this can lead to weight gain and an assortment of medical conditions.

There’s a proven connection between gluten and back pain.  Your back pain can result from too much gluten just because of too much inflammation in your lower abdominal wall.  This inflammation shuts down and inhibits your lower abdominal muscles from activating properly, which is important to stabilize your pelvis and lumbar spine.  Your lower back and abdominals are one in the same, and work together to support your muscular skeletal system.  Think of them as a “corset” where they support and stabilize your lower back and spine from the back and front side.  At least now you know that when eating that break or pasta, you may be de-stabilizing your lumbar spine, and increasing inflammation to the surrounding lower back and pelvic muscles.

Now you see why it’s important to cut down on and avoid gluten if you suffer from back pain, sciatica, abdominal pain or any musculoskeletal condition.  It’s easy to find “gluten-free” foods in the grocery stores, as many stores devote an entire section to it.

Try a more “gluten free” diet, and you may notice your weight decreasing and energy levels increasing.  Your back pain might disappear so you enjoy your life so much more, and sit, stand, and walk pain-free.

Why Are My Tension, Cluster, and Migraine Headaches Getting Worse Even With Advil and Ibuprofen?

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Most of us know at least one person who suffers from frequent or daily tension, cluster, sinus, migraine headaches or, just persistently pounding headaches. According to medical data gathered in 2004, the percentage of adults that suffered from severe headaches and/or migraines was almost 20%. Migraines, characterized by throbbing pain and other debilitating symptoms, have no known cause, treatment or cure. Women suffer more than men and the percentage of adults suffering from migraines was found to have jumped by 77% over the last decade.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), chronic migraine headaches can either be “classical” or “common”. The symptoms of the common migraine headache are; generalized malaise, dizziness, fever and nausea. The most distinguishing sign of a classical headache is an aura just before the onset of your headache. The aura may be auditory or visual. Further, a classical headache is usually of short duration, typically less than 12 hours, as compared to a common migraine which can last for up to four days.

How Muscle Imbalances, Poor Posture, and Trigger Points are a Source of Your Tension, Cluster, Sinus or Migraine Headaches!

Even though research is yet to clearly identify the cause of migraines, there are several well known risk factors. These include; stress, allergies, pollution and diet. A few lesser known risk factors, such as muscle imbalances, bad posture and trigger points are often the hidden causes and culprits for your debilitating chronic headaches and migraines. Many individuals here in Los Angeles have turned to Neuromuscular Therapy and Posture Realignment Exercises with great success. Headaches caused by muscle imbalances and poor posture often originate from your jaw, neck and upper back muscles which become tight and rigid. Posture realignment care corrects these muscle imbalances, bad posture and resolves resultant migraines.

Trigger points, which are like “landmine knots,” build up in your neck muscles from poor posture, stress, or trauma and lead to tension and trigger point headaches. The headache begins as a tension band around your head as opposed to a painful pulsating ache on the side of the head normally seen in migraines.

Irrespective of the type of headache, many people suffer needlessly for years taking aspirin, ibuprofen and/or acetaminophen without results. In fact, long term use of these medications shows they have a rebound effect by increasing the frequency of the headache. Withdrawing the medication leads to an increase in the severity of the headache too. To make matters worse, these medications damage your gut, kidney and liver when used over a long period of time.

At the end of the day, the most important thing to note about headaches is that a headache is a symptom – a sign of something else that is wrong in your body. Treating the symptom and failing to find out the cause is the wrong approach. Painkillers merely treat the symptom but holistic approaches such as neuromuscular therapy, trigger point therapy and posture realignment exercises go to the root of the problem. If you suffer from constant headaches, get a qualified Neuromuscular Therapist to assess you.

 

Are Regular Walking Exercises For Lower Back Pain Good For You

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Scientists long concluded the human body is made for motion, especially walking,  to keep a strong and stable lower back. This was after lengthy studies of its design and upright good posture. Despite this fact, many people rarely every walk. Gone are the hunter-gatherer days when a human being would trek for miles to search for food. These days, an average human being is seated most of time at an office desk, in the car or simply relaxing on the couch in front of a television.

The effect of prolonged sitting on your lower back is muscle atrophy and weakness of the same muscles we need strong to stabilize your back and pelvis. Our gluteal or “butt” muscles and other postural muscles waste away from lack of use when we sit on our “butts” all day. Walking is just what the back doctor ordered for this as it engages and gently activates these gluteal and postural muscles in a functional way to create better muscle balance for your pelvis and low back muscles.

As you walk,  you activate and engage your gluteal, pelvic, and hip muscles, bringing your posture and spine into better alignment. A twisted, weak, or dysfunctional pelvis causing back pain is often alleviated with gentle walking exercise and gluteal contractions.

Studies of kids in Norway revealed that over 50% suffered with back pain over the last year. This is in spite of the fact that most parents think their kids are immune to lower back problems by virtue of their young age. It would appear that lower back pain begins early and continues into adulthood.

It was also noted from research that lower back pain is inversely proportional to physical activity. The more time children spent in physical activity the less back pain they experienced while the more time they spent in front of a television, computer or video game the more likely they were to have back pain; walking was found to reduce back pain considerably.  This is why doing regular, daily walking exercises for lower back pain is often great to relieve your pain.

In another study of adults who were regularly active through moderate exercise such as walking, major differences were seen between them and people who were inactive. The exercise group had better emotional states of being, used less pain reliever medication and had less need for physical therapy for back pain. They also had much less workplace disability.

The advantages of walking are seen even in old age. Older citizens who walk regularly have less incidence of lower body disability. Walking can help to lose the back pain because it’s what the human body is designed to do.  The blueprint design of our bodies is for motion, not stagnation.

Not everyone in the world lives a sedentary lifestyle; there are others – blue collar workers – who engage in strenuous repetitive tasks. This category of people is at risk of muscle imbalances, trigger points, injury and spasms. Thus, both a sedentary lifestyle and strenuous work can lead to back pain. The fact of the matter is that 90% of people will experience back pain at some point in their lives.

In the past, conventional medical wisdom said that a week’s bed rest was good enough to fix back pain. However, research continues to contradict this position. It would appear that the best way to end back pain and keep it away is first through neuromuscular trigger point therapy, posture alignment exercises and regular physical activity. Nothing beats walking as a form of exercise for back pain.

If you’re a Los Angeles Back Pain sufferer or looking for a pain management or pain relief specialist, call now.

What’s the Best Pillow for Neck, Shoulder or Back Pain?

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With so many pillow options on the market today, no wonder people are so confused as to the best pillow for neck and back pain. There are pillows for stomach sleepers, side sleepers, back sleepers, and insomniacs!

To add to this, every pillow ad says they have the world’s greatest pillow to solve your neck, shoulder and back pain. Even health practitioners are often biased as to their favorite sleeping cushions.

Here’s the deal with pillows, and it’s very important for you to understand…

It’s not about the pillow, never was, and never will be.

It’s about your postural alignment, and how your head, neck, shoulder and hips line up when sleeping.

The better aligned your head, neck, shoulders and hips are when sleeping, the less aches and pains you have when you awake!

Focusing on your alignment specifically, and not your pillow, is your best long termsolution to minimize tension all night long, and get your best nights sleep.

You see, you may have the “world’s greatest neck, cervical, or lumbar pillow”, yet if it’s too thick and lifts your head too high, then your head is out of alignment all night with your neck and shoulder muscles suffering.

The solution is quite simple…use a thin pillow that gently supports your neck yet doesn’t lift it too high out of alignment from the rest of your body. If you need any further neck support, roll a small towel, roughly 3-4 inches in diameter, and put it under your neck to support your cervical curve further.

This maintains the proper position and alignment for your neck and back.