What’s The Best Exercise To Do When Recovering From Back Pain?
A lot of our clients are raring to go after two to three weeks and really want to get back into doing some physical exercise whether it be walking, jogging, running, swimming, cycling, rowing, gym or CrossFit (sorry I’m biased)
It’s good to get back into some sort of cardiovascular and resistance-based work in order to try and put some decent stress on the body. We encourage our clients to put stress on the body when they’re going through a corrective process. We need to make sure that there’s stress on the body with the new corrections in place in order for the body to be able to meet those demands and if there are any issues, we can correct them as you go through the process.
When I talk about stress, I mean a good stress. For example, doing a walk or run is good stress for the heart as it takes it to a different zone and makes it work differently. Lifting weights stresses the muscles for them to adapt and get stronger. There needs to be a stimulus in order to facilitate change and this comes in the form of a stressor.
There’s no use going through a two to three-month corrective process doing nothing and then getting back into lifting heavy weights or running 5 kilometres and the problem coming back.
Where to start when recovering from an injury?
What is the best exercise to do when recovering from backpain?
The important key to remember is that everything should be taken very easy and gently because even though there may not be any symptoms, there’s still an underlying issue with inflammation. Then when this is stressed to a high intensity could cause problems or relapse.
We would always recommend starting with some light walking and then ensuring that you’re stretched afterwards. I know it sounds a bit extreme and it may be a bit silly to stretch after a walk, but the muscles may not have been used in that position for a long time. They could be very tight. The walk could cause them to tighten up. Once you’re fine with that after a couple of days, a light jog. Jogging is a tricky one as it is load bearing and it’s also impact.
The best thing to do is jog on a treadmill. Try and avoid jogging on the road and then the second best is jogging on a path or some grass where it’s slightly softer.
Even better than that is swimming. The reason swimming is such a good exercise is because it is non-load-bearing. It doesn’t stress the joints. It doesn’t compress the discs in the base of the spine as well.
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It’s also very gentle and can be great just to mobilise the muscles and the joints through the spine. I would recommend doing a front crawl kick with breaststroke arms, trying to keep the head above the water or using a float and just kicking to extend the spine but still using the muscles.
Front crawl can often cause the neck to become stressed and using breaststroke legs can often put a stress on the hips. Kicking with the breaststroke arm or even backstroke can be good as well but it’s not the most comfortable for a lot of people.
I recommend anything from 20 minutes to half an hour of low intensity exercise. Whether that be jogging or swimming.
Another great way to get some load in the body without stressing the joints are some gym based activities including a cross-trainer, a stepper and also upright cycling. These are great because they don’t put any weight on the actual joints, and they avoid compression.
Note on cycling. If you’re bent down like Chris Frome (professional cyclist), that is going to compress the lower part of the spine and cause flexion through the lumbar spine, which could compress the discs. So just avoid that if you can.
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Which exercises should I avoid?
Heavy weightlifting in the gym. Even if you’re a power lifter, I would still recommend not doing any heavy lifting for the first two to four weeks of any program.
Rowing because it can put a lot of pressure on the base of the spine if the back is not fully healed and if you are a CrossFitter like myself, if you recover from back injury, I would just try and avoid heavy deadlifts or squats for the first two weeks when you’re recovering from a back injury. Do some light remedial work to try and build everything up as we go through the process.
If you need more advice on which exercise to choose, please call us on 01932 355529 or email info@westchiropractic.co.uk
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