The best exercise to do when your back goes into spasm
We often see clients coming in with back spasms where they are bent over to one side or flexed forward at 90 degrees because the back is locked up.
This can often be severely debilitating and can happen in any age range, in people in their teenage years through 20s, 30s, right up until their 70s. Age does not control whether or not you can get a back spasm.
It can often last for weeks but most commonly days. It can have a severe impact on the person’s life.
What happens in a back spasm?
The back spasm, believe it or not, is designed to actually protect the vital mechanisms within your spine, that being the spinal cord. So the muscles at either side of your spine called the “erector spinae” seize up, go very hard so that you can’t move, thus protecting the spinal cord. The spinal cord carries all the information from your brain to the rest of your body so it is important to keep this protected.
Often where there is a disc issue in the base of the spine and the disc has been degenerating for a number of years and your body is trying to stop the disc from touching the spinal cord. If the disc becomes under too much pressure it is at risk of a prolapse or slip.
You think of a jam doughnut. The jam will pierce out through dough and thus press on the spinal cord causing more pain. The most common form of this is sciatica which many of you may have experienced.
So the muscle spasm is designed to not let that disc herniate and keep your spinal cord protected. But it doesn’t feel like that at the time. It feels extremely painful, immobilizing and debilitating and you wonder, “What have I done wrong” Why do I deserve this? And very often it’s nothing that you have done wrong. It’s a collective build-up over a number of months and years where the body has just suddenly said, “Hey, enough is enough.”
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The body can do a great job of compensating over these years so that you don’t have to have a spasm and it can keep on functioning. You can keep on picking the kids up, sitting for eight hours at work, running on uneven roads, walking with incorrect footwear and the body can handle it until one day, you put your socks on and the back goes into spasm and it says, “I can’t handle this anymore. Enough is enough.” This is usually on day one of the holiday where you are relaxed, your guard is down and you lift that luggage case or put your socks on, typical.
If the spasm is there for a reason, we obviously don’t want to get rid of it straight away. We want to bring the spasm down gradually. Some of the best ways to do this are to keep your body mobile, keep moving lightly. So some gentle walking between furniture, try and straighten up as much as you can without putting too much stress to the back. Wherever you feel too much pain, just stop. Take some deep breaths and go again.
If you’re debilitated in bed, it’s really important you try and get on to all fours just to allow the back to have some breathing space and you can rock back and forwards on your all-fours.
As the spasm starts to decrease over the hours and the days, add some gentle walking with sporty footwear, and some more stretching.
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The best stretch to do with a back spasm
This is the child’s pose where you can sink back into the bum, move the hips from side to side to really floss all of the muscles in the spine and help flex out the base of your spine. Repeat this 10 times and rest, do 3 sets before getting up in the morning and do throughout the day, you can’t do it enough. Watch the video here
Keep using ice therapy, 10 minutes on, 10 minutes off. This will allow the inflammation to subside in the spine, thus helping the spasm go down and keep drinking water.
When the muscles are hydrated, they start to get looser. They get dehydrated. They get very taut and will keep on putting pressure through the base of the spine.
Then when the spasm goes, this is the most important part. You would have to find out what the reason was that caused it so that you can work on fixing this. It may be developing the core strength. It could be helping the glutes activate better so this problem doesn’t keep coming back and identifying if there is any disc degeneration or any problems or misalignments throughout the rest of the spine.
So if you need any help with this and if you’re having recurrent spasms which happen every three to four months or ? then please let us know.
We need to put an end to this cycle. Otherwise the spasms get longer. They get more frequent, more debilitating and they start to affect the decisions that people make in their lives.
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