Does sitting ever drive you completely crazy?  I don’t know about you but I am a mover.  I get so fidgety when I have to do too much work at the computer.  I’d much rather be up and moving around!  Unfortunately in today’s society sitting comes with the territory.

Sitting is just one of the culprits that can start to cause low back pain.  The muscles in the front of the thigh that cross the hip joint are all hip flexors; in other words they lift your leg up in front of your body.  If you think about what that looks like, you can see the thigh perpendicular to the body when standing is the same as when you are sitting in a chair.  Stay in this position for prolonged periods of time and eventually those muscles won’t go back to their full length. The result?  When you stand those muscles pull the front of the hip down to compensate for being shorter than normal.

So what, you ask?  With that pelvis being pulled forward it ‘squishes up’ the lower back, which shortens and tightens those muscles resulting in pressure on the joints of the vertebrae.

The same thing can happen when you have a larger belly than you should have.  I know, you don’t like to hear that but it’s true!  That extra belly takes you out of gravity and pulls your whole body forward and down at the front of the pelvis.  Again this causes undue stress on the muscles and bones in the low back.

When those muscles get tight they cause pain.  As for the joints, there are small joints called ‘facet joints’ which are part of the vertebrae.  They are loaded in pain receptors so when they are unnaturally jammed together, they send lots of messages to your brain that says PAIN!!

So what can you do about it?  We will talk about this more on my next blog.  Meanwhile here is a great stretch to get you started on making some changes:

Give this a try on a daily basis and see if it doesn’t start to help with that low back pain.

To your health,

Julie