Back Pain and Fitness

For those who have back pain, working out can be tough.  Especially for those who suffer from chronic back pain.  Never getting a break from the aches, and sometimes disabling pain can be overwhelming and make those who were once fit, quickly become couch potatoes.

This is the first in a multi article series about workouts to overcome back pain as well as treatments that have worked for me.

I have had back pain since my junior year of high school.  As I got older, then pain grew worse and more frequent.


Years of running track, improper weight lifting and being young and foolish caused my pain to set in at an early age.  Then serving twelve years as a Deputy Sheriff wearing a gun belt and jumping over fences made it worse.  Add a motorcycle crash into the mix, and I can't even pass most physicals for employment.

But still, I keep going.  Do not get me wrong, I have been down.  I was feed handfuls of pain pills for two years straight to manage the pain.

But with a lot of trial and error I found things that minimized the pain and allowed me to stay active.  I can't do everything I used to.  And I still have my bad days where I can not sleep because the pain is so bad.  But those have become less and less and my activities more and more.

There is no one magic bullet that fixed me.  Its a combination of things.  Sometimes, one option works better than another on any given day.  So it will be trial and error.

The first and biggest thing I am going to tell you to do is simple.  Stay active.  No matter how much it hurts unless your doctor tells you otherwise.  Inactivity was the absolute worst thing I ever did.  The pain grew day by day.  I thought the injuries were getting worse.  But I was losing muscle causing the pain to increase.  When I tried to get active, the pain grew tremendously.

It does not have to be anything strenuous.  Just simply getting up and walking helped.  But you have to walk farther than the refrigerator or bathroom.  If you can do a mile, do it.  If you can go two, then go two.

And stretch.  Every day.  Stretching is such an easy activity, but so many of those who suffer from back pain simply neglect this simple exercise that should be routine first thing when you wake up.  If you ever go to physical therapy, the first thing they will work on is flexibility and range of motion.  For any injury.  So do it.

I have a simple two minute routine I do every single morning and it starts before I even get out of bed.

I twist my hips over as far as I can while keeping my back flat on the bed.  I hold it for a few seconds, then I go the other way.  Then I pull each knee up to my chest as I raise my head up off my pillow.  I do that a few times with each leg.

Then I get out of bed and bend over.  Then while bending over I twist to the outside of each foot.  I raise up and do it again.  The I simply reach for the sky like I am climbing a ladder.  Make sure you reach as far up as you can like you are skipping rungs on a ladder.

That's it.  It literally takes about two minutes each morning to do.

This will greatly help those of you who do not routinely stretch.

I will go over some treatments, such as inversion therapy, acupressure, massage and more in my next article.  My last article will cover workouts I do such as rowing, cycling and more.