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Recover your Back Stability

By: Lawrence Gold

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We know how overtraining with weights can lead to the condition of muscular restriction and pain known as being musclebound. It's a conditioning problem, really, an over-conditioning problem, of the muscles being trained. They get trained to tighten, stay tight, and get tighter and tighter.

The same problem applies to repetitive lifting movements; the muscles involved, those of the back, get conditioned to tighten and stay tight as the body becomes ever-ready to do the lifting action. Tightness leads to muscle fatigue (soreness), stiffness (muscular tension) and the tendency to spasm (fixed, painful contraction). Lift-and-twist injures are a variation of the same problem.

Almost all lifting injuries and back trouble stem from being musclebound in the muscles of the back. Disc problems come from neighboring vertebrae being pulled too closely together by back muscles. Nerve pinches (such as sciatica) come from the same cause.

That means that back injuries are not a consequence of muscle weakness, but of over-conditioning. Muscles may feel weak due to fatigue because fatigue feels weak. Because being musclebound affects all movements, "good lifting techniques" are often insufficient to prevent injury and injuries often reappear.

The practical question becomes how to de-condition overconditioned muscles.

The answer is astoundingly obvious: training in muscular control, which includes strength, relaxation and coordination - all three.

Muscular control cannot be acquired by massage, drugs, or external manipulation because the brain controls muscular tension, not muscles, themselves. What is necessary is to unlearn tension habits and learn better muscular control. Better control - less chance of injury. That's where somatic training comes in. ("Somatic" means "the body experienced and controlled from within.")

A person can, by specific training, recover from being musclebound and develop a more ideal, safer range of strength, flexibility, and comfort. For people whose daily work makes them musclebound, such remedial training is a necessity. People need to undo the residual effects of their repetitive motions to avoid the occupational hazard of their work.

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Home Website for access to more articles, Lawrence Gold's qualifications, and self-help resources: Somatics on the Web. See the blue navigation bar at top for Self-Help.

What you can do for yourself for back pain.

Lawrence Gold is a long-time practicing clinical somatic educator certified in The Rolf Method of Structural Integration and in Hanna Somatic Education, with two years' hospital rehab center experience (Watsonville Community Hospital Wellness and Rehabilitation Center: 1997-1999) and articles published in The American Journal of Pain Management (Pain Relief through Movement Education: January, 1996, Vol. 6, no. 1, pg. 30) and in The Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients (A Functional Look at Back Pain and Treatment Methods: November, 1994, #136, pg. 1186 ).

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