How I Cured My Back Pain and You Can Too
Back pain affects millions of people all over the world.
For many people it is a chronic, everyday thing.
I personally suffered chronic daily back pain for over 10 years, and another ten years or so of painful back episodes spread out over time before that.
Finally, my back "went out" to the point that I could not even stand up straight.
My x-ray looked like a snake, not a spine.
After 500 dollars with a chiropractor and a couple of weeks off of work, I was able to regain enough movement to resume what I had of a life.
The chiropractor assured me he could eventually stop all of the pain.
But he already had all of my money and without insurance I couldn't afford the additional treatments.
Not to mention the "adjustments" I would need for the rest of my life.
But in the end, what I gained from the chiropractor was just what I needed.
He had said he could relieve all of the pain in time.
I figured if he could do it, so could I.
The only problem was that I didn't really know how.
The first thing I did was to get my inversion table out of storage and try to use it again.
It met with the storage building because I didn't know what I was doing and ended up worse off than when I started.
It is really cool to see those people hanging upside down and doing crunches on the inversion table commercials.
But if someone with back problems tries to do that, well, their inversion table ends up in storage.
At the same time I recovered my inversion table, I also got a copy of Robin Mckenzies "7 Steps to a Pain Free Life".
It was about 15 bucks at Books a Million, and that was the last money I ever spent on my back problem.
It is not that the book stopped the pain.
It was still there, but to a manageable degree.
The book helped and I learned the exercises I needed to do to keep things from getting as bad as they were again.
At the same time, I began researching the use of an inversion table.
I found they worked for a lot of people, but not for everyone.
I needed to understand the reason they work for some people, but not for others.
I stumbled upon an article about a chiropractor who was using them in his practice.
The article said he used them at very slight angles and kept the patient on it for about 10 to 15 minutes.
He spoke of great success, and his office was reported as one of the leading referrers to an inversion table store.
I began to realize that between the Mckenzie book and the inversion table I had all of the tools I needed to end my back pain once and for all.
With that knowledge, I started to consider exactly what I needed to do to make it happen.
When doing the Mckenzie exercises, after some time of doing them my pain would change.
It was not the centralizing of the back pain discussed in the book.
It was an entirely new pain.
I determined that I had most likely overdone the stretching and caused additional damage.
So I stopped the exercises and improved over the next couple of weeks by doing nothing at all.
I also determined that when I had used my inversion table in the past, I had also overdone that by going back too far, too fast.
Again, my "treatments" were doing additional damage while not allowing the original damage to heal.
Somewhere in between doing nothing and doing too much was the cure for my back pain.
But where, and how could I find out what was too much and what was not enough? I knew if I did what the Mckenzie book said for too long, I would just hurt more.
I knew that if I overdid inversion I would get the same result.
At the same time I also knew that if I didn't do enough I would not get better.
I decided to make an attempt at devising my own back pain cure that would use both mild inversion and minimal exercise.
The goal was to ensure that I did neither to the point of additional damage.
I didn't really know it at the time, but one of the absolute keys to stopping chronic back pain is to make sure you do not do any further damage with the treatment you choose.
If your back hurts, it is because there is damaged tissue.
You cannot do exercises that have the potential to do further damage.
That includes putting too much stretch on them by over inverting yourself.
Once I learned to respect my back pain, I never again did additional damage.
In fact, I designed my cure to ensure that I could not do any additional damage.
With everything I knew about back pain, here is the outline I came up with to cure my back pain.
First, I recognized that my posture was the root cause of all of the problems.
I made a conscious effort to sit and stand correctly as much as possible.
In order to correct your posture, you have to understand what the goal is.
Sitting and standing straight is not the goal.
It is the result.
The goal of good posture is to keep your spine out of stressful positions.
Your back has a range of motion just like everything else.
If you stay at the extremes, such as bending over or hyper extending your back, for too long your body will let you know it.
Your spine has a natural curve to it.
The goal of good posture is to identify that natural curve and try to keep it intact for as much of the time as possible.
Correcting your posture is essential in stopping your back pain.
If you don't make the effort to maintain the proper curve in your back, you will be fighting against your body.
Every day, you will undo the work you have done the day before.
The inevitable result is chronic back pain.
Correcting you posture is the first step to permanently eliminating your back pain.
If you are not willing to work on that you are wasting your time doing anything else.
The next step in the treatment was to undo some of the damage and allow it to heal.
For that, I used a single extension exercise done three times a day for three days, followed by two days of rest.
I immediately noticed that the most improvement happened during the resting days.
I came to understand that it was during the days of rest that the healing was happening, not during the exercise.
That is a principle that comes from bodybuilding.
People used to think that they built muscle while lifting the weights, but later science revealed that the exercises actually caused damage to the muscle.
It was during the healing process, or rest, that the muscle grew bigger and stronger because of the workout.
Keep that in mind anytime you have damage to any part of your body.
After a round of extension exercise and the two days of rest, I decided to add another exercise.
A stress free forward stretch.
I did it along with the extension exercise for another three days followed by two more resting days.
Much to my amazement the pain was almost gone after the two days of rest.
I decided to wait a little longer to see if the remaining pain would go away with more rest.
Well, it didn't.
So I did the routine of flexing and extension again for three days, with two more of rest.
I didn't see a lot of improvement.
The pain left over was mild compared to what I had already been through.
In comparison to what I felt before, I felt great.
My back was still "sore" and weak, but there were no more sharp pains when I bent over.
It was an improvement over what the chiropractor had been able to do with my 500 bucks.
I decided that my treatment needed a boost.
I introduced the inversion table to the program.
I would do my flexing and extending exercises which had substantially reduced the pain.
The immediately after doing them , I would get on the inversion table at a mild angle for five to ten minutes.
After the five day cycle, three of the treatment and two for healing, the pain was as little as it had ever been in my memory.
It was nothing but a mild muscle soreness.
I determined that it was lingering because of muscle weakness, and not any problem with my back or spine alignment.
To overcome that, I added a dead lift exercise to the rest of the developing treatment.
To my amazement, I woke up absolutely pain free within a couple of days doing it.
I had finally conquered all of the problems and the pain was totally gone.
At that point, I decided to continue on with my treatment one day a week as a preventive measure.
I also did the extension exercise anytime my back felt tight, which was usually after being bent over for while or if I allowed my posture to get bad for a prolonged sitting at the computer.
Having been pain free for a couple of years now, I want to help everyone else do it too.
So here is the generic prescription to help you do it.
1) Visit a chiropractor for an initial visit and x-ray.
If he says he can stop your pain, you can do it yourself with this program.
2) Understand and correct your posture.
3) Do an extension exercise three times a day for three days, rest for two.
4) Add a flexing exercise and repeat the cycle.
5) Add MILD inversion and repeat the cycle.
6) Add a dead lift exercise for one final cycle.
7) Do the entire treatment once a week for maintenance.
That is all it takes to cure non traumatic back pain.
You will benefit most from your back pain treatment if you look at your efforts as an attempt to do what the chiropractor does.
He knows he cannot cure you in a single visit.
There is no reason to believe that you can with a single extension exercise.
With each exercise, in each cycle, your only goal is to take a small step towards improving the alignment of your spine and the ability of your muscles to recognize and support the improvement.
For many people it is a chronic, everyday thing.
I personally suffered chronic daily back pain for over 10 years, and another ten years or so of painful back episodes spread out over time before that.
Finally, my back "went out" to the point that I could not even stand up straight.
My x-ray looked like a snake, not a spine.
After 500 dollars with a chiropractor and a couple of weeks off of work, I was able to regain enough movement to resume what I had of a life.
The chiropractor assured me he could eventually stop all of the pain.
But he already had all of my money and without insurance I couldn't afford the additional treatments.
Not to mention the "adjustments" I would need for the rest of my life.
But in the end, what I gained from the chiropractor was just what I needed.
He had said he could relieve all of the pain in time.
I figured if he could do it, so could I.
The only problem was that I didn't really know how.
The first thing I did was to get my inversion table out of storage and try to use it again.
It met with the storage building because I didn't know what I was doing and ended up worse off than when I started.
It is really cool to see those people hanging upside down and doing crunches on the inversion table commercials.
But if someone with back problems tries to do that, well, their inversion table ends up in storage.
At the same time I recovered my inversion table, I also got a copy of Robin Mckenzies "7 Steps to a Pain Free Life".
It was about 15 bucks at Books a Million, and that was the last money I ever spent on my back problem.
It is not that the book stopped the pain.
It was still there, but to a manageable degree.
The book helped and I learned the exercises I needed to do to keep things from getting as bad as they were again.
At the same time, I began researching the use of an inversion table.
I found they worked for a lot of people, but not for everyone.
I needed to understand the reason they work for some people, but not for others.
I stumbled upon an article about a chiropractor who was using them in his practice.
The article said he used them at very slight angles and kept the patient on it for about 10 to 15 minutes.
He spoke of great success, and his office was reported as one of the leading referrers to an inversion table store.
I began to realize that between the Mckenzie book and the inversion table I had all of the tools I needed to end my back pain once and for all.
With that knowledge, I started to consider exactly what I needed to do to make it happen.
When doing the Mckenzie exercises, after some time of doing them my pain would change.
It was not the centralizing of the back pain discussed in the book.
It was an entirely new pain.
I determined that I had most likely overdone the stretching and caused additional damage.
So I stopped the exercises and improved over the next couple of weeks by doing nothing at all.
I also determined that when I had used my inversion table in the past, I had also overdone that by going back too far, too fast.
Again, my "treatments" were doing additional damage while not allowing the original damage to heal.
Somewhere in between doing nothing and doing too much was the cure for my back pain.
But where, and how could I find out what was too much and what was not enough? I knew if I did what the Mckenzie book said for too long, I would just hurt more.
I knew that if I overdid inversion I would get the same result.
At the same time I also knew that if I didn't do enough I would not get better.
I decided to make an attempt at devising my own back pain cure that would use both mild inversion and minimal exercise.
The goal was to ensure that I did neither to the point of additional damage.
I didn't really know it at the time, but one of the absolute keys to stopping chronic back pain is to make sure you do not do any further damage with the treatment you choose.
If your back hurts, it is because there is damaged tissue.
You cannot do exercises that have the potential to do further damage.
That includes putting too much stretch on them by over inverting yourself.
Once I learned to respect my back pain, I never again did additional damage.
In fact, I designed my cure to ensure that I could not do any additional damage.
With everything I knew about back pain, here is the outline I came up with to cure my back pain.
First, I recognized that my posture was the root cause of all of the problems.
I made a conscious effort to sit and stand correctly as much as possible.
In order to correct your posture, you have to understand what the goal is.
Sitting and standing straight is not the goal.
It is the result.
The goal of good posture is to keep your spine out of stressful positions.
Your back has a range of motion just like everything else.
If you stay at the extremes, such as bending over or hyper extending your back, for too long your body will let you know it.
Your spine has a natural curve to it.
The goal of good posture is to identify that natural curve and try to keep it intact for as much of the time as possible.
Correcting your posture is essential in stopping your back pain.
If you don't make the effort to maintain the proper curve in your back, you will be fighting against your body.
Every day, you will undo the work you have done the day before.
The inevitable result is chronic back pain.
Correcting you posture is the first step to permanently eliminating your back pain.
If you are not willing to work on that you are wasting your time doing anything else.
The next step in the treatment was to undo some of the damage and allow it to heal.
For that, I used a single extension exercise done three times a day for three days, followed by two days of rest.
I immediately noticed that the most improvement happened during the resting days.
I came to understand that it was during the days of rest that the healing was happening, not during the exercise.
That is a principle that comes from bodybuilding.
People used to think that they built muscle while lifting the weights, but later science revealed that the exercises actually caused damage to the muscle.
It was during the healing process, or rest, that the muscle grew bigger and stronger because of the workout.
Keep that in mind anytime you have damage to any part of your body.
After a round of extension exercise and the two days of rest, I decided to add another exercise.
A stress free forward stretch.
I did it along with the extension exercise for another three days followed by two more resting days.
Much to my amazement the pain was almost gone after the two days of rest.
I decided to wait a little longer to see if the remaining pain would go away with more rest.
Well, it didn't.
So I did the routine of flexing and extension again for three days, with two more of rest.
I didn't see a lot of improvement.
The pain left over was mild compared to what I had already been through.
In comparison to what I felt before, I felt great.
My back was still "sore" and weak, but there were no more sharp pains when I bent over.
It was an improvement over what the chiropractor had been able to do with my 500 bucks.
I decided that my treatment needed a boost.
I introduced the inversion table to the program.
I would do my flexing and extending exercises which had substantially reduced the pain.
The immediately after doing them , I would get on the inversion table at a mild angle for five to ten minutes.
After the five day cycle, three of the treatment and two for healing, the pain was as little as it had ever been in my memory.
It was nothing but a mild muscle soreness.
I determined that it was lingering because of muscle weakness, and not any problem with my back or spine alignment.
To overcome that, I added a dead lift exercise to the rest of the developing treatment.
To my amazement, I woke up absolutely pain free within a couple of days doing it.
I had finally conquered all of the problems and the pain was totally gone.
At that point, I decided to continue on with my treatment one day a week as a preventive measure.
I also did the extension exercise anytime my back felt tight, which was usually after being bent over for while or if I allowed my posture to get bad for a prolonged sitting at the computer.
Having been pain free for a couple of years now, I want to help everyone else do it too.
So here is the generic prescription to help you do it.
1) Visit a chiropractor for an initial visit and x-ray.
If he says he can stop your pain, you can do it yourself with this program.
2) Understand and correct your posture.
3) Do an extension exercise three times a day for three days, rest for two.
4) Add a flexing exercise and repeat the cycle.
5) Add MILD inversion and repeat the cycle.
6) Add a dead lift exercise for one final cycle.
7) Do the entire treatment once a week for maintenance.
That is all it takes to cure non traumatic back pain.
You will benefit most from your back pain treatment if you look at your efforts as an attempt to do what the chiropractor does.
He knows he cannot cure you in a single visit.
There is no reason to believe that you can with a single extension exercise.
With each exercise, in each cycle, your only goal is to take a small step towards improving the alignment of your spine and the ability of your muscles to recognize and support the improvement.
