“Back pain is youth leaving the body”

But there’s no time to be wistful about the loss of youth! Being proactive about this back pain means figuring out where it is coming from and doing something about it. For most people, the epicenter of back pain is the core, which involves numerous sets of muscles that contribute to your postural strength. Most types of non-descript back pain will stem from dysfunction in the postural muscles. Here’s how it works: 

• Postural muscles refer to the deep-lying sets of muscles between the pelvis, abdomen and upper back. These are the muscles, including the ones that attach to your spine, which are responsible for keeping you upright. They are always working, even when you are sitting still, which means that they often become tight from over-use. This tightness leads to pain. 
• Phasic muscles refer to the muscles which strengthen your body and provide for movement. Muscles such as the abdominals and glutes contribute to core stability by lending reinforcement, but they often become weak from lack of use. This weakness contributes to misalignment of the spine, and increases your likelihood for injury.

Postural strength focuses on balancing the body to prevent back pain

At our office in Dunedin, we have a plan to address our shortcomings in regards to postural strength. It begins by realigning the spine to improve range of motion and reduce pain. From here, we focus on stretching and elongating the overly tight postural muscles, while simultaneously strengthening the phasic muscles to increase stability of the core region. Sretching and strengthening of the postural muscles works best with low-intensity, higher-frequency conditioning while strengthening of the phasic muscles works better with higher-intensity and more rest.

Increasing postural strength to keep on feeling young

Better postural strength means you will be able to stay upright easier, looking sexier and more confident, while also keeping yourself resilient toward injury and back pain. if these things interest you, give our office in Dunedin a call to schedule an appointment today.