Back Pain? Why Muscles Cause Back Pain and What Can You Do to Stop Muscular Back Aches

What would you suppose is the most common and overlooked cause of back pain?

If you guessed muscles, you would be absolutely right!

Overstretched back muscles cause pain in your back, and they can also cause pain in your legs, head, arms and hands.

How do we manage to overstretch the muscles in our backs?

Here’s how. Ninety percent of our lives our heads and hands are in front of us. This causes the muscles in front of our bodies to get short, and the back muscles to get stretched. When we do this over and over, over time, our back muscles get overstretched.

These overstretched muscles complain. They let us know they are unhappy by causing back pain.

We each have several hundred muscles in our bodies, and we mostly use only the same sixty or so over and over. We get out of balance because we are not using all of our muscles.

A good goal is to use more of our muscles and to use them in different ways every day. Be thoughtful and pay attention to your body when you are trying new movements.

And, please don’t be timid about trying out different parts of your body and different movements. You are your own best physical therapist!

One really important move is to get our arms behind our bodies, since ninety percent of our lives our arms are in front of us.

Drop your hands down and stretch your arms backward. Try to squeeze your shoulder blades together. If it feels uncomfortable, that is because you aren’t used to it yet. Try it a few times a day for a week, unless it immediately makes your symptoms worse. Next week you can add a few more times a day.

By the way, remember to keep your head over your shoulders.

Many of us forget about our head when we are stretching, and our head moves forward. This can make our back pain symptoms worse or cause a headache.

An easy way to position your head over your shoulders is this: Think of a giant hook attached into your breastbone and pulling you up to the sky. When you lift your chest, your head moves into place over your shoulders.

Your poor, overstretched back muscles have been complaining. They don’t want to be stretched any farther. And to call attention to their plight, they cause back pain symptoms.

You can make them stop complaining when you start getting back into balance. You can get back to neutral posture by strengthening your back and opening up the muscles in front of your body.