Thank you for joining us for today’s livestream where we talked about headaches, migraines and neck pain, and how your neck could be contributing towards you experiencing headaches and migraines. Regular headaches can really take it out of you, so we’re going to be talking about why these may be triggered by your neck as well as what you can do to help.

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We’re going to go into first and foremost, what can cause headaches. A lot of people are not aware that there are a number of nerves and blood vessels that travel through the base of the skull. When these become compressed, this can lead to us developing headaches as there’s a constriction of blood flow. In the video, we showed you what the impact a lack of space can have on the joints at the base of the skull - there’s quite a pinching going on. This is important to note because if you’re being given tablets to help with headaches/migraines, those tablets aren’t going to address your alignment so it’ll be a recurring problem.

In the poor neck image, the joints seem to be going in towards the skull, compared to the lower image where there’s plenty of space for these nerves. You can also see the difference in the two images of the alignment of the neck. The bottom ‘good’ image has a curve that is well maintained, while the image above of the poorly aligned spine is forward bending, it has lost its curve and the only backward bend is at the very top where those joints have become compressed.

Restoring alignment is going to be the main concern. To do this, we frequently recommend two stretches that will be helpful for you. Cervical extensions, where you use an exercise band placed behind the neck and gently pull as you lean back. We show you in the video how to perform this exercise properly. The rolled up towel exercise will also help to unload the cervical discs and take the pressure away from the spine. Using ice is also going to be helpful, as long as you’re placing it on the neck and then holding it in position with a towel rather than leaning your head forward with your hand holding the ice pack.

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Thank you for joining us on today’s livestream where we talked about muscle stiffness and back pain. Muscle stiffness is often one of the very first symptoms that occurs when we’ve got some kind of lower back dysfunction, and often it can be misattributed as a problem within itself rather than linked to the back.

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We often hear people being given the statement, ‘it’s just a bit of muscle stiffness, it’ll go away on its own’ but this is often a precursor to long-term back pain. It’s not very helpful to discount it as a muscle problem, as it ignores the underlying cause. The muscles are reactive structures and they will react to whatever is going on underneath.

If you go to the gym, you’re likely to suffer with delayed onset muscle soreness, which is a muscular reaction to a new workout. This can often last quite a few days, and depending on how hard you went at the gym it could be rather painful. It’ll usually appear after a day or so after going to the gym.

Usually the case goes that we get an injury in the back, usually due to a repetitive strain from sitting with poor posture - perhaps you’ve been working at home with a poor set-up. From there, the muscle reacts as a protective mechanism and tightens up. If you recognise it from there as a back problem, you can start to treat it as so and the problem can be fixed relatively quickly. The damage from that initial injury starts getting worse if you don’t do anything to resolve it, and the muscle reaction gets stronger. You might get more severe pain, you might get muscle spasms.

The Back In Shape membership area is designed to better support your spine, strengthen the body against injury and ensure your lower body is functioning effectively to protect the spine.

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Thank you for joining us for today’s livestream where we talked about rib joint and upper back pain. Rib joint pain can give you some quite disconcerting pain, so we’ll explain what that could be as well as some tips to help. 

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When the rib joints become irritated, it can give you sharp pain that often seems like it’s coming from the chest, although it can affect the front or back of the body. The ribs are joints with synovial fluid. On the back they attach to the thoracic spine, that are more flexible. On the front, they connect to cartilaginous structures. Our rib cage needs flexibility to move to help you breathe.

If you injure the joints through a trauma, you’re going to know this has happened and unfortunately there’s not a lot that can be done. It takes time but they will heal on their own.   If you spend a lot of time hunched over, you’re stretching the ligaments and muscles, which puts unnecessary strain through the rib joints. If we’re immobile and not moving properly, sometimes these rib joints are going to get irritated.

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Thank you for joining us for today’s livestream where we talked about disc bulges. How you can injure them so we can help you understand why your injury has occurred. We’ll also explain what you can do from home to help the problem and get you on the road to recovery.

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A normal healthy disc has two main parts, a fluid-filled centre and a collection of ligaments around the side. It’s the fluid that gives the disc height, which helps to resist compression. The nerves at the back of the disc travel through a hole, which has plenty of space in a healthy disc. So you won’t be experiencing pain. We don’t really have a need to know what’s going on in that area as it’s taking care of itself. 

In a disc bulge, we often don’t realise a problem is [DDD/herniated/slipped/prolapsed?] occurring until it starts to bulge far enough that it starts to compress on nearby nerves. Quite a lot of damage needs to happen before that disc fails, which is why rehabilitation can take time to resolve. As we start to do forward bending exercises or we’re not aware we’re damaging the spine daily through poor habits, more and more compression is applied to the disc. 

When this progresses, herniation occurs. At this point, there’s a lot of inflammation and you may be suffering from severe symptoms. The disc material has essentially come out of the disc, which can’t be put back - unlike a disc bulge/slip. This would be a bit like popping a water balloon.   In the case of degeneration, various complications can occur here where bony spurs can occur, permanent dehydration can occur.

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Why Do I Lean Away From My Pain? My Pain Is Making Me Stand Funny! 

Thank you for joining us for today’s livestream where we talked about how you stand when you have back pain. Antalgic posture is the term for when you have back pain and you find it difficult to straighten up.

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This antalgic posture can often be without you even noticing you’re happening, it might be that you’re leaning off to one side and usually you lean away from the herniation or disc bulge. When we adjust our positioning like this with back pain, the spaces in the spine can get slightly bigger as we’ve adjusted the positioning because it often feels better - this is due to this extra space. However, inflammation fills the space and can then make it very painful for us to move back into our original standing position.

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Welcome to today’s livestream where we talked about neck and shoulder pain, including how to differentiate between the two. How do you know when the pain is actually stemming from the neck or it's a genuine shoulder issue.

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How can you tell if it’s a neck issue?

If it’s across the top of the shoulders, you may notice your neck posture coming forward that might overstretch the shoulders. This can cause pain to occur across the trap muscles. Doing any kind of massage across these muscles is only going to create more of a problem as you might then have tissue damage. Other symptoms that occur with neck dysfunction can be pins and needles in the arm or fingers. You may also get pain at the top of the scapula or alongside of the neck. Poor neck alignment can pull on this attachment area as your head is a heavy structure, a bit like the weight of a bowling ball! 

How can you tell if it’s a shoulder issue?

Usually, shoulder issues tend to happen at the edges of the shoulders and top of the arm, where the two attach. The shoulder doesn’t have as much stability as other joints, it requires muscular support to prevent it from shearing. If you don’t have adequate muscular support, a common problem you’re likely to get is with the supraspinatus tendon or with the bicep tendon. Your shoulder muscles often get recruited if there’s not enough support around the joint itself.

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Difference Between OA and RA?

Arthritis is a topic that crops up a lot as it’s very common to suffer with arthritis affecting the spine. Today we’re going to be talking about why arthritis can often be dismissed as an ‘age-related’ issue, the difference between osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis as well as how you can deal with the pain that arthritis causes through the right rehabilitation.

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What Is Rheumatoid Arthritis?

Rheumatoid arthritis is quite different to osteoarthritis, in terms of nature and of treatment. We don’t deal with too many cases of rheumatoid arthritis here at the clinic as there’s very little that can be done to help, besides the medication you might be given for the problem. Rheumatoid arthritis is an inflammatory auto-immune condition. An auto-immune disease means that your immune system, which is usually designed to help us get better, attacks the cells around the joints. This causes the joints to become stiff and painful. 

What Is Osteoarthritis?

Osteoarthritis causes a similar swelling and stiffness in the joints as rheumatoid arthritis, however this will have been caused by wear and tear rather than the body attacking its own cells. The most common joints to be affected by this type of problem are going to be the ones that carry a heavy load, including the knees, hips, lower back as well as the more dominant side of your hands. You may develop more wearing on certain joints if you’ve injured them in the past, if they’re under more pressure due to incorrect alignment or being overweight, or even just by being female as women are more commonly affected than men.

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Thank you for joining us for today’s livestream where we talked about the effect core exercises can have in reducing back pain. Core exercises can help back pain but only if you do it correctly, so there are certain things you’re going to want to avoid in order to prevent making your back pain worse.

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We’re going to go through some principles that you should follow if you’re going to be doing core exercises:  When people think of training their core, there’s 3 exercises that usually spring to mind. Sit-ups, leg raises and russian twists. All of those activities involve flexion, which is forward bending. As you flex the spine it is not able to load bear effectively and shifts the weight to the front of the discs.  Any flexion based exercise with a twist can be really bad for your back, which is essentially what a russian twist is.  A lot of these exercises are not functional. They’re just not movements that are simulated in everyday life. When you slip off a curb, it’s your core that’s jumping in to save you from falling.  Your spine has a natural lordosis that should be maintained as it allows the spine to be strong. You don’t want to be rounding the spine to perform exercises nor doing a pelvic tuck to help you engage your core.  The core muscles when engaged become a corset around the spine that protects the lower back. We teach the vacuum exercise to teach you this without a pelvic tuck.

*****

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Thank you for joining us for today’s livestream where we talked about how to get around daily with back pain - how you can reduce back pain during daily tasks.

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Hopefully this is going to be helpful for you to be able to manage your back pain better, as well as how to manage things when you’re going through your recovery so that you don’t relapse.  These daily tasks can be anything from long drives, gardening or putting your children in the car. We’re going to go through 3 principles to bear in mind: Recognising The Strain On Your Back Recognise that there are activities that put a great deal of strain on your back, just when weight bearing when standing up. Doing the gardening or lifting your shopping bags is much more strenuous on your back. Try To Do The Activity Safely You can do this through maintaining your natural lordosis. We demonstrate this in the video just to be clear but we’re making sure to not round the spine in the lower back. Engage your core during the activity as this helps to protect your back.   Use your knees and hips to get down on the ground if it’s gardening you’re looking to do, or to unload shopping from bags.   Square yourself to the task as much as possible, don’t twist when you’re bending down as this can cause a relapse, turn around fully to do those things.   Know your limits in terms of time or strain. If you are in the early stages of recovery, don’t try and take all the shopping bags from the car at once. Go back a couple of times and make the extra trips. If you want to do the gardening and you know you want to do it during the day, don’t do it all in one go but just split it throughout the day.  You all have access to the free Phase 1 area of our Back In Shape. If you’ve had a busy day and you’ve done more than you probably should have done - do the entire Phase 1 protocol as this will help ease that strain on your back. Adding in extra towel and ice combinations over the next few hours if you have done something very strenuous, that should help. 

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Thank you for joining us for today’s livestream where we talked about the effect back pain can have on your mental health. 

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There is lots of research on back pain and mental health. If you’re struggling with it, it does affect a lot of people. When it comes to chronic back pain, sometimes a one-off incident can have less of an impact on mental health than someone who wakes up with the pain everyday. When you’re dealing with it alone it can feel very lonely. Our Facebook group for Back In Shape members, which you have access to when you join the Premium is a community of people and reassure you that you’re not alone.  Back pain recovery is never a linear improvement. You have to live on a daily basis so it’s normal to see bumps in the road when you are getting better. The important thing is not to give up on rehabilitation when that happens or think it’s not working.  Give yourself time and take an honest look at where your rehabilitation is at now. Don’t expect to be able to do more than your body can handle.

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