Change your life and you will change your spine. Change your spine and you will change your life. Let me give you a few lifestyle tips for self-care which you can do today.
What are the best ways to prevent lower back pain or relieve lower back pain if you already have it? Having a morning movement routine, adopting better breathing habits, switching out your shows, sitting less, staying hydrated, hinging your hips, and changing your sleep position are all ways that you can easily relieve lower back pain and prevent it from coming back.
DIY Lower Back Pain Lifestyle Tips
Below are my top 7 recommendations for improving lower back pain.
- Adopt a morning movement routine
- Practice breathing techniques
- Switch your shoes
- Sit less
- Stay hydrated
- Do hip hinges
- Change your sleep position
1. Adopt a morning movement routine
Do you ever get pain in your lower back right as you rise from bed?
A study has been done showing morning lower back pain can be reduced by simply not flexing your spine as much when you wake up. This means don’t round your back.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9854759/
In the morning, before you drag yourself out of bed, you have an amazing opportunity to start the day off right with some simple movements for your body. Often when a person with lower back pain first sits up in bed and stands, they feel some slight pain or discomfort. So let’s make sure we wake up the back muscles and prepare them for sitting up and standing.
Avoid the forward “sit up” when you wake up. Instead, roll onto your side and do a “sideways sit up.”
This will protect your spine from flexion. The sit up is often a hip flexor dominant movement. When hip flexors get short and over used they compromise the spine. Avoid those problems by sitting up sideways.
How to do a sideways sit up? Roll on your side while laying down. Bend your knees up and swing them over the side of your bed. Use your arms to push yourself up sideways. Engage your obliques and quadratus lumborum muscles, not your hip flexors. Do not round the spine, keep it neutral.
Now let’s get your core muscles in gear to start your day.
Position yourself to sit on the edge of your bed with your legs hanging off the side. Raise your head up as high as you can, make a big chest and pull your belly button in. Sucking in your gut. Hold it for about 10 seconds. Then rest for a breath before trying again. Do this 4-5x. Breathing slowly in and out while you do it
Once you are done then you can slowly shift your weight onto your feet until you are standing up. This is a much slower and cleaner method to rise from your sleeping position in the morning.
2. Practice breathing techniques
What kind of breathing do you have? Are you a mouth breather? Are you a shallow breather?
A study has shown that breathing programs can be helpful in reducing lower back pain. Here are my tips for starting to modify your breathing habits.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27632818/
Throughout your day, you are going to take thousands of breaths. Each time you breathe you are going to move your spine ever so slightly. Depending on the rate or pace of your breathing, you will also be influencing your heartbeat as well. We want to take advantage of this simple lifestyle change to optimize our breathing patterns. This is something that will benefit your overall health, not just your lower back pain.
Take slow breaths. Preferably about 6 seconds inhaling and 6 seconds exhaling.
Set reminders for yourself throughout the day so you keep practicing this pace of breathing. This will lower your heart rate. Calming your body and nervous system. Reducing your pain levels.Change the movement of your breaths. Use diaphragmatic breathing. Expand your rib cage out horizontally, not vertically. Let your ribs get wide with each breath. Expanding left and right, not up and down. This puts less stress on your neck and provides more movement around your thoraco-lumbar junction.
3. Switch your shoes
This can be confusing to understand. I’ll try my best to keep things simple. Your feet are the foundation of your body. If your feet are not functioning well, the problems will ripple up the whole body. The main problem for most people is weak and incarcerated feet.
You have probably worn shoes most of your life. Shoes are a great tool. They protect and keep us warm. You wouldn’t want to walk out in the snow or on to a construction site barefoot. But shoes have become too constricting. They squish our toes together and restrict healthy arch movement. We lose muscle mass in shoes and our ability to feel.
For some people who are older or who have chronic conditions preventing them from a healthy gait. Special shoes might be the best option. But expensive shoes with orthotics are often a band-aid. You don’t create healthy movement patterns and function by wearing special shoes. You have to train those muscles with movements and shoes usually restrict movement.
My advice to most people with lower back pain, when it comes to shoes, is this:
Less is more. Less shoes, less restriction and less time in shoes.
Many people have shoes which they need to throw away or at least wear with caution. Flip flops, high heels or tight dance shoes. When I buy new shoes I make sure I can wiggle my toes around and don’t feel any confinement of my natural foot movements.
Spend less time in shoes. If possible try to walk around your house or even your work barefoot. Even outside you can walk through parks, beaches or sometimes hiking trails barefoot.
If barefoot is too crazy for you then buy minimalist shoes. Zero drop. Meaning no restrictions. No heel or arch support. Open space for your toes and flexible material which bends and moves.
4. Sit less
Sitting has recently been called the “new smoking.”
Kelly Starrett wrote a fantastic book about this topic called Deskbound. I recommend you read that if you want more info about the errors of sitting too much.
But the problem is not just sitting too much. Truthfully it’s about not moving enough. Even if you switched from sitting to standing or laying down. You would still have the problem of not moving enough. Being still. Motionless is the real problem.
Motionless lifestyles cause stiffness, locked up and weak muscles.
Your soft tissues, muscles, tendons, ligaments and fascia will mold themselves to whatever position you stay in for long periods of time. If you sit, then your hip flexors will shorten, your glutes will stretch and weaken, your spine will compress. Don’t get stuck in one position.
The fix is to get fidgety. Start shifting yourself around in your seat. Be uncomfortable. Stand up, then sit down, then kneel, then stand on one leg, then sit again and keep moving.
This will use more muscles, energy, and keep your body nimble.
5. Hydration.
Drinking water is healthy for you. We all know this. But why is it healthy for your spine?
In between each bony vertebra in your spine you have a gelatinous disc. This disc requires lots of water to stay healthy and squishy. If it dehydrates, then it will turn hard, cause compression and pain.
Avoid these degenerative disc issues by replenishing your discs and simply staying hydrated with lots of water.
My rule of thumb for water consumption is half my body weight in ounces.
So if you weigh 100 lbs. Then you need to drink around 50 oz. of water each day.
You also need to limit the substances which dehydrate you. Smoking, alcohol, coffee, salty or fast foods.
Just like breathing. Hydration is essential for life. You should not be neglecting this activity.
6. Try squatting, lunging, and hip hinging
How are you bending over to pick something up off the ground? Could you be compromising your spine during these daily movements?
If you bend over with a rounded spine then let’s make some changes. Spinal flexion repeated throughout the day while lifting something can damage your spine.
Instead try squatting, lunging or hip hinging to pick something up.
These moves will keep your spine in a neutral position. Protecting the discs and facet joints. It will engage your leg and hip muscles keeping you strong.
7. Change your sleep position
Last, but not least. Sleeping positions. We started with the morning and now we will end with night time.
You sleep about 8 hours each night. Unless you roll around and move, then that means about 8 hours in the same posture. This can cause some serious issues of compression and muscle stiffness if you get yourself into a poor position.
The 3 most common positions for sleeping are belly, side and back.
Let me break down each.
Belly is usually the easiest to fall asleep in. It’s comfortable and relaxing. It causes an arch in your spine which can feel nice if you are stuck in spinal flexion all day long.
But it does twist your neck. If you already arch your spine during the day then belly sleep will increase your facet joint compression, causing more pain when you wake up.
Side is also a very comfortable position. It helps with snoring and is nice for staying warm in the fetal position.
But it curves the spine, imbalances the hips and rounds the shoulders. It’s best to bolster your hips, torso and shoulders with a body pillow.
Back is rarely comfortable for people. It can cause snoring and if you have a mattress which dips then it will compress your discs.
But this is generally the closest you can get to a neutral spine while sleeping. It’s better for your neck and shoulder positions. The hips can stay even and the lumbar curve is relatively normal. Depending on your mattress, I say stiff is better. I recommend you try back sleeping when possible.
This concludes my 7 lifestyle tips for lower back pain. I hope this helps you.
If you liked this article, check out my article about releasing trigger points in your low back.