Are your evenings full of lower back pain from sitting at your job, or driving the kids around to all of their activities? Does it make it difficult for you to even plan out anything enjoyable to do with your family at night? If you suffer from lower back pain, know that you do not have to live like that. There are quite a few things that you can do to help alleviate your pain, no matter what type of activity, or lack thereof, caused it. Here are some great things to do to help stretch out your lower back to reduce or eliminate your pain.
Give Some Basic Stretches a Try to Help Reduce Your Lower Back Pain
Stretching can do a lot to lessen lower back pain. Many of the exercises that your doctor would have you do for lower back pain are things that you can try on your own to help loosen up your lower back. So long as you do them gently, your back should be feeling better after each stretch, but don’t overdo it. Just go as far as you can comfortably so that you do not cause any type of injury to your back.
Stretch one for lower back pain is lying flat on your back and raising one knee up towards your chest at a time. You should use your hands to pull your knee in as far as you can without pain. Once you do the first knee, lay that one back down and stretch out the other knee.
Stretch two for lower back pain is a stretch that crosses your legs. While still on your back, take your right foot and put it just above your left knee, then lift your left leg towards your chest. Again, only go as far as you can safely, and repeat with both legs. Make sure your shoulders and head stay flat on the bed or floor, whichever you are laying down on.
Stretch three for lower back pain is a stretch meant for your trunk, including your lower back. You are going to take your left foot and place it on the floor outside of your right knee. While keeping your back flat on the floor, you are going to roll your lower body towards the right without lifting your shoulders. Then you are going to repeat on the other side, following the same steps.
If Massage Tends to Help You More, These Techniques May Help Your Lower Back Pain
For those that want to try to massage away their lower back pain, here are two techniques that may help you live with less pain. For the first technique, try making small circles on one side of the spine, followed by the same small circles down the other side of the spine. You never want to push straight down on the spine itself, just around it. You can also extend these circles out to cover the area around each hip as well. This should be done for 10-20 minutes, one or two times per week if you have chronic lower back pain. The other technique involves a kneading motion across the gluteus. This should cover from the waist down to the tailbone while avoiding the spine itself. These compression movements are able to help loosen up any bunched up muscles that could be causing your lower back pain. This should also be done one or two times each week, so long as your pain is still chronic. However, you should reduce how often you get the massages to once every 2-4 weeks when the pain decreases and all you are trying to do is maintain a healthy, pain-free lower back.
When Lower Back Pain Takes Away from Your Quality of Life, You Need to Seek Professional Help
There are times where stretching and massages are not going to be able to do much to help your lower back pain. Often, this is when there was some type of injury to your back or there is something more going on inside your back. If this is the case, you should get checked out by your doctor to see what is going on. They may have you try some of these techniques to help with your lower back pain, or they may have you go on and see a back specialist to look deeper into what could be the source of your pain. Just know that even if your lower back pain has been a problem for a long time, it doesn’t mean that you have to remain living like that indefinitely into the future.