Understanding how your body works and why you should care goes a long way toward relieving severe lower back pain.

If you’re looking for a quick fix or silver bullet to get rid of your severe lower back pain, I have news for you: There aren’t any.

My goal is to focus more on the why and the how of acute lower back pain, so that we can solve the problem at the source.

If you need immediate help with your severe lower back pain, schedule an appointment with your chiropractor in South Jordan, Utah now.

Let’s Start by Talking About Posture.

When you hold your head forward in poor posture, your spine must support increasing amounts of weight.

One rule of thumb is that for every inch that the head is held forward in poor posture, an additional 10 pounds of weight is felt on the cervical spine. So if the average head weighs between 10 and 12 pounds, just 1 or 2 inches of forward head posture can double or triple the load on the cervical spine.

You can see how this one little thing could cause severe lower back pain.

Your neck muscles are meant to hold your head up stacked on your vertebral column. When it has to hold your head away from your body, it’s like holding a can of soup out at arm’s length. At first it feels like nothing. But it doesn’t take long before your arm starts to fatigue.

The same thing is happening in the rest of your spine over time. And instead of quitting, your efficient body is gonna recruit and compensate until it finally can’t any more. That’s a very common cycle of severe lower back pain.

Your spinal muscles are designed primarily to guide movement and to stabilize your core. The constant low-grade load of holding your body away from midline (in any direction) will inevitably lead to fatigue, then failure. This is what you experience as acute lower back pain.

Sometimes you’ll experience a gradual onset back pain. Other times you bend over to tie your shoelaces, and you go into acute lower back pain.

Treat Severe Lower Back Pain by Correcting Your Posture

So, if poor posture is the cause of your severe lower back pain, how can you fix it?

You’ve heard of fight or flight? Well I’ve come up with my own catchy little thing: Stacked or Stable.

When you’re sitting, standing, lifting, driving, exercising, working, hobbying, reading, using the computer, or looking at your phone, you either want to be stacked or stabilized.

As much as possible, you want to be stacked. Stack your weight over your support so that you have the biomechanical advantage. You waste so much less energy on useless work this way. Energy that your body can now use to run your immune system, your digestion, and maybe even have energy left over for remodeling and repair.

How to Lean to Avoid Severe Lower Back Pain

Sometimes, however, you can’t help but have to lean. That’s when you stabilize. Either with your stance, or an arm. Back to physics. You know how triangles are the strongest shape? I want you to become one as often as you can.

If you have work in front of you, like dishes, or working on a car, or putting together a puzzle with the family over the holidays. Sometimes you can’t help but have to lean forward.

When you find yourself in these situations, find a way to make a triangle. Put one arm out to brace yourself, so the weight is stacked along your arm bones with little muscle stabilization needed.

Or widen your stance to a triangle to bring yourself lower, and closer to your work. I’m on the tall side for a woman, and I always use a wide stance when I’m doing dishes. Otherwise I end up with my own severe lower back pain.

If you’re doing something in front of you, like laying flooring, or gardening, instead of holding your torso up with your back, brace yourself with your strong leg muscles.

Following a few common sense tips, and knowing a couple of easy concepts can help us to reduce the frequency and intensity of severe lower back pain.

Adding regular chiropractic adjustments to maintain proper joint mobility is another easy way to avoid neck spasms, headaches, back spasms and acute lower back pain.

Schedule an appointment today with Dr. Gina Labrum, your South Jordan, Utah chiropractor to get out of pain now and prevent severe lower back pain in the future.