Solutions for Back Pain, Tension and Other Pain
A guide to what is effective in regards to back pain and tension. Compiled from years of research and first hand experience.
May 20, 2020
Purpose of This Article
I’ve seen so many people just resign themselves to living with pain (“I guess I’m just old now!”), or worse chase their tails trying ineffective and often expensive solutions only to end up right back where they started. I’ve been researching it for a long time and I wanted to put together this condensed guide for others to easily get to some of the more effective (and cost effective) solutions, without having to wade through all the misinformation out there. Unfortunately there’s not really a pre-defined universally agreed process that someone can go through who has back pain. So this article will attempt to put together a practical working solution until we find out something better.
Table of Contents
Disclaimer
Although I use the word ‘Back’ Pain… I’m going to be using it as an umbrella term for muscle, neck, and shoulder pain as well. For years now I’ve struggled with a lot of pain and tension largely from not moving enough. And so have a lot of you. Nearly everyone I’ve talked to who works a desk job at some point has been troubled with back, neck, shoulder, wrist pain, or just felt crappy from being immobile for long periods.
The solutions in this article are primarily intended for people who have NOT suffered an injury. Basically if you were otherwise healthy, and then started to get aches and pain and muscle tension and you are doing very little body movement each day, this article is for you. Your pain and tension is probably caused by lack of movement and a few other related things. If you suffered an injury like a car accident or sports injury and are getting pain, you may require a different approach with a professional. (But some of these approaches may complement and overlap with your treatment!)
Forget Everything You Currently Know About Back Pain!
One of the most frustrating things about the topic is the wealth of misinformation out there. Society tends to act like there’s one true solution for back pain, but in reality it’s a lot more like cancer treatment. We really don’t have a good understanding of how it works and there’s not one solution that works for everyone. There’s a lot of hearsay …and many things that don’t work at all. There’s also a ton of stuff that only partially works.
So much of what’s out there is straight up false information that I encourage everyone to just throw out everything they think they know about back pain and start over from scratch (Yes really!) .
Otherwise people will tend to fixate on common things they’ve heard repeated throughout our culture that don’t actually work and it just gets in the way. It really is that bad.
And what’s even worse than that, many medical professionals don’t know what works either! They often don’t keep up with the science, are also just as prone to the cultural hearsay as all humans are, and have vested interests in you staying with their (often expensive) approach. You may go to a host of professionals such as chiropractors or physical therapists that all tell you different and contradictory information. Where can you turn?
Painscience.com Might be the Best Overall Site on the Internet About Pain There Is
As far as the internet goes, it’s an absolutely terrible resource for information on pain and muscle tension. It’s full of contradictory and straight up false information. But, If I had to turn to one site for information, http://www.painscience.com would be the one. Here is a good overall guide to the site.
The man who runs the site’s sole job now is full time research into the topic of pain. His tutorials go into extreme depth into what works and what doesn’t. He is on the front lines of this topic and his solutions have been much more effective and cheaper than others. The only problem I’d say is he tends to throw out any approaches that haven’t yet been tested yet. So he’s not fully comprehensive. Not all approaches have been tested equally, or at all. But of the stuff that has been, he is a great resource.
Best Overall Solutions that Have Worked For Me
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with any of these sites or methods and receive no payment, but I have used each and every one and can personally vouch for it.
Painscience.com’s model (free)
Painscience.com’s primary approach revolves around 3 separate things that come together.
Massaging Out Trigger Points - trigger points are basically these areas of tension in muscles that need to get massaged out for at least 30 seconds in order for the muscle to really loosen. You often cannot fully relax tight muscles without doing this every so often. You can get at them yourself, or have someone else do it (A knowledgeable massage therapist can also help a lot here, but they won’t be able to be with you day to day).
- Here’s a list of common trigger points to massage - (don’t need to do all of them, but focus on ones that contribute to your own problem areas).
- Here’s a link to a good massage ball that gets at the points better than your hands. It’s great to do it against a wall or in a door frame.
Use Mobilizations - (repeated simple body movements) - to keep future tension at bay and to calm down currently agitated muscles. The trigger points reset the muscles, but to maintain the looseness from there, you need body movement. You basically do high reps of very simple low intensity movements to loosen a muscle. The high reps are key. You need anywhere from 30 - 70 reps depending on the person. 40 is probably a good number to shoot for until you get a feel for how much you need.
- Here’s an In depth article on mobilizations and how to do them.
- A DVD routine of mobilizations (about $40) .This one is one of the best routines I’ve found for loosening the whole body, and you get a lot of bonus information on acupressure which feels awesome.
- More Mobilizations from Tai chi. The 1st video you get in their 1 month Free Trial has some really great ones you won’t get elsewhere.
Mobilize at a certain frequency for them to stay effective -. You need a 20:1 ratio. Basically if you are in a static (non moving position) for 20 mins, you need at least 1 minute of mobilization to ward off tension and pain.
- Here’s an in depth article on how often you should mobilize.
You want to keep the cycle of all three things going. If I don’t do one of the three usually the cycle breaks down and stops working, especially if I’m not working on the trigger points.
What a routine might look like.
So the overall approach would look like this. I’ve been sitting for about 30 mins. I get up and use a massage ball to work on 1- 2 trigger points near my most aggravated areas for about 30 seconds each. Then I’ll pick a problem area to do about 40 reps of a mobilization on each (while doing breathing and going into a meditative state from qigong). Then back to work. Repeat at least once every 30 mins for best results. When really jacked up do every 20 mins. You don’t need to repeatedly work trigger points each time. I’ve found 1-3 times per day seems to be sufficient. (I now also include some progressive muscle relaxation in this routine for my hips / neck / jaw as well. See below)
Don’t Just Sit There ($40)
https://www.primalblueprint.com/dont-just-sit-there
This program tries to find a solution to the problem of how to integrate movement into your daily life instead of having to always take breaks to do it. You are doing it all the time. Adding in breaks on top of though only makes it more powerful. They are one of the only people I’ve seen try to address this issue in an office environment.
How it Works
Their basic approach is to switch positions as often as possible. Ideally you would have a laptop and some space and furniture to sit and stand. Every time you begin to get tense you switch positions. You cycle through as many positions as possible including but not limited to sitting on the floor with legs out, kneeling, cross legged, laying down, sitting, standing, etc.I’ve tried it at home and it seems to be an improvement over simply sitting or standing in one position for long periods. I was cycling through about 5-6 positions over the course of an hour and I never really got the chance to tense up. If you couple this approach with the PainScience model, I see it is a really really powerful system. The problems come in in how to fully do it in an office environment unless you have the right space and equipment. Despite this, there are so many useful and sneaky and subtle tips to work in movement (especially at standing desks) I still recommend it. Especially since in the future we will have more mobility with laptops.
Alignment and Ergonomics
Along with making sure you move, it’s good to make sure that when you are not moving you aren’t putting yourself in positions that aggravate pain. Alignment and ergonomics is important, but usually not as important as moving enough. Postural alignment is a pretty deep subject and beyond the scope of this article… but in general if you align yourself and your workstation similar to the following images, it should take care of a lot of the biggest offenders in terms of posture related pain problems. The numbers aren’t so important as having the actual lines line up with the points on your body.
The Greatest Alignment Cue: Hanging from a Thread at the Top of your Head
By far the greatest postural tip I’ve come across is to let your head feel as if it’s suspended from a thread at the top of your crown. Let your tailbone relax and release away from the top of your head, loosening and elongating your spine. Next let your shoulders, arms, and legs hang off of your spine.
Normally we try to tense ourselves into standing up straight, forcing our shoulders back and chest out. But that approach just tires you out and is ineffective. This gets you much straighter and by doing the opposite, relaxing. So it’s infinitely sustainable. It also manages to take the pressure off and align you better.
If you want to take postural alignment to the extreme, I would suggest getting into Tai Ji Chuan. They take postural alignment to depths that few others dare.
Fixing Muscle Imbalances
It seems like in addition to the movement, sometimes strengthening certain muscle groups can give additional added benefits. For any given task, your body will recruit muscles to get it done. It doesn’t really try to make sure you are using the best ones for the job though, and over time it can develop bad habits and the recruitment can snowball to where you are overworking muscles you don’t need to use to make up for weaker ones.
The common recommendation is to work with some sort of physical therapist. Most types of physical therapy did not work for me, and would fix one thing but increase pain and tension somewhere else.
But If I was going to recommend one type of physical therapist, it would be MAT (Muscle Activation Technique) practitioners. They seem to be the best at understanding and working with muscle imbalances. Here’s a decent overview of what it’s all about. They’ve helped me cut my pain down by at least 50%. Where the other physical therapists weren’t as effective and didn’t really know what to do about the tension increasing, the MAT guys already accounted for that and had a plan. At the end of the day they were the most effective of all the physical therapy based methods I tried.
The main con for them is that they are expensive. But most treatment is. But if you are going to pay for something in regards to strengthening, this is probably your best bet in terms of a permanent solution. And you’ll need less sessions the longer you do it.
Combine it All Together with Qigong
Doing all of these movements will help, but I’ve found they tend to plateau over time unless you add breathing ,meditative states and you are feeling and releasing your feelings. The tension in your body is partially caused by external factors like lack of movement, posture and repetitions of bad movement. But another huge portion is that it’s a reflection of your mental and emotional state. Unless you are confronting these things as well, you will probably never fully be able to get rid of your pain and tension.
With qigong, often, 10% of your results will be from the movement, 30% will be from the breathing, and 60% will be the meditative state you can get in while you are doing it. This relaxes you much much more deeply and on a much more fundamental level than other methods.
What is Qigong and Why is it Effective?
It turns out there is already a system that focuses on mobilizing the body to get rid of pain and tension…while also incorporating breathing, meditations and emotions. It’s called Qigong. Qigong seems to be the root of nearly all body based systems like yoga. But is significantly more powerful and comprehensive than many common systems.
Why is this? It’s because it takes a really holistic approach to the process. With gigong you get all of these in one place:
- Mobilizations
- Breathing
- Meditative States (including a form of loving kindness / gratitude)
- Progressive muscle relaxation
- Strengthening
- Clearing emotional blockages
Perhaps one of the only things you don’t get are the trigger point massages.
For the best resource on this, check out https://www.flowingzen.com. I tried several systems before this, and this was by far the most comprehensive and effective. Start with their blog posts to get more general information, and from there I would try their Quiet Mind Healthy Body intro class and then the more comprehensive 101.
One of the added benefits is that it helps build up your energy and vitality over time, which creates a positive feedback loop this in turn makes it easier and easier to relax, go into meditative states, which makes it easier to build up more energy which makes everything deeper.
The things that truly make it powerful though, are the sections on standing meditations (a.k.a. Warrior postures) and a section called Five Animal Play where you learn to release your emotions through spontaneous movement. The warrior postures really help you build up a lot of energy and bring emotions to the surface which have been buried, and the Five animal play gives you a process for letting them out. This is a vital missing ingredient from many other methods.
The Vital Importance of Muscle Relaxation
Progressive muscle relaxation is an actual specific technique for trying to relax your muscles using your conscious mind and intent. I am referring to it in a more general sense and not the specific technique from the wiki article. I’ve found over time that it’s important to be deliberate in telling your body to relax, and this can be a key component in overcoming certain issues. Scanning through your body, feeling all the different areas, intending for them to let go… It might be one of the most important skills you can ever develop. We acquire so much tension over the course of our lives and we do little to actually release it. Going deeply into this technique is a huge vehicle for dramatic changes, mentally and physically.
QiGong Tai Chi Chuan and Standing Meditations
There are a series of standing meditations in Qigong and Tai Chi called ‘standing post’ or Zhan Zhuang, or ‘warrior postures’.. Many in qigong and internal martial arts have been doing these for centuries. You maintain a certain posture and try to relax any non essential muscles by scanning the body and intending for each section to relax. The more you relax the heavier you can feel yourself become and the more weight goes into your thighs. The added benefit is that you also strengthen postural muscles. Basically you learn to let go of what you don’t need and strengthen what you do. It also helps to correct muscle imbalances. It creates a positive feedback loop that allows you to relax further and further and increases your energy levels as well as the flow of the energy. The less tension, the less blockage to your energy. The less baggage you have to carry.
Feeling Your Feelings
There’s no getting around your feelings. Whatever you resist persists. One of the best things about qigong is that in the advanced stages, it gives you a framework for preparing the body to emotionally release. Qigong will help build up and circulate your energy and bring emotions to the surface, and then a specific section called ‘Five Animal Play’ teaches you how to express them.. In the same way pressure must be in a hose before you can turn on the spigot and water will come out, qigong helps build up the pressure as well as release. In other systems I’ve tried, usually they have one or the other but not both.
Diet
Look into Anti inflammatories such as Spirulina, Tumeric w/ Black Pepper to reduce pain now. Additionally you want to check for any food sensitivities, vitamin deficiencies (particularly magnesium) or genetic mutations that could be contributing. For food sensitivities, the easiest DIY approach is to do an exclusionary diet for a month and see if anything improves.
Sleep apnea or poor sleep in general can also cause high levels of inflammation that can increase pain.
Experimental Research
Kinetix- is a newer form of therapy that has the practitioner pin your muscle where a trigger point is and then have you move at the same time. It’s supposed to get dramatic results and break up tension more comprehensively than just trigger point massage. I haven’t got to try it yet though, and they are currently only in Colorado. Link to her foundational technique -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JrBlCfsWJY&t=206s
To Sum Up
So we’ve covered quite a bit of material in this post. Here’s a recap of what we went over.
- Forget What You Know About Back and Other Pains
- Painscience.com - Is a good way to find out what works and what doesn’t
Top Methods that Work For Me
- Pain Science Model - trigger points, mobilizations, and frequency
- Don’t Just Sit There - change your set up so you can change positions frequently
- Alignment and Ergonomics - make sure you are avoiding postures that aggravate pain. Be sure to try “hanging from a thread”
- Fix Muscle Imbalances - find a MAT practitioner to help suss them out and correct them
Combine it all together with QiGong- to help with extra upper body tensions and stress.
Muscle Relaxation - learn to be more aware of your muscle tension and consciously control it.
Feeling your feelings- the tension in your body is directly related to your emotional and mental tensions.
Diet - try seeing if you are deficient in any nutrients, or have any food sensitivities to help with tension.
Experimental Research - try kinetix if you have the opportunity
There’s so much more to say on each one of these topics, but so little space. We’ve reached the end of this article and hopefully this has provided you with some good tangible resources to tackle pain and muscle tension problems. If anyone has questions or wants to know more feel free to reach out.