How NOT To Walk With Back Pain

“Hey! What’s going on? It’s Ian Hart here, Co- Creator of Back Pain Relief4Life and Back Pain Relief Expert. Today I’m going to speak to you about walking and back pain.

Many times people are trying to protect their back when they have back pain – which is a normal response. The brain is trying to protect your body. But, when it comes to walking, stiffening up will create twisting torque on the back and will actually create more trauma and more pain. You might feel like you’re protecting it, but you’re not. So what I am going to show you is how to walk when you’re dealing with back pain. This might be something that goes against your intuition, but it’s going to help you in the long-term and I can show you few other things. We have other videos that are going to help for you to find the right place to put your pelvis when you’re walking. But for now I’m just going to show you a quick walking technique. I’m going to show you what NOT to do. The first thing is when we see people walking with back pain, they tend to be tensed up and then move very slowly, they take short choppy steps, they try to protect their back, and actually what’s happening is there’s causing a twist and torque in their back.  This is not good especially if you have pain, it’s just going to exacerbate the problem.

So you want to relax the shoulders and you kind of want to let the arms swing while you’re walking and try to walk a little bit faster. You’ll notice that if you’re in back pain, you’ll actually feel better when you do this. So this is the way NOT to do it… tighten up here, you can see there’s twisting torque. If I just relaxed my arms and I let my arms swing and take a little bit bigger steps, and walk a little bit smoother, my body is going to function naturally, the spine stays straight, there’s no twist and torque going on. Twisting and torquing the spine is one of the worst things you can do. It’s the best way to cause back pain and injury later on and it puts a lot of compression on the disc.

So there you go, that’s one simple technique for walking. Make sure you are conscious of how you are. A lot of the people that we deal with with back pain we find as soon as they get on the bike or start walking, they tense up, they’re holding their body tight and they are actually not strengthening the muscles that need to be strengthened and they’re compensating creating more problems not only in their back but again you’ll see shoulders tense up, so the back muscles and the shoulders get tighter, and it creates more problems throughout the whole body.

Again, this is Ian Hart with backpainrelief4life.com. Go ahead and click the link below if you’re interested in checking out our program to help eliminate back pain as well as prevent future back pain and strengthen the core.”

Ian Hart is a Body-Mind Transformation expert, the creator of EarthFIT Training Systems, co-creator of BACK PAIN RELIEF4LIFE, and founder of BEAUFORTPERSONALTRAINING.COM and MYBACKPAINCOACH.COM. Ian and his team help people get into optimal shape in the safest, fastest and most effective way possible, using cutting edge science.