Archive for June, 2009
For many back pain sufferers, much of the pain is in the muscles. Muscles contract as a reaction to inflammation, causing pain and potentially leading to more inflammation. It can be a vicious circle, and — surprisingly to some — regular exercise can help.
Whether and how much this resource will be helpful to you, and what kinds of equipment and exercises may be most suitable, will depend on the type of back pain you have, the cause(s) of that pain, and the severity.
Foremost, you’ll need to okay it with your primary physician, and as a back pain sufferer, you should take great care before beginning any exercise program or adding a new piece of equipment or set of exercises to your existing routine. There is no question that it is of utmost importance to be careful, but in spite of what Rush Limbaugh says on his radio show, study after study prove that people who may have an occasional minor injury while making a sustained and appropriate effort to stay physically fit are most definitely not the ones driving up the costs of medical care.
Every credentialed expert there is seems to agree that there is virtually no end to the potential benefits of being physically fit.
Even so, some people seem surprised that someone who has back pain should, or would want to, work out at all.
But they shouldn’t be.
For back pain sufferers — actually, for nearly everyone — there are many benefits to a regular exercise routine that includes both aerobic and progressive resistance strength training.
Further, the right kinds of exercise can do more to help control pain than most people realize, and there is nothing any better than being fit. The right kinds of exercise are good for almost everything, improving the functioning of all your tissues and organs, increasing your energy level and improving your endurance, helping to fight off disease as well as many of the worst effects of our modern, stressful lives. Exercise gets blood and oxygen into your muscles where it’s needed, and that helps clean out and metabolize toxins in those muscles that can be related to increased inflammation, which can increase your pain.
Additionally, sufficient exercise, of the right intensity and type, releases endorphins (your body’s natural pain-killing opiate) into your system, helping to control the pain and helping sometimes to break the vicious circle of inflammation causing muscle pain, and that in turn causing more inflammation.
Finally, though just about everyone knows by now that exercise helps to reduce your body’s overall fat content, not everyone yet realizes the extent to which high body fat has been shown in various studies to increase inflammation, i.e., again leading to pain.
So if you always thought you’d get fit just as soon as you got rid of the pain, you may need to re-think that strategy.
Here at Back-Pain-Therapy.com, we are particularly impressed with the quality of Nautilus and Bowflex equipment. Standard free weights are far more dangerous, take up more space, are a lot slower and more difficult to set up between exercises, and are much, much harder to manage in virtually every context. Further, most other home gyms and trainers we’ve tested don’t even begin to compare to Nautilus and Bowflex.
But the qualify and durability of this equipment is not the reason we recommend aerobic and progressive resistance exercise as a resource.
So long as you okay it with your primary physician, and no matter what equipment you prefer to use, quite simply, and because it works . . .
. . . Back-Pain-Therapy.com recommends exercise as a back pain therapy resource.
