It is hard to imagine that 80 percent of the US population currently experiences low back pain. To give you some perspective on how bad the situation is, that is 4 out every 5 Americans . What is more telling is that low back pain, while it can sometimes be extremely complicated, is often rooted in simple, avoidable, and manageable situations. Today, we continue our theme on trigger point presentation to highlight one of the biggest root causes of low back pain: trigger points. Low back pain is often hidden within trigger point tension, as we can see from this picture below:
At Body Heal, we often see this specific pain presentation for low back pain. Typically, this is described as a dull low back pain, deep low back pain, or stiff low back pain.
What exactly causes these trigger points to replicate low back pain?
Trigger point activation often occurs in myofascial structures that undergo tension for extended periods of time. For many, this boils down to poor posture in gravity as the number one culprit in low back pain caused by trigger points! The pandemic has not helped matters, as most people are continuing to work from home, and often on laptops:
Here we see a typical pattern for people working from home. We can see how much compression this person would be dealing with day after day, causing the muscles in the abdomen to get tense and begin to irritate these trigger points. This seated posture is a primary culprit in trigger point induced low back pain.
What can I do to alleviate these trigger points?
There are a couple of things you can do to begin addressing this low back pain presentation before it becomes more serious.
1) Manual therapy: tension caused by poor posture and faulty movement patterns can be immediately relieved by softening the tension in the muscles and fascia.
2) Find ways to stretch and release the tension yourself! Here is one we recommend for relief of low back pain and low back tension:
3) Finally, begin to utilize a better sitting posture at your home work space:
