There are all too many ways to hurt your back, and one of the most common ways you can hurt your back is by cracking open one of your intervertebral discs. Your back is made of a bunch of flat surfaces stacked on top of one another. In order to get movement between the layers, you have these discs of gel which are encased inside a harder, outer shell.
When you bend backward, your discs move forward, and when you bend forward they move backward. However, because your body is built so that everything is in front of you, you tend to bend forward substantially more than you bend backward (300 times more). Even sitting counts as bending forward! When you bend forward too much, you push your discs backward more than they should be pushed, and they become at risk of cracking and letting out their gel. When the gel releases it fills up the crack and causes pain; which means that your disc is officially broken and your back will start to hurt.
A Few More Notes About Back Pain
- The best line of defense against all back pain is to bend backwards.
- If bending forward were actually a cure, there would be no point in posting this blog, now would there be?
- Bad Idea – “I’ll bet a hamstring stretch will help my back pain!”
- Stretching your hamstring with a bad back will cause the disc’s crack to open further.
- Bad Idea – “I’ll bet the knees-to-chest stretch will help my back pain!”
- Pulling your knees into your chest may feel good on your back, but it’s actually very bad when you have a cracked disc.
- When you pull your knees to your chest with a bad back, you’ll cause your cracked disc to spasm and it will be worse off after the stretch.
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