There are many causes for lower back pain, like pulled back muscle, disc issues/problems, arthritis, or sacroiliac joint dysfunction. If you want to tackle lower back pain successfully, the important areas you need to address are effective abdominal exercises.
Abdominal strength plays a big role in strengthening your core stability area and thus preventing and a swayed back and compressed nerves. But like any exercise, not all abdominal exercises are the same. So to prevent making your back pain worse, you will need to choose the correct abdominal exercises from the start.
Abdominal exercises can relieve back pain, but you should understand the source of your back problems before you begin an exercise routine.
To test if abdominal exercises are the best therapy for your lower back pain, we shall first investigate the main causes of back pain, and then look into postural dysfunctions, and what sort of role abdominal exercises play in these.
Main Causes of Back Pain
Lower back pain is mainly caused by the following two reasons:
- Trauma – a sudden shifting of the muscles or bones. Often caused by a fall or a car accident
- Muscle Imbalances – uneven muscle strength
Muscle imbalances have a bad affect on posture, which can lead to postural dysfunction. These dysfunctions consist of abnormal curvature of the spine and abnormal alignment of your pelvis. Misalignment will then lead onto the wearing out of the joints, muscles, ligaments and discs.
What you need to understand, and this is highly important, is that lower back pain doesn’t occur overnight. Ok, you may become symptomatic rapidly, but this happens over a long time period, it takes time where your back gets to the point of finally caving in, resulting in lower back pain.
Muscle Imbalances Are a Leading Cause of Back Pain
Putting it in simplest terms, when there are overdeveloped and tight muscles in one part of the body and the opposite side of the muscles are stretched out of their normal position and weak, a muscle imbalance occurs. Muscle imbalances can occur on any part of your body, and results normally due to habit and routine of your job, sports, exercise, or any other activity you enjoy. Many things can cause this issue.
When your muscles get more out of balance, misalignment occurs, causing heavy stress and more wear and tear on your muscles, the ligaments, joints and even your spine. Postural dysfunction can ensue after spinal shifts and muscle imbalances.
How Abdominal Muscles Cause Back Pain
Lower back pain is caused by short muscles in the abdominal region or if the muscles are too tight in the lumbar region. Either one of these will cause abnormal pressure on the spinal column and nerve irritation. Discs will become compressed resulting in tighter muscles and additional pain.
Your abdominal muscles are those that tilt your hips under and return your spine to a neutral position. Your abdominals need to be used just enough to return the spine to a neutral position to prevent it from “over-arching”. Your abdominals aid your back to transfer from a bad postural position into a neutral spine position.
But strengthening your abdominal muscles doesn’t immediately make them supportive of your spine and postural dysfunction. It depends on where the muscle imbalance is occurring, thus the postural dysfunction, doing an incorrect abdominal exercise may not have any benefit to you at all, or you could even make the condition worse.
