It’s one of the first things your doctor will recommend in helping you on the road to total health. Along with diet, exercise is almost universally part of any plan for a healthy lifestyle. According to Healthline, exercise reduces stress and can make you feel better, exercise is critical to weight loss and strengthening muscles and bones. It can reduce your risk of chronic disease and increase your memory, brain health, and energy levels. Exercise can also improve the quality of your sleep and your sex life. Exercise has many health benefits, but it must be done properly. Total Chiropractic Care and Wellness wants you to know that some exercises can hurt your back.
Total Chiropractic Can Help You Manage Back Pain
At Total Chiropractic, we help patients deal with chronic back pain every day. It can be caused by a variety of problems, including accidents, sports injuries, and chronic conditions. While we encourage exercise as a means of promoting back health, we do encounter exercises that are known to harm your back. We want to tell you about five examples.
1) Pull-ups: You may have had a pull-up bar in your bedroom or remember doing them in your high school gym class and never associated them with your back. But according to Livestrong, this exercise can cause strain on your back. That’s because there’s a tendency for your hips to move forward when you lift yourself. It’s recommended that you bring your hips slightly in front of you when you do the pull-up to counterbalance this.
2) Improper Squat Technique: Lifting a large amount of weight may look impressive and make you feel stronger, but it can do a number on your back. Men’s Health stresses that you don’t do squats with bad technique. If you’re having problems, it’s time to re-learn what you’re doing. Start over with body-weight squats.
3) Deadlifting Weights: Many of the same problems you see with squats come into play here. Improper weightlifting technique can cause back injury. Livestrong recommends making certain that you don’t pull your shoulder blades around your rib cage. Hunching your shoulders and rounding your back will keep the upper part of your spine from being badly positioned. It’s also important not to lead with your chest. Instead, drive your hips open.
4) Sit-ups: This is another popular exercise that can cause issues for your back. According to WebMD, people tend to use the muscles of their hips when they’re doing sit-ups, and this cancels out the benefits of strengthening your abdominal muscles. Doing sit-ups can put a strain on the discs of your spine. They can also cause difficulty for your lower back. Partial crunches work better
5) Toe Touches: You can often feel the strain on your back as you bend forward to touch your toes. WebMD says that toe touching can put pressure on your discs and can also put stress on your ligaments. This exercise can also cause you to overstretch your back muscles.
Total Chiropractic Can Create an Exercise Plan For You
Exercise is important and if you’re feeling back pain, Total Chiropractic can help. We can work with you to design a treatment plan and an exercise program that will move you forward, not backward on the road to health. To learn more, contact us today.