Well, we are supposed to move, run, jump, climb, roll and continue doing all of the cool, fun things we did as young children.

But most of us do not. 

So, we get back pain.  Why?  Because we are no longer using our muscles in a balanced way.  We use the same 60 or 70 or so each day and the rest of the 600 muscles are ignored.  When those muscles get unhappy, you get pain.

Walking is a perfect exercise and movement to help heal back pain.  Unless you were born with a disability that prevents you from walking, you were born to walk!

Walking uses your whole body.  It’s all attached and when you walk, your hips joints move.  Your shoulders move.  Your spine sways from side to side.

I like to tell the story of my friend, Rosalie.  She got rid of hip pain (she could only crawl up the stairs) and neuropathy (numbness from diabetes) in her feet AND she doubled her lung capacity.  Her pulmonary (lung) doctor was amazed!  She got all of these benefits just from walking!  (<– click here.)

My friend, Glenn, didn’t get much help from his doctor or the physical therapist (in fact, he quit therapy.)  But he got tremendous relief from walking. He could not go far at first (only 20 or so feet) but at his back relaxed over time, he was able to go farther and farther.

When you walk correctly–as you were designed to do–it helps your body regain its muscular balance.  In turn, that will help you with your back pain.

Some folks clomp their feet.  They no longer roll their feet when they walk.  They jar their joints.  (Is that you?)  Or they use their back pain as an excuse not to walk.

Some people have gotten into poor postural habits.  This is not too hard to do when you use only those 60 or 70 muscles each day instead of all of them.

Getting a strong back (<– click here) will help prevent and eliminate back pain and strain.  Walking can help you regain the fluid movement that will help you get rid of your back pain.  And eating healthy foods, drinking enough water and getting enough rest in a comfortable, supportive bed will also help you become pain-free.

If you take the simple, natural steps that your body wants you to take, you can have back pain relief.  Walking is a “step” in the right direction!

You have a smart body.  Your back pain is a message.  Your body is telling you that it is not happy about something that is happening.

There are a lot of causes for back pain but most involve your muscles.  Muscles move joints, bones, disks in your spine and press on nerves. Muscles rule!

My client Sharon said, “My mom’s been having a lot of back pain lately.  She tried one massage and hurt more afterward so she’s afraid to try again.  She’s going to have hospital tests next week.”

I called Lisa and asked her about her back pain.  (Pain is a symptom – your body is telling you something.)

I listened while Lisa told me where it hurt, how her symptoms had been growing worse and what her doctor said.

She even told me what she suspected caused her back pain.

I told her she was probably correct about the cause of her pain.  It sounded logical to me and bodies are logical.  When she drove her car, she would “hover” her foot over the brake pedal in case she needed to respond quickly.

That put a lot of strain on her emotionally and it put a lot of strain on her muscles, too.  Tight muscles can press on nerves.

Her doctor had told her to “just wait it out.  It will go away on its’ own.”

I told her that was wise of her doctor.

I explained why doctors do so many fewer surgeries now for back pain.  In many, many cases there was no relief.  (That’s because they were chasing a symptom rather than actually taking care of the cause.  The cause may well have been muscular.)

I also explained how a nerve needs only a whisper of anything pressing on it to cause symptoms.

Take that barest of pressures off the nerve, and it will settle down.  Sometimes it’s as easy as changing positions.  I suggested a relaxation position which would take pressure off Lisa’s back.  I told her about other people I knew whose back pain had healed naturally.

We made an appointment for Lisa to see me the following week.  But when I walked into the waiting room to get Lisa, she wasn’t there.  Sharon was there!

Sharon said, “My mom hasn’t had any pain in four days so I came in her place.”

She continued, “My mom said the strangest thing.  She said, ‘I don’t have to have pain for the rest of my life‘.”

One of the things I told Lisa and that I am telling you now is that you DO NOT have to have back pain (<– click here) for the rest of your life.

Our bodies are wonderful machines, designed to be healthy and last for years and years.  They are designed to heal.

Bruises heal, cuts heal, broken bones heal, even surgeries heal and those are BIG injuries.  Your body is designed to heal!

You do not have to have back pain for the rest of your life.  You can feel better. Click on that link and discover much more about your body and your back.

Will it take some work on your part?  Perhaps a few changes in the way you do things?  Maybe strengthening your back and doing movements to improve your posture?

Yes.  But you are worth it.  You really can get rid of the pain in your back.

People (including professional massage therapists) often massage the rhomboid area trying to release the knot or pain there.  If it doesn’t release (relax) the knot or pain, that means the cause is somewhere else.

Let’s pretend your back pain is a dragon.  Sometimes “surrounding the dragon” will relieve the pain.  The “dragon” is the painful area.  If you pinch, roll, press or massage the latissimus or “lat” muscles on the outer sides of the back, that may help because they may be pulling on the “dragon.”  The dragon cannot relax and go to sleep while those muscles continue to pull on him.

And, there can be other causes for knots and pain between the shoulder blade and spine.

There is a muscle in the neck that causes pain in the rhomboid area. When nothing else works, that is the place to go to. If you go to http://CarpalTunnelPainReliefNow.com and look in the Video Category you will find a video that shows a massage professional treating that neck muscle. Also if you look in the Causes Category while you are there, you will find articles about the “muscle in your neck.”

If you go to http://SimpleStrengthening.com you will find articles about how to simply get strong back side muscles which will help prevent future occurrences by correcting your posture. Also, stretches to open and relax the muscles in the front of your chest and arms will help, too.

And, if you go to http://KnotsInYourBack.com you can claim a free report about how to get rid of the miserable knots in your back.

Muscles are the most frequent cause of back pain.  And that’s good news!  Why?  Because muscles can be “released” or treated and get back to their normal healthy state.

Here’s more about muscles:

• Muscles move bones.
• Muscles can get “trigger points.”

Your muscles don’t usually act all by themselves; they pull all the other parts of your body into the act.  Why?  Because all of your parts are attached.  That means ALL of your body should be assessed to figure out WHY you are having pain in your back.  If you’ve had your back pain for more than just a couple of days, the CAUSE of your pain is most likely NOT where it hurts.

You have to get to the cause to get rid of the pain.

Sometimes back pain is caused by other issues, like gall bladders or infections, but most often the cause is muscular.  And, if you have a chiropractic adjustment and it doesn’t hold–well, it’s your muscles pulling your bones back out of alignment.

Remember:  Muscles move bones.

Here’s another cause of back pain:  Trigger points are crabby areas of muscle that “fire” into other parts of your body–they cause pain elsewhere.  That’s why sometimes you try to press or massage where it hurts but it won’t relax.  It CAN’T relax because the cause–the trigger–is elsewhere.

Important:  If you lose the ability to control your bowels or bladder along with your back pain, get to the emergency room or your doctor right away. Otherwise, you can look to your muscles as the cause of your pain.

Nerves can be pressed on (they hate being pressed on!) by bones OR by muscles.  Since muscles move bones, it’s possible to get rid of both nervy pain (sciatica) and muscular pain by treating the muscles.  If you release or relax the tight muscles or the muscle that’s in spasm (contraction) that allows pressure to be removed from the nerve.

You will discover lots more about natural ways to get rid of your back pain by visiting  Back Pain Natural Relief (<– click here.)

When you understand how your body works and why you have back pain, you will have a very good chance to get rid of it with do-it-yourself treatment.

You have a smart body; it wants to be well.  It just needs a little (or a lot) of help from you right now.

Learn what you need to know.  Do what you need to do.  Get rid of your back pain.

At the same time, the muscles in your back get overstretched and so they complain.  (They hate being stretched too far!)  They give you pain to call your attention to the fact that something is wrong.

Collapsed posture also causes lower back pain, headaches and migraines, constipation and lots and lots of other problems.  It’s a primary cause of “old age.”

You had wonderful posture when you were very young and with a bit of help from you, you can have it again.

Watch this whole video through to the end before you try this movement.  At the end, the teacher will demonstrate how to come out of the movement.

You can use a towel rolled into a tube and folded towels for supports for your head.  If you need to adjust the size of your “tube” it’s easy to just unroll the towel a bit.

Every week I do another episode of Pain Relief Radio.  Today we talked about how to walk to prevent or get rid of back pain.  We talked about how our walking patterns become faulty and how that causes pain.

We talked about walking with stiff knees and hips.  This kind of stiff walk contributes directly to arthritis in your hips and knees and fragile bones in your pelvis.  But bones stay strong and healthy when we use all of our muscles as they were designed to be used.

Meir Schneider wrote a great book, “The Handbook of Self-Healing, Your Personal Program for Better Health and Increased Vitality,” and I quoted lots from Meir and threw in plenty of my own thoughts, too.

Meir is a brilliant bodyworker in San Francisco.  I’m so fortunate to have taken classes from him.  There are people who understand how bodies work and what we must do if we are to be pain-free.  Meir is one of them.  His story of curing his own blindness with massage, eye movements and exercises is inspirational.  He has been helping people feel better with self-help movements for years.  We just have to know what to do; that’s what Meir shares.

If you walk with a smooth movement you will have no pain.  But, if you learned or acquired a less-smooth or “jerky” or stiff way of walking, or if you do certain things that bodies don’t like–like locking your knees backward–then you will have pain.

Bodies operate by following certain natural laws; they were designed to move in certain ways.  Getting back to the movements that your body prefers will help reduce your pain.  Walking easily and correctly will help you get rid of your back pain, naturally.

And now I’d like to invite you to claim your free report about Healthy Walking (<– click here) so you can start learning how to walk without pain.

You can get rid of pain by walking.  You can feel better if you walk.  You were born to walk.

Today a client told me that she had a great weekend stretching and straining and balancing on a ladder to trim, prune and clean up her yard.  She said it looked beautiful!  And she felt fine until she sat down.

When she tried to get up, her back from hip bones to shoulder blades went into spasm and tightened up!

She tried to press into her muscles to relax them the best she could but basically she had spent the last two days in bed.  She was very uncomfortable.

I warmed, massaged and pressed into the tight muscles along her spine for a while.  They were very tender but they didn’t seem to be releasing or getting better even though she said a few times, “I think you’re on the cause!”

So I suggested we work on the muscles on the front side of her body.  The right side of her abdomen was fine; no pain and no referrals.  The left side of her abdomen was “on fire” when I stretched the muscles on the soft abdomen.  Her ribs were “on fire” when I pressed into the muscles that ran up from her belly.

For whatever reason, the muscles on the left side of her abdomen had spasmed or “tightened up” and they were causing her back pain.  Even though the release was quite uncomfortable, the abdomen muscles did relax.  You can tell when they relax because they become less tender when pressed on.  When that happened her back muscles also were able to relax.

When an area of muscle causes another area to hurt, that is called a trigger point.  In this case, the trigger points in the belly were causing pain in the back.

Back Pain Natural Relief is a helpful site that may give you just the information you were looking for to get rid of the pain in your back.

Sometimes your back pain is caused by something that you do.  Other times, it’s caused by something you DON’T do.  Okay, I’ll be totally honest:

There are a LOT of reasons for chronic back pain. It could be caused by:

• Foods that causes inflammation (swelling in your muscles and soft tissues.)
• Additives (chemicals & toxins) that are in your food.
• Vitamin & mineral deficiencies.
• Artificial sweeteners (chemicals & toxins) (Oops!  Did I already say that?)
• Muscles that are “out of balance.” That means muscles on one part of your body are not in balance with the muscles that oppose them.  Some of your muscles are “too tight” and some are not strong enough to keep you where nature designed you to be.  This creates muscle strain.
• Injury to a muscle or area of soft tissue from incorrect use or an accident.
• Anger and sadness; strong negative emotions.

Let’s just stick to muscle strain here.  We can talk about the other causes at a different time.

Can muscle strain can be caused by doing things over and over?

Yes, and especially when the same movement is done over and over again incorrectly.

Here’s an example:

I was at the airport and I was watching the men who unload the luggage from the belly of the planes.  I’ll call them “Fred” and “Ed.”

As each bag came down the belt toward the baggage cart, Fred would bend, lift and twist to get the bag off the belt.  Then he would heft and jerk the bag onto the cart.  Every move he made looked like an effort.  I mean, the man was working!  (Lifting and twisting at the same time is a common cause of low back spasm.)

Ed, on the other hand, looked like he was dancing.  He watched the approaching bag, and when it was just at the right height for him, he comfortably caught it.  It appeared that he used the momentum of the moving belt to continue the move to the cart.  Ed’s moves were smooth and effortless.

Who do you suppose went home with a chronic backache?

Perhaps you’ll say to me, “Yes, but maybe Fred was moving like that because his back already hurts.”  And, that could be true.

But, when we “stiffen up” to protect muscles that are already uncomfortable, we run the risk of further injury.  A flexible body that moves smoothly is a lot less likely to develop chronic back pain.

By the way, lifting with your stomach held in will help prevent back muscle strain.

The best things you can do to reduce your back pain are to educate yourself about the causes of back pain, learn how muscles work, and learn what self-help measures to take.

Therapeutic massage might be one of the tools you use and so might yoga or another movement therapy.  The people over at Back Pain Natural Relief can give you lots of good ideas, too.

But, then…we went to school and sat on furniture that didn’t fit us.  Sometimes we had to sit for hours at a time instead of running around using all of our muscles.

That’s part of the problem.  We stopped using all of our muscles.

Most of us use only the same 60 or so.  Since we have over 600 muscles, that means we use only about 10% instead of 100%.  That gets us “out of balance.”  This creates poor posture and back pain.

Or, maybe you continued using most of your muscles, but in ways that caused some to be much stronger than others.  Your posture might look pretty good, but still you feel strain and pain in your back.  That’s a clue that your posture isn’t balanced. This also causes back pain.

What causes poor posture?

When you hold your head and arms in front of your body for most of the day, like most of us do, the muscles in the front of your body get short.  They pull, or round, your shoulders forward.  They pull your head forward and down and make your chin stick out.

When your back muscles get weak because you’re not flexing (strengthening) them, they get overstretched.  Instead of holding you upright, your weak back muscles let your spine round at the top and you lose the curve in your low back, too.

Then what happens?

Your bones are the support system for your body.  But, when your posture gets weak, or collapses, your poor muscles start acting as bones to hold you up.  Your muscles are straining to hold your heavy head up while gravity is pulling it down.  (Remember why?  Because your head has moved in front of your body instead of being held directly over it.)

So what can I do?

There are several natural things you can do to improve your posture and get rid of your back pain.

1.  Assess your posture.  Have someone take a sideways photograph of your whole body and examine it to see where your head is.  Is it over your body or is it several inches in front of your body?  Are your hands hanging next to your body or are they in front of your body?

If your head and hands are in front of your body, that indicates that your back muscles need to be strengthened.   If you don’t know how to do that, there are lots of articles at Simple Strengthening that will help you get better posture.  It also indicates that the muscles in the front of your body are tight, or short.

2.  Learn about muscle balance therapy and assessing your posture at Back Pain Natural Relief.

3.  Stretch the muscles in the front of your body that are tight and short.

4.  Balance your workouts.  It’s much easier for us to strengthen the large muscles in the front of our thighs than the hamstrings in the back of the thigh.  But the hamstrings need to be strong, too.

It might make you feel more powerful if you have well-developed pectoral (chest) muscles, but they can pull you into poor posture unless you also strengthen your back.

5.  If your lower back is “flat,” practice flexing it slightly backward and forward.  The goal is to develop a small curve in your lower back.  If your lower back has too much curve to it, practice pressing it into the floor to help normalize the curve.

When the muscles in front (from knees to head) are relaxed, or in a neutral resting length, and the muscles in the back of your body are strong enough to hold you up, you are in an ideal posture.

Correcting poor, or “forward” posture, will take the strain off your back muscles.  Less muscle strain equals less low back pain.

When you were little, you used all of your muscles.  At some point, for some reason (sitting, sports, injury) you started getting out of muscular balance.  When this happened, you were setting the stage for pain in your back.

When all of your muscles were “balanced” (neither too tight nor too weak) you didn’t have back pain.  But, now you do.

So, what should you do?

Part of the answer depends on exactly what is causing the pain in your back.

Do you have trigger points?  Trigger points are hyper-irritable places in muscles which refer, or “fire,” pain elsewhere (sometimes far away.)  Does your back hurt simply because of tight muscles or muscle strain?  Is it due to the positions or furniture you spend a lot of time in?  Or your mattress?

Could it be poor posture or habits?  A rotation in your torso?  A “slipped disk”?

The first part of the answer is to stretch the muscles which have become shortened.  These muscles are most likely at the root of your back pain, and they are usually in the front of your body from knees to neck.  These muscles cause your back muscles to be overstretched.

The second part of the answer is to strengthen the muscles on your whole back side, from knees to skull, except for your calves.  When these muscles get weak, they are easily strained and can develop trigger points.  Trigger points need to be released (pressed into) to normalize the muscle.

The third part of the answer is to figure out what is causing your pain and how to get rid of it.

These three things will bring you closer to the muscular balance you had as a child.  As you regain the balance in your muscles, you will have less back pain.  And, there are self-help tools that can help you get better faster.

Another “tool” to help speed your recovery is therapeutic massage.  A knowledgeable massage therapist will listen to your symptoms and work in the areas that are causing your pain.  Those might not be the same areas you expect.  (Your abdomen is the front of your back!)

Now, you know there are many things you can do to get rid of the pain in your back naturally.  Which ones will you do today to help get on the road to no more back pain?