What Causes Lower Back Pain

Video Transcript

"So once you identify those three major muscle groups you can begin to identify certain causes of lower back pain. If you have weak or over developed abs you can cause the curve in your lumbar spine to become flattened or to become over-exaggerated. For example if my abs are under developed and they are too weak I'm going to stand like this with an exaggerated curve in my lumbar spine and that is going to cause compression in my lower back and eventually postural damage basically and the other thing is if my abs are over developed it is going to cause the opposite tilt of my pelvis which is also going to over time, damage my body and cause chronic pain. Another cause is if the hamstrings are too tight because they run from the sitting bones, the little two points at the bottom of the pelvis they run from those bones and they attach to the tibia, if they are too tight again they are going to cause that posterior tilt in the pelvis and eventually over time they are going to do permanent damage. Those are major muscular causes. There are other causes that involve having a herniated disc or the sacrum, the triangular shaped bone that sits at the bottom of the spine, it can be not sitting correctly, it can be tipped to one side and it can be twisted again in that anterior or posterior, anterior meaning tilted forward and posterior meaning tilted backward. So if your sacrum isn't sitting straight of course that is going to cause pain and if you have a bulging or herniated disc which means that your discs are compressed or are laterally askew, you have some sort of subluxation which is not a dislocation but just a misalignment of the bones that can cause the cartilage between your vetebrae to bulge out to one side or the other and that is a whole another bag of worms and the other problem that is very common is sciatica which you may or may not be familiar with the sciatic nerve and again I'm going to demonstrate. The sciatic nerve runs underneath your gluts, underneath a muscle called the piriformis muscle and that piriformis muscle is again attached to your leg down here and again attached to your pelvis up here. If that little piriformis muscle is over stretched or distended or if that little piriformis muscle is tense and tight and crunched and in knots it is going to affect that sciatic nerve. So those are going to be your main causes of lower back pain and we'll go on to do some yoga poses that can hopefully help to bring some movement into those areas, release the muscular tension, and get rid of that pain."