Back Pain from an Injury: How to Prevent and Treat it
Lacey Back pain is very common in people of all ages and can be caused in a multitude of ways. You need to be careful with your back and take proper care of it, lest you injure it and get chronic pain. There are many ways to prevent back injuries, but not a whole lot of ways to treat back pain. The best option would be to prevent the injury in the first place, but for some, it is simply too late and they need to look into the pain reduction options.
How to Protect your Back
The first thing you’ll want to know is how to properly lift heavy objects. This is very important since most people lift things wrong and end up injuring themselves. When you want to lift something up from the ground, the first thing you want to do is get as close to it as you can while standing. Then kneel down with one knee on the ground and slowly rise up with the object without bending your waist. This way your legs are doing most of the work instead of your back when you bend over to grab something.
There are also some more minor ways to protect your back from injury, such as proper posture, a balanced diet, a healthy weight, and doing back strengthening exercises. These all help to make sure that you’re not putting too much stress on your back and keep it strong and fit.
How to Prevent Back Pain
Many ways of preventing back pain are the same as how you would protect it, so make sure you are caring for your back in those ways as well. Chilling and heating are pretty simple, just take an ice pack or a heating pad and put it on the area that hurts. Incorporating stretching to the area that typically gets pain can help lengthen the muscles causing fewer injuries in the future. There are also some more holistic options such as acupuncture. Physical therapy also works wonders on back pain, especially MAT.
What is MAT?
MAT stands for Muscle Activation Therapy and it focuses on improving the range of motion within your body and correcting muscular imbalances and joint instability. MAT realizes the muscles that are in pain or are tense are like that because it is the body’s way of protecting joints. While most therapies would focus on the areas of pain or tension, MAT focuses on finding and treating the original problem muscles, that way the pain and tension are no longer needed and goes away naturally.
In fact, most therapies will have you doing stretches and getting massages on the tight and painful muscles which can do more harm than good because they haven’t addressed the origin of the problem and have removed the body’s natural protection!