The most frequent pain complaint I get as a Trainer, by far, is low back pain. This is VERY common. Some experts in the field have estimated that as much as 80% of the population will suffer from back pain at some point in their lives.

When your back hurts you feel like you can’t do anything, it truly does affect most to all movement your body will go through throughout your day. That’s the bad news, but here is the good news…through my years as a professional personal trainer, I have identified TWO MAIN reasons people have chronic back pain.

1. Inflammation Due to Your Nutrition

A diet that is high in “pro inflammatory” foods tends to affect joints and cause areas of the body to hurt. Pro-inflammatory foods are most commonly foods that people have intolerances to. When you have a food intolerance this means that your body has a low level immune reaction to that specific food. Symptoms may include digestive issues, skin issues, pain, brain fog and sleep issues, just to name a few.

Intolerances

Because intolerances are an immune reaction, your body increases its inflammatory markers to create a defense. This inflamed state makes everything feel stiffer and makes areas that are susceptible to pain hurt more. A list of common foods to test when you are trying to reduce nutritional inflammation include: gluten, dairy, eggs, corn, soy, processed sugar, alcohol and processed vegetable oils.

Overeating

Overeating can also increase systemic inflammation so try to monitor overall intake as well. It’s exciting to see how many people actually eliminate most of their pain from these simple dietary changes alone.

2. Tight Hips and a Weak Core

Who in today’s society doesn’t have tight hips, let’s be serious. This is likely due to the fact that we sit for the majority of our day. In a seated position, our hip flexors are shortened and due to the length of time they stay in this shortened position they tend to get tight.

Now, combine that with a lack of overall ab, oblique and inner core strength and you have the perfect recipe for back pain. If this is you, the solution is NOT to go do a bunch of crunches. If you do that all that will happen is you will activate and use your hip flexors all while your abs just sit back and do almost nothing. This will only make the problem much worse which is why sit ups and crunches tend to make back pain worse.

So before working/activating the core, it’s important to teach the body to “disengage” the hip flexors while activating your core muscles.

This goes for all movements, knowing your intention during any movement will help foster safer exercise and better results.

All in all, applying lower inflammatory eating habits and working on deactivating your hip flexors along with hip stretching movements should bring more comfort to the lower back. Some folks may need a more individualized approach depending on the severity of pain and discomfort, but most people reading this will get some great benefits from the instructions listed above.