Abel Smith
Most people experience lower back pain from time to time. Some physicians suggest that you can alleviate lower back pain by strengthening muscles in your abdomen. However, abdominal exercises like crunches are not good for your body if you are already suffering lower back pain. Crunches put too much flexion on the lumbar spine and can worsen back pain. There are deep stabilizers in the lumbar spine and if you train them and build them up you can alleviate lower back pain and return to your normal activities sooner.
Pilates is a form of exercise that focuses on strengthening the deep stabilizers of the lumbar spine. Pilates are also a great exercise to use when recovering from injuries to your lower back. Pilates can help you because they focus on your core strength, enhancing your control of movement, and precision of movement.
Using Pilates will help you develop awareness of your body and you need that awareness in order to strengthen deep stabilizer muscles in the lumbar spine properly. Most people are unaware of whether or not they use deep stabilizer muscles and if you are not using these muscles, you can suffer from back pain.
Pilates will help you develop a more effective breathing pattern. This will in turn help you alleviate stress, which in many cases attributes to lower back pain. By focusing on your breathing, you will become more aware of your body and enable the use of your deep stabilizer muscles.
Your core strength will increase as you learn how to engage your pelvic floor properly, which will then work with your transverses abdominis that is responsible for affecting the position of other lumbopelvic region structures.
An example of a Pilate’s exercise that will help target and strengthen your abdominal muscles is to place the mat on the floor and lie down on your back. You will then bring your feet up and put them on the mat be sure to place them hip width apart. At this point, your spine should be in a neutral position, which is relaxed, and not arched or flat. At this point, you are in position and ready to follow through with the exercise.
For the exercise, you will inhale and slightly nod your head forward. Then you will exhale as you curl your upper body off the mat but without pressing your lower back into the mat. The end you will slightly raise your arms off the mat while you are doing the curl. At this point, you will inhale and hold your position. Now exhale and return to your starting position laying flat on the mat. This exercise should be completed in reps of 5 to 8 times. Regular abdominal targeting Pilate’s exercises will help strengthen your lower back and reduce or wipe out any pain.
Aside from exercising, you can also put pain relieving cream on your back and massage it to ease the pain.
