Hey guys!

I’m Dr. David of El Paso Manual Physical Therapy.

I’ve been getting lots of questions lately from clients that are coming in to have us take a look at their back to start treatment on their back pain.

One of the questions that has been commonly coming up is, “Do I need to lose weight so that my back could feel better?”

I have one woman in particular, I can’t give you her name, but just some of the details about her.

She’s 52 years old and she’s got a couple grandbabies that she loves to chase around and care for. She picks them up from school, they just started school I think this week, and her back tightens up and stiffens up, and this has been going on for a year and a half.

It happens when she’s on her feet more, or she’s walking around a lot more, and now that she’s taking care of her kids afterschool, she’s on her feet playing with the kids and her back is just done by the end of the day, so that’s why she came in to see us.

What she revealed to us was that her back pain started about a year and a half ago after she’d slipped and fell.

It was kind of an accident.

She was working out prior to that, and since the back pain started a year and a half ago she hasn’t been able to go to the gym as consistently because her back gets worse every time she goes to the gym.

She liked to do classes at the gym, get on the treadmill, and do some of the machines inside the weight room, and her back was just killing her by the end of the week.

I mean, to the point where she couldn’t move for a few days without a lot of pain.

What we found once she came in and we took a look at her is we did some tests, and there’s one test in particular where we got her to use certain muscle groups that she hadn’t been using before, and the pain instantaneously got better.

Almost completely gone.

She was able to move with a lot less stiffness, and what this showed was that it wasn’t the weight.

She had put on about 25 pounds in the past year and a half.

She didn’t lose the weight in that moment, we got her to do something that she wasn’t doing and the pain got way better.

That’s something that’s going to give her tremendous relief over the next month or two as we begin treatment.

If you know of anybody that has been telling themselves, or telling you, “Hey, I need to drop 20 pounds, 30, 40 pounds for my back to feel better,” and they’re focused on losing weight rather than improving their pain, and maybe they’re even avoiding going to the gym because of the back problems they’re dealing with, we can help them out.

We can make a huge difference in that situation.

It’s very rare situations where it truly just is the weight.

9+ out of ten times there’s stuff that we can do that can instantaneously improve their back pain…or at least we can see that it’s going to have an improvement in the short term, but over the long term it’ll make a huge improvement and probably even completely get rid of the back pain, or keep it at bay to the point where you’re not having to rely on pain medications and you’re not on the path to surgery.

The most important part of all is to be able to enjoy the grandkids and pick them up after school and not worry about the back pain getting worse.

Being able to go to the gym without worrying about the back pain slowing you down and paying for it the next day or two afterwards.

Thanks, guys!

I hope this helps.

Have a great day.