Understanding and Addressing the Root Cause of Back Spasms: A Comprehensive Guide

In this video, I’m going to tell you all about back spasms and everything you need to understand to fix the root problem. Here’s an important perspective to get on your back muscles and the way that it supports your spine. Here’s a low back, you have five lumbar vertebrae, and there’s three muscle groups that connects to the spine directly to give it support and control its movement.

The first muscle group is the lumbar paraspinal muscles, the ones that run up and down your back here, this lumbar paraspinal group is made up of smaller muscles, which we don’t need to get into the details about today, you just need to understand that there’s a group of muscles that run up and down this the back right here.

 These are the ones that you can reach behind your own back and usually feel them on the sides of your spine. The second muscle group that directly connects and influences the spine, or the hip flexors.

The main hip flexor muscle is called your psoas muscle, and it comes from the hip bone down here, runs through the back actually connects through here runs through here this way and directly connects to the spine.

There’s another muscle that runs in the same way but it connects to the front of this bone right here and that’s called the iliacus muscle. Those muscles have similar functions, except that the psoas muscle can directly offer compression to the spine. These are hip flexor muscles, not lumbar stabilizers. So it’s important to note more on that in a bit.

The third muscle group that influences the spine is the abdominals. Of course the abdominals are right in front right here between the ribcage and the front of the pelvis bones here, and it helps to keep your organs in but it also influences the position, the posture and the forces going through your spine.

Now, understanding that here’s the root problem. For back spasms between those three muscle groups, there’s usually an imbalance occurring where the abdominals are weak, and either the hip flexors and or the back extensors become too dominant. And when the back extensors are especially dominant, they are prone to spasming those spasm because they’re overworked.

Or sometimes nerves get pinched in the area or joints get pinched in the area. And then the muscle spasm as a response to that joint or nerve getting pinched. If you overdo it. Somehow you’re doing some repetitive bending over motion, like cleaning up around the house, doing yard work or lifting heavy things.

Sometimes in the weight room, at the gym, or sometimes at home, cleaning furniture, moving things around. If you’re using your back muscles more than you normally might, and you have that underlying muscle imbalance, where your back muscles are your main stabilizing muscle because you don’t get help from the abdominals and hip flexors, then your back muscles are going to be prone to spasming.

The most common weakness here is those abdominal muscles. And every time I get a patient in the clinic and explain this concept to them, as soon as I tell them that their abdominals are probably weak, they never disagree.

They’re always like, yeah, I could have told you that I’ve never touched my abs in a long time, or I go to the gym all the time, but I always forget to target my abdominal muscles, or the most common one is I hate working on my abs is not my favorite thing to exercise. And then a less common insight that I get, but is actually probably really accurate, is people say I do work on my abdominals.

But I still feel like they’re weak. Like I’m missing something. That’s important. And I’ll speak more to that here. Want to answer some commonly asked questions about back spasms coming back to the hip flexors. To answer that question, the hip flexors again run from the from the hip down here, over to the back when those are over dominant, because that can happen as well.

People usually get pain in the front of the hips, they can get pain in the hip joint stiffness in the hip, and that can be associated with back spasms as well. But usually teaching the abdominals to work better and to get stronger tends to calm down. those hip flexors. hip flexors are rarely weak. They’re usually over dominance, along with the back muscles.

Now what happens if you don’t treat this problem? What does this lead to? is a common question that I get. If your back muscles are frequently spasming, and you don’t really do anything about it, most people just kind of wait it out, rest a bit and their back spasms will come down, they flare down and they can get back to life as usual.

But they have this recurring tightness that happens in their back that doesn’t necessarily put them out. It doesn’t stop you from doing what you want to do but they get tired in their back or tight or stiff in their back to report those symptoms a wake up with this problem if they’d been doing more the day before. And immediately after doing some Heavy activities, sometimes even just exercise, this back stiffness, pain and tightness can be present.

If that persists for months and years, usually these back muscles because they’re being worked extra will get bigger and stronger, and they’ll get harder, and you can reach behind your back and feel your back muscles stiff and hard.

And the valley that’s created between the two straps of muscle right here gets bigger and deeper. And sometimes it’s even a crevice like it’s it, you have to kind of pull the muscles apart to actually get into the spine.

If your back muscles are that big, you have overdeveloped back muscles, and they’re going to be very, very prone to spasming. As soon as you overwork them a bit too much. They’re not designed to do all the work for your back. And you know, a counterintuitive thing here is if you have back problems or back pain, exercise your back muscles.

But given this information, if you have a muscle imbalance and your abdominals are weak, it makes sense that you should not be using your back muscles, you should not be exercising them directly. So doing like Superman style exercises, or any sort of back extension exercises where you work these muscles out is not appropriate if you’re somebody who’s been suffering from back spasm.

If this problem keeps on and those muscles stay nice and big and thick, then you’re going to get excessive compression through the facetted joints. These are the joints you can get arthritis in in your spine. Over time people develop facettes arthritis. For set, arthroscopy is something else that’s thrown out there are therosis is another name to sit arthrosis. In case you’ve ever had an x ray and MRI, those terms might already be in your X ray or MRI reports.

It can cause disk herniations disk damage, decreased disc height as well, because these back muscles directly compress the spine. And so if you have big massive back muscles, and you’ve been exercising them, they’re going to compress your discs, they’re going to herniated discs, they’re going to pinch the nerves are going to cause stenosis as well.

Back spasms are usually a sign that your back health is not good. And it’s the precursor to the more chronic problems that people get in their 50s 60s 70s and beyond. And it begins with his root muscle imbalance. Let me answer a couple of questions that are commonly get does stretching help for your back.

It depends on how you do it because these muscles are short and their purpose is to extend your back. Bending over forward in such a way that creates stretching through this back might actually be beneficial. But you can overdo it. If you’re aggressive with your stretching, the muscles actually begin to contract. So you got to do a light stretches.

Now a better option in my opinion is to begin to strengthen the abdominal muscles. And just a side note here, we talk a lot about strengthening the abdominal muscles, exactly how to do it in how to move it into your walking and standing as well.

Here on this channel, go down into the description below. And you can find links to playlists of videos that we offer here on this channel to help with abdominal strengthening to correct this muscle imbalance.

So back to stretching. Stretching is marginally helpful. Usually just short term relief is what you can expect out of it. Potentially potentially there’s some long term relief in it, but I think your time is much better spent strengthening your abdominals rather than stretching your back extensors.

Another common question I get is does a back brace help marginally as well and temporary pretty much just as long as you have the back brace on. A lot of people like to use the back brace because they instantly feel support. And think about it.

If you have an imbalance, you’re not getting the correct support from the muscles around your lumbar spine lower back, getting that brace on, just offers that external support and allows those poor back muscles that had been overworking to take a bit of a break.

So it’s okay to use that. In fact, I tell my patients here in the clinic, go get a back brace. Allow yourself to decrease how much medication you’re taking by getting the back brace on. It’s a natural thing. The only thing you have to worry about it is don’t rely on it for the long term. If you’re not strengthening your abdominals comes back to the abdominals and you’re just relying on the back brace.

You’re going to actually make your problem worse over time so you’ve got to get back on strengthening those abdominal muscles. Another common question I get is this back spasm was so intense. i Is there any permanent damage that I’ve created?

And the scenario that people are typically asking this question from what I get to hear in the clinic and we get it online from other different places, is people have had an intense back spasm so intense is created 10 out of 10 pain they’ve used.

We’ve fallen over, they’re stuck holding on to something and they can’t move their back is just seized up spasm immensely. And it’s traumatizing. Most people will have to go to the hospital or have to show up at a chiropractor’s office on an emergency situation, they have to be taken there because they can’t drive there themselves, because their back is so spasm. In those situations, it’s hard to tell you with certainty if there’s any permanent damage done.

But most of the time, if you can begin to free up the tissues that have become stiff in spasm, usually the muscles, but also the joints and the nerves can get spasms and cause that kind of jolting. sudden pain, then you can begin to free up the spine.

And then you are in a situation where you can do exercises to fix the root problem like abdominal exercises, whether or not there’s permanent damage at this point is kind of past you, you know if the damage is done if it’s there, but what you have to consider more so is how can you heal? How can you allow your discs to begin to heal naturally?

How can you take pressure off your joints, your preset joints in your spine, where you get the arthritis and the orthosis? And how can you make sure there isn’t pressure on your nerves that shouldn’t be there. It goes back to fixing that root problem that muscle imbalance.

Usually we have to get your abdominals stronger and secondarily, glutes need to get stronger very often to now we’ve got a program that directly treats the root of these back problems is called the 28 day back health and wellness boosts program.

This is a 100% online program. It’s on demand. So you can access it anytime from anywhere that you have an internet connection on your phone or on your computer. You can see the videos it takes you through a 28 day routine so that you can begin to treat that root problem and take the pressure off your back and fix the imbalance so that you can normalize all the forces through your lower back and allow your discs to heal your facettes to move more normally and heal and take the pressure off your nerves so that they can function just the way that they’re supposed to.

There’s a link to this program in the description below. Go check it out if that’s something you’re interested in. I hope this video was helpful for you. Please check out our other videos and I’ll see you in the next one. Bye