To gain a better grasp to all these problems or unspecific pain that sooner or later almost all of us feel in the back, we must visualize that this structure is the central axis of the body and therefore it bears great tensions and forces both to maintain our straight posture and to allow our movement. We’ll deal with the causes of back pain.

If we go back in time in everyone’s life, we would verify that in the beginning no one would suffer with tension or back pain, among other reasons because we wouldn’t be able to stand on our feet. Since the moment we start to walk, our muscles are struggling to keep our posture for which our skeleton is not sufficiently adapted and, in addition to fix it, it must allow the movement by the displacement of the extremities. We do it imperceptibly, but that work entails a coordination of an enormous number of muscles and gliding of joints.

Curiously enough, movement is not the source of muscular back pain but sedentary lifestyle or wrong postures that we take when we rest sitting or lying down, those that cause a muscle or muscular area to tense or retract causing pain and a worse quality of movement in the joints where that muscle, or group of muscles, acts.

Initially, this retraction (or shortening) is only painful when is touched or asked to do a high level or intense movement. Therefore, we’ll only be conscious of it in extreme activity situations, hard to reach if our life is a sedentary one. In these cases, we use to think or say the expression “That’s weird! It never hurt me there before”.

To the touch, the painful area seems a muscle contracture that will form a fibrosis over time and will become chronic in our body, meaning we will get used to it. If it features a series of characteristics, we can refer to it as “trigger point” and, at that time, the area of origin can start to compensate in other places producing pain and functional impotence (lack of strength the moment we try any movement).

Remember that the sooner you go to your physiotherapist to get treated, the sooner you will recover and feel results because you will be able to cut the chain of compensation that can affect a muscle or group of muscles.