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Back pain is one of the leading causes of disability. Those who've dealt with back pain understand that it can affect every single aspect of your life, wreaking havoc on your health and career.
According to a recent article from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, lower back pain is the leading cause of disability globally, affecting more than 619 million individuals in 2020. Often, it's your spine shape—bent away from its ideal shape over the years—that causes this pain and dysfunction.
The good news is that you can reverse back pain. It's not an inevitability of aging! In fact, a well-known movie director was able to reverse his debilitating back pain with the help of Orem-based Upright Spine Solutions.
One Hollywood director's story
"When I first started working with Upright Spine, I was 58 and suffering from sciatica and chronic lower back pain," this patient says. "The idea of running and jumping had become foreign to me. After one month of following the Uprightly Program, I caught myself running across a parking lot in the rain and realized that—for the first time in several years—I was running without any pain! The increase in mobility was amazing, and I still have it 10 years later."
The patient continues, "I find myself wanting to spread the message for Upright Spine. I've started giving unsolicited advice to the people I play pickleball with. I see how much more mobility and agility I have, and I want to tell them their limitations are not necessary. I've referred several people to Upright Spine and each one had a positive result. It's amazingly simple!"
Finding the cause and solution
The Hollywood director's career meant years of leaning over scripts and camera lenses. This physical work had caused his lower back to flatten out. That's not harmless: progressive loss of the lower spine curve causes its shock-absorber-like discs to wedge and bulge out.
Just like squeezing one side of a water balloon until it bursts out the other side, chronic wedging of discs due to poor spine shape will stretch and weaken the back wall.
Fortunately, that wall has many layers and the loss of one layer doesn't usually cause the disc to rupture. Instead, it bulges more and more until it begins to press upon its immediate neighbor, a delicate spinal nerve sitting within its tunnel.
Pinching a nerve can be excruciating, depending on how much the nerve is being compressed. A little squeeze feels like a strained back muscle. More of a squeeze causes pain in the buttock. Even more squeezing causes pain and/or numbness in the thigh. When the disc finally ruptures, pain sears down the leg and is accompanied by numbness and weakness.
The solution is straightforward: stop wedging the disc and pinching the nerve. To illustrate this, think of your car being parked on top of a garden hose. If you want to water your lawn, you should first move the car.
The research confirms that to remove pressure from the nerve, one treatment is to increase the inward bow of the lower spine gently. This can be done through typical spine extension exercises or with the Upright Spine's UpLifter spine extension device.
The movie director chose the UpLifter because it's comfortable, convenient and doesn't require getting down on the floor.
Why spine shape is so important
The shape of a healthy spine is upright with three equally balanced curves similar in length and depth. In an unhealthy spine, one of the most common shapes is where the rib cage-area curve becomes the most dominant, robbing curve length from the neck and lower back sections. The lower back becomes shortened and flat while the neck curve becomes shorter and deeper (think of a hunched forward "tech neck").
The good news is that bodies are resilient, so spine shape is changeable and can be improved. The Uprightly program equips and guides participants in their quest to restore normal spine shape. Research has revealed that any individual who tries to improve the shape of their spine can make progress unless most of their spine has been naturally or surgically fused.
Fix your spine with the Uprightly program
Back and neck pain management is a process that requires sustained protection and maintenance. Earning and keeping a healthy spine is a choice. If you have back or neck pain, you deserve to know what your spine shape looks like, and you deserve to learn how to improve your spine shape. If you want to function better and improve your own spine shape, spine stability, spine mobility, and spine protection, visit uprightspine.com to enroll in the Uprightly program.
