Spine health - “80% of people at some point in their life will experience significant back pain”. This has been a growing statistic and with our sedentary lifestyles, which should come as no surprise. Pinpointing the cause of the problem is difficult because there are many contributing factors. Common factors include tightness of the hips, sitting for prolonged periods, stress, poor breathing mechanics, high volumes of repetitive movement patterns, physical activities such as running, CrossFit or yoga. It's scary to say, but being more physically active can be detrimental to your spine health. The quality of your movement patterns and your ability to move loads safely is often overlooked in the pursuit of fitness, but at what cost to your spinal health?

For many, the solution is chiropractic adjustment, massage, acupuncture, medical intervention such as pain killers, cortisol injections or surgery. You may have even been recommended to strengthen your core and back muscles with pilates or yoga. Unfortunately, most people find that these solutions never seem to last, you're left with the option to either accept this discomfort as part of life or spend more money on treatments to be pain-free? This is a very common scenario and you are not alone on this.

The physical/ medical providers often aim to treat the symptoms (the pain), but they fail to investigate the cause of the problem. After weeks or even months of treatment, you might be lucky to rehabilitate your spine back to "normal." But normal is the state that got you injured in the first place. This is not a sustainable solution when it comes to health and longevity.

Both physical pain and injuries can often be tied to a movement problem, and TSTM is a firm believer that providing a movement-based solution is more effective in the long run to addressing the root cause of the problem.

How do we address spinal health from a movement perspective?

In the video we introduce the first step to self-managing and regaining control of your spine:

The cat/ cow segmentation is an exercise taken from Functional Range Systems (FRS). The goal is to develop control of the spine through segmentation. Segmentation will allow you to self-assess how well your spine moves and what areas need to be addressed.

The next step is hinge point training in order to unblock areas of the spine that need better segmentation.

Here are the steps most people should start with before considering more demanding movement tasks.

Set yourself a goal of performing 5-10mins each day of spinal segmentation over a period of 30 days. You can incorporate it into your morning routine, or as your warm-up before training. Consistency is essential to progress in all aspects of training, performing an exercise once or twice a week is not going to deliver the same results as performing the exercise daily.

Record yourself; what we feel is happening to our spine may not be what is actually happening. By filming yourself you have the ability to see what is actually happening, you may be VERY surprised to see the contrast between what you are feeling and what you're doing on video.

Monitor how your spine feels after segmentation practice. As you go about the rest of your day, do you notice any difference?

It can be hard to build new habits within our busy schedules, a practice like this can be frustrating at first as the benefits and rewards tend to be delayed. If you can associate small improvements on a daily basis it may help keep you motivated with your spinal practice.

свернуть