Research regularly cites 80% of the population will experience or suffer from spinal pain. So chances are you will at some point require assessment, treatment, and advice for spine pain.

Some spinal pain can be short-lived, lasting less than one week. This pain may be described as non-specific and commonly disappears without any assessment or treatment.

Persistent spinal pain or pain that is so severe requires strong analgesia does require prompt assessment, treatment, and advice. With the correct advice, spine pain and dysfunction can improve steadily. The majority of clients (95% plus) will improve with good quality care, assessment and advice. This treatment must also include specific spinal rehabilitation.

The correct treatment will ensure your spine is more robust, and the education to look for signs to predict a back exacerbation. Listen to your body, treat early and self-manage.

General exercise versus specific targeted spinal exercise

‘It’s not what you do, It’s how you do it’. We often hear stories where people have tried their best, kept exercising, but are still troubled by spinal pain. Prolonged pain and disuse of muscle are associated with the altered motor cortical representation. Pain very quickly switches off your deep lumbar stabilising muscles.

General exercise, unfortunately, is not enough to re-program specific spinal musculature. Studies have identified a marked improvement in clients who practice skilled specific motor training. Cortical reorganisation following skilled training is one of the likely reasons for such improvements with spine pain clients.

Specific exercise is essential to target the correct musculature to hold and stabilise your back. This directly reduces load and overuse of passive structures that often generate pain due to altered pressures which are placed upon them.

Building strong core muscles is not achieved by performing copious amounts of sit-up exercises and crunches in the gym. The correct exercises for building spine-stabilising core muscles are exercises that are performed very slowly without any spine movement. To do so correctly, you will need to re-train two key muscle groups, Transversus Adominus and Multifidus.

Why use real-time ultrasound during physiotherapy?

Having a strong core means that all the muscles in the trunk of your body are strong and flexible, and are working together to support and stabilise the spine. Your ability to identify and strengthen your core abdominals is crucial for spinal rehabilitation.

The tranversus abdominus multifidus (corset muscles around your lower back) and multifidus muscles (pieces of eye fillet steak either side of the bony parts of your lower spine) attach locally to the lumbar to give us core spinal stability. These muscles are an important component of our core or ‘cylinder of stability’.

Unfortunately, these spine-stabilising muscles switch off after back pain lasting more a couple of days. When this happens, these muscles need to be retrained and strengthened to function properly.