On June 24th I began 30 days of dedicated action towards treating the muscle imbalances that have been causing me severe back pain and sciatica for over 5 years. Today I decided it would be a good idea to write a little bit about what muscle imbalances are, how they develop, and how to correct them. Basically, I want to share with my readers what I’ve been learning about back pain and how to beat it.

6 days ago I began the treatment portion of a program produced by the Healthy Back Institute that is designed to identify dysfunctions such as muscle imbalances, and then provide the right combination of targeted stretches and exercises to correct the dysfunctions by bringing the imbalanced muscle groups back into balance.

My specialized treatment program is made up of about 20 corrective exercises and stretches that were put together to correct my major dysfunctions – a right side ‘high-hip’, a ‘backward tilted pelvis’. These dysfunctions have developed into sciatica which is what now causes me most of my pain, but the Lose The Back Pain system should be able to fix my sciatic nerve pain by addressing the underlying cause — muscle imbalances.

What are muscle imbalances?

Muscles work in groups that must be balanced in strength and flexibility, when the balance gets pulled too far in one direction it begins to pull your bones and joints out of proper alignment. This is the root cause of most back pain, and is what the Lose The Back Pain system refers to as ‘muscle imbalances’.

You could imagine it as a kind of ‘tug of war’ on your hips. When I was taking kickboxing classes I developed very strong abs, but my back was hardly developed, especially my lower back. My quads also lagged behind the strength of my hamstrings. This means that my strong abs were pulling up on the top/front of my hips, while the weak quads didn’t pull equally as hard (balanced) on the bottom front of my hips. My tight/stronger hamstrings pulled down on the back/bottom of my hips while my weak lower back didn’t balance the pull on the top/back of my hips. This caused me to develop a dysfunction called ‘backward tilted pelvis’ or ‘backward tipped pelvis’.

On top of that, I used to wear my wallet in the back pocket of my right side pant for years when I was younger. I believe this is a major contributing factor to my right side high hip. The assessments I did in the LTBP system easily identified my high-hip. After I saw it the first time in the mirror it’s obvious to see every time I look at myself in the mirror now! My hips are visibly tilted sideways with the right side an inch or two higher than the left. I can’t be sure that it was the wallet that caused this dysfunction, but whatever caused it, the Healthy Back Institute promises that they can help fix it — and I’m now putting this to the test.

How to correct muscle imbalances

To correct a muscle imbalance issue you first have to identify which muscles are out of balance. There are tons of physical tests you can do to help identify your dysfunctions and imbalances. The Lose The Back Pain system has an entire dvd full of these tests to help you identify imbalances specific to back pain, neck pain, and sciatica. There are countless websites out there with information on imbalances in other parts of the body.

After you’ve identified which muscles are out of balance you want to stretch the stronger/tight muscles while strengthening the weaker ones. You want to do this with all of the muscle groups that are out of balance until you achieve a state where your muscle groups are more in sync with each other. This often means only stretching one side of your body — which feels really weird, as I have found out. Intuitively it feels wrong, but this is what it takes to fix a muscle imbalance.

High-Hip

For the high hip I have to focus on strengthening the glute on the high hip side, and stretching the glute on the opposite side. I also have to stretch the inner thigh on only the high hip side. This makes logical sense to me after going through the entire education portion of the LTBP system — the whole idea is to bring things back into balance so that my hips can naturally sit in the correct position with the full support of all of the muscles involved.

Backwards Tipped Pelvis

To correct the backwards tipped pelvis I have 6 exercises to do that stretch the strong abs, strengthen the weak back, tighten/strengthen the quads, and stretch the hamstrings. These exercises feel good. It’s slightly painful to do some of these movements, but I can tell that these are the exercises I need to be doing.

I had never really noticed just how weak my lower back actually is — especially when compared to my much stronger abdominal muscles. This is a major contributor to my back pain and probably the sciatica as well.

Sciatica

Sciatica is pressure being placed on a nerve that runs from the lower back, down through your ass, and down your leg to about the knee. It’s caused by improper positioning of the hips and back which causes pressure to be placed on the sciatic nerve. Sciatica can be extremely painful in a hard-to-describe kind of way. Sciatica can be extremely touchy and there are some ‘good’ days, more ‘bad’ days, and the condition can be triggered by seemingly regular movements or even sitting on certain types of chairs. Sciatica can also be triggered by inflammation of the muscles around the sciatic nerve.

When my back pain started developing into a fairly severe case of sciatica, I knew I had to do something to fix it — there’s no room in my life for pain like that on a daily basis! This was the thought that set me into action that will eventually lead to balanced muscles and no more pain.

To treat sciatica there are an additional 4 or 5 stretches that stretch the nerve and surrounding muscles and release the pressure on the nerve. Doing these stretches are the most painful part of the program, but they also seem to offer the most relief. These stretches were all new to me — no doctor, physiotherapist, chiropractor, acupuncturist, or massage therapist has ever shown me any of these stretches.

Click here to watch a video of one of the sciatica stretches that gives me the most relief. That stretch is actually what convinced me that the Jesse and Steve over at the Healthy Back Institute actually know what they are talking about. The stretch worked so well, I had to know what the rest of their system could do for me — and I’m still optimistic about the program 6 days in to the self treatment portion of the program.

New stretches

As I expected, the system showed me several new movements, stretches, and exercises. Almost all of the movements brand new to me — I mean, I’ve never even seen anyone do these stretches until I watched the Lose The Back Pain self treatment video. That kind of makes me sad because nobody seems to know about this stuff, yet so many people suffer from conditions like mine and go on suffering for years without ever getting relief!

Spinal Decompression

The entire program has been taking me about 40-50 minutes to do each night after a warm shower. After doing the entire set of stretches, exercises, and movements, I do 2 minutes of spinal decompression using my Nubax Trio (click here to read my review of the Nubax Trio). I have decided to keep the decompression to about 2 minutes and only once per day to ensure that I don’t over-do it. I’d rather have too little than too much going on with my back at one time, especially this early into the treatment program.

Spinal decompression takes the pressure off of the discs in the spine and allows nutritional healing fluid to move in and refresh the discs, heal herniation or bulging of the discs, and instantly release pressure on the sciatic nerve. I’ve been experimenting with the Nubax for about 6 months and I’ve found it fairly helpful. If I had to buy again, I would probably go with this inversion table instead of the Nubax, because I’ll soon have enough space for an inversion table. The Nubax is a smaller, more portable option to inversion therapy.

Getting personal support and advice

I just want to mention that the other day I added Jesse Cannone on facebook. He was happy to respond to my inquiries and was very quick. He offered personal support, and told me that if I have any questions at all to send him a message or an email and he would reply to it personally as soon as he could! I was impressed with the way Jesse conducted himself, he was friendly and offered more help than I had expected. He even thanked me for the honesty in the detailed review of the Nubax Trio that I posted. He seems like a nice guy.

Results so far

So far I’m having some mixed results with the system. The first few days went well, my back felt tired and stretched, but good. Most of the days at work went by fairly well, it wasn’t until the last part of my shifts that my back started to hurt. This is a big improvement over having my back hurt a ton right at the beginning of the shift before I’ve even done anything.

After doing the exercises and stretches on day 4 my back hurt quite a bit. It was hard to get to sleep because my back and sciatica were acting up, but I finally did get to sleep. When I woke up, my back was quite sore again. It was even more sore than on a bad day before I started the treatment.

By the end of day 5 (yesterday) my back was feeling good again. I thought I may have just over stretched it a bit on day 4, so I decided to take it a bit easier when doing the treatment last night on day 5. My back felt really good after doing the stretches last night and the good feeling has lasted through most of today (day 6).

I plan to do again tonight what I did last night and do the Lose The Back Pain stretches and exercises a little easier and hope that my back feels even better tomorrow than it does today.

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It looks like this 30 day trial of the Healthy Back Institute’s Lose The Back Pain program is turning it into ‘Back Pain & Sciatica Awareness Month’ at Exploring Infinity!

You can get a 30 day free trial of the same Lose The Back Pain program I talk about in this article by clicking here.