Chiswick Physio founder Nathan Carter on the best exercises for lower back pain

Which exercise is best for lower back pain?

Lower back pain is the most common complaint seen at Chiswick Physio over 17 years of treating clients in west London. In the first of a new monthly column for The Chiswick Calendar, Nathan Carter explains why the answer to ‘what’s the best exercise?’ isn’t as straightforward as you might think – chiswick-physio.co.uk/exercises-for-low-back-pain

Guest blog by Nathan Carter, Chiswick Physio

Lower back pain is the most common complaint seen at Chiswick Physio over 17 years of treating clients in west London. In the first of a new monthly column for The Chiswick Calendar, Nathan Carter explains why the answer to ‘what’s the best exercise?’ isn’t as straightforward as you might think.

One of the most common questions we hear is: ‘What’s the best exercise for lower back pain?’

The honest answer? It’s a bit like asking, ‘What’s the best medicine?’ It depends on what’s causing the problem and where you are in your recovery.

One of the biggest mistakes we see is people strengthening when they need mobility, or stretching when they actually need to build strength and confidence.

In simple terms, back pain often falls into two stages. When your back is painful and stiff, the priority is usually to keep moving and calm things down. When the pain begins to settle, the focus shifts towards rebuilding strength, confidence and resilience.

We’ve put together a guide explaining which exercises can help at each stage, and, more importantly, why.

Is my low back pain serious?

Here at Chiswick Physio, we see and treat a wide variety of clients who struggle with pain in their lower back, and we help them to establish ways of fitting exercise into their lifestyle and busy routines. Whether that is adapting to increased travel commitments or reduced time available to exercise, we work with our clients to establish what their goals are and how we can support them in achieving those goals.

Back pain affects eight out of ten people, so it is common for people to have experienced it at some point in their life. Serious back pain is very rare and affects less than 5% of the population, so it is unlikely that your pain is going to be so significant that the team at Chiswick Physio are unable to help you.

It is important to know that the back is a strong and stable structure. It is encased and supported by a scaffold of strong ligaments and muscles capable of managing much more than the day-to-day activities we throw at it.

There are many causes of lower back pain, the most common of which are often not related to a specific structure and will settle within six to eight weeks. Exercise rehabilitation can help to ease symptoms and improve strength, helping to prevent further episodes.

If your symptoms are not settling, your pain keeps getting worse or you are experiencing other symptoms such as fever, major weight loss or weight gain, loss of function or weakness in extremities, or bladder problems, we recommend you seek further medical advice.

What will help my low back pain?

The mainstay of improving pain within the lower back is based around movement. Exercise is currently the only prevention for recurrent low back pain. So keep positive, keep going and keep active.

Often in the first few days of experiencing back pain, movement can be the aggravating factor. When this happens, it is only natural that you become more fearful of aggravating your pain and you gradually start to modify your activities and your quality of life. But it does not have to be this way.

What exercises help acute low back pain?

At Chiswick Physio, we encourage clients to move little but often to avoid the associated stiffness that comes with acute low back pain. Certain positions can provide relief from pain. We encourage our clients to adopt these positions throughout the day in an effort to settle their symptoms. Here are a few examples:

Child’s pose
Knee hugs
Cat camel
Pelvic tilts

What exercises will strengthen my lower back?

Once the initial pain has subsided, we look to strength-based exercise targeting the muscles surrounding and supporting the back. When we discuss strengthening, it is important to understand that we do not consider our clients as being ‘weak’ or ‘not strong enough’. We use strengthening exercises to help regain confidence in different movements and to build greater strength of the targeted muscles to reduce pain and symptoms. Exercises we commonly prescribe include:

Sit to stand or squats
Romanian deadlifts
Hip bridges

By encouraging movements that use a joint’s full range of motion, we can increase our body’s ability to move freely in all directions with adequate strength and without caution: bending down to pick the dog up, for example.

How Chiswick Physio can help your low back pain

If your back pain has been getting worse and you want to address your back pain rather than simply manage it, physiotherapy could be the solution you’ve been looking for.

An in-depth assessment and structured rehabilitation programme is often needed to determine the cause of lower back pain. At Chiswick Physio, our specially trained physiotherapists provide personalised care by tailoring an exercise programme that works for you and your lifestyle. Our team have worked with hundreds of patients suffering with lower back pain and can get you pain-free and moving normally again.

If you would like to prevent or treat lower back, knee, shoulder or neck problems, sports injuries, or have a women’s health issue, please get in touch with Chiswick Physio or call 07441 921060.

Nathan Carter is Business Director of Chiswick Physio. A qualified physiotherapist, Nathan now heads up the team and writes a monthly column for The Chiswick Calendar. Chiswick Physio is a Chiswick Calendar Club Card member.