Chronic Back Pain you Can’t Figure Out? You Might be Neglecting Your Hip Flexors

When it comes to chronic lower back pain, there are countless possibilities for the source. After all; your spine is central to how you move, so it would follow that damage to anything that helps support your spine will result in pain in the back. Therapies for back pain with an identifiable cause include medical interventions like PRP injections, stem cell therapies and trigger point injections, and, of course, physical therapy.

But if the cause of your back pain is unclear, the next place you should look for fascial damage, weakness or tightness is your hip flexors and piriformis muscles; more often than not, hip problems and back problems work in a feedback loop, which is why the same therapies that are effective for back pain often also work for hip pain.

Signs Your Hip Flexors are Weak

There are several symptoms that indicate your hip flexors are weak and/or tight, both of which can cause also chronic pain in the lower back:

• Changes in posture quality and comfort
• Uncomfortable or crooked gait
• Hip pain
• Leg pain
• Knee pain

When your doctor recommends regular, moderately-strenuous exercise as a lifestyle, they’re not just worried about the way you look. Both inside and out, a healthy exercise regimen keeps all the interworking systems of your body balanced. Weak hip flexors often come from weak hip flexor tendons and injuries that started in childhood. Exercise will help, but your body may need a PRP needle surgery to strengthen how fascia anchors and holds you together. Pain is often near major joints because much of the underlying cause of the pain includes a lifetime of tendon injuries.

Back Pain Therapy for Weak Hip Flexors

Even though there are many causes of back pain, including body parts that aren’t even in your back, like with piriformis syndrome and weak hip flexors, the overwhelming majority of pain symptoms are the same. So, many stretches and exercises doctors recommend for back pain are universally-helpful, regardless of the cause. Here’s a great article with 4 major stretches to help stretch and strengthen your hip flexors as well as help treat lower back pain from sciatica or piriformis syndrome. Unfortunately, these stretches are what is most often taught… and involves pulling on the ends of your muscles in hope to stretch a knot in the middle. If these stretches and conventional medicine have failed you, we at the Blatman Health and Wellness Center in Cincinnati and at Blatman Integrative Healing in NYC teach a very different way to stretch that most everyone can do…. And it is not about pulling on the ends of the strings/cords of your fascia. What we were taught about pain does not work any better than what you experience… and there is another way… The Blatman Method for Understanding and Treating Pain.