Andrew Boyer Massage | Uptown, Chicago

For any of you who know me on a personal level you know that I love my Quick and Dirty Tips podcasts (www.quickanddirtytips.com). Being quick and dirty they’re everything I love in life. My personal favorites are The Get-It-Done Guy (Stever Robbins http://getitdone.quickanddirtytips.com), The Nutrition Diva (Monica Reinagel http://nutritiondiva.quickanddirtytips.com), she has one of the most soothing voices I’ve ever heard and just makes you believe everything she says, The Digital Marketer (Aliza Sherman  http://digitalmarketer.quickanddirtytips.com), and the topic of today’s post, The House Call Doctor (Dr. Rob Lamberts http://housecalldoctor.quickanddirtytips.com).

These are a little old, but I got pretty behind on my listening and just recently caught up. He has two that deal with back issues, so I thought I’d respond to both together. The first is deals specifically with back pain  http://housecalldoctor.quickanddirtytips.com/what-causes-back-pain.aspx).

Somethings I learned from this are that 85% of people have had back pain, over $1billion is spent on treatment of back pain a year, and 75% of people who start to have back pain give up sports and exercise.

Back pain comes mostly from injuring the muscles in the back or damaging the nerves that begin in your spinal cord and spread to the rest of the body.

Muscle injury comes from repeated actions and or giant mis-step. I see a lot of the repeated action type. Mostly by people who sit all day at computers with bad posture (not unlike what I’m doing right now. That creaking sound you hear is me sitting up straighter.)

The single mis-step is picking something up that’s too heavy, weekend warrior football, or just even that time you turn and for some reason everything seizes. I get a lot of those too. I hate it when it happens to me.

(All the detailed medical stuff is on his post. Follow the link.)

As far as treatment goes, he suggests ice or heat. Generally, heat soothes muscle pain while ice calms down inflammation. What I’ve heard is that any new muscular injury you should ice for 48 hours and then heat. If something feels sharp is should probably be iced and as it starts to ache be heated. (Is this where I say I’m not  a doctor and this blog should not be taken in anyway to be medical advice?) They also say you should heat before you do the activity that causes the pain, and heat after. There’s also a thought that if you can rapidly go from cold to heat that’s actually the best. In less than one minute increments. That’s easy with an ankle or wrist when you can sit there with two buckets, but obviously hard with a back. The idea is that the rapid change from hot to cold flushes blood in and out of the injury which brings in nutrients and oxygen.

He also suggests general things like over the counter pain medication and maybe getting something stronger from a doctor if need be.

And massage! Massage helps relieve the stress on the supporting muscles around the injury as well as promoting blood circulation into the injury. If the muscle is in spasm we can help calm it down and help it release, which is always good. Then of course there are the “knots” from the injury. If you don’t know, muscle is made up of long fibers, like if you held a bunch of uncooked spaghetti. Often times when there is an injury there will be microtears, or in the case of the one big mis-step, not so microtears in the fibers. When the muscle heals the fibers can often heal all mish mush (a technical term). Think of cooking said spaghetti then holding the soft noodles in a tube to look like the hard stuff. The noodles will be in roughly straight lines but they’ll swerve around each other and not be all nicely lined up. What we do is we go in and actually retear the microtears and then smooth out the fibers so they can heal in nice, military-like straight lines.

Physical therapy could also be needed, since that will strengthen the supporting muscles and take strain off the injury.

This brings me to the one thing that I felt like Dr. Rob didn’t really address. Imbalance in opposing muscles can often lead to pain anywhere in the body. Ever see a sprinter go down with a hamstring tear? Most likely his quads were significantly stronger than his hamstrings. In that same way, weakness in abdominal muscles can often lead to lower back pain. The stronger muscle is pulling on the pelvis, but the abdominals aren’t strong enough to keep the pelvis even, so it tilts and now the back muscles are in a state of constant contraction and shortening. Conversely, the abdominals can be stronger than the back and tilt the pelvis the other way. Now the back is stretched and working to pull the pelvis back, but it can’t and it gets tired.

When someone tells me they have chronic low back pain I always do work on their abdomen, and in particular a magic muscle group that I’m just going to collectively refer to as the psoas. The psoas is actually made of two muscles, but they work together, and this is just easier. This muscle attaches to the front of you vertebrae about even with your belly button and runs down through your pelvis and attaches on the inside of your leg. This muscle is the deepest abdominal, and its so deep in your body some people once classified it as a back muscle. Its technically on the anterior side of the body and flexes the waist, so its really an abdominal muscle.

Getting the psoas massaged is a lot of fun. No, not really. It can be very invasive for some people, and always feels odd the first couple of times. Basically I shorten your hip, either by putting your leg over my knee or putting your foot on the table and proceed to push two fingers into your stomach weaving my way between layers of other muscle, fat, and organs until I get it. I then repeat that down to your hip along the muscle. Repeat. I usually do at least three passes. To add just a little bit more fun on my last push I’ll slowly straighten out your leg, which pulls the muscle under my fingers and gives it just a last extra stretch. Who wouldn’t love that? I’ll tell you what though. More than any other “deep release” that’s the one that people email me the next day and tell me that they feel completely different. Clients get a new freedom in their hips and pain is relieved. It’s great. And it’s fun for me to do.

This isn’t a huge reason for back injuries, but its something to be aware of. Even if its not the reason, because the abdominals are supporting muscles, they’ll almost always be effected by back pain of some sort.

Ok, so I said I was going to address both podcasts, but this is long, so I’ll hold off on the pinched nerve one for a few days and let you all digest this one. Enjoy!

As always you can email me with any questions to andy@andrewboyerlmt.com, follow my fan page on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pages/Andrew-Boyer-LMT/82850286638, you can subscribe to the blog through the fan page, or on twitter twitter.com/andrewboyerlmt, or even hunt me out on foursquare if you’re just curious what I’m out and about doing.  I love texts too, so if you have questions or want to schedule an appointment feel free to hit me at 773-809-4312.

Look for the pinched nerve response soon!