So there’s an age old debate and that debate is whether or not. Doing core work and building a strong core is good for back pain now. On this episode. I’m going to end this debate once and for all. And let you know, what’s really going on with this. So one of the problems is that if you have back pain, there is.
Millions and millions of different quote unquote solutions. And if you type this in on Google and do a search. You’ll see people who say yes, the stronger your core, the better it is for your back. And you’ll see an equal amount of articles saying that. Doing core work does nothing for your back. And if you have back pain, you’re still going to have back pain. And in some instances,
Doing core work is actually going to make it worse now. Here’s the reality of the situation. Who’s right. And who’s wrong. And you may or may not like this answer, but they’re both right. And [00:01:00] they’re both wrong. And it really depends. And this is the issue. Right. Which is if you’ve got back pain, there’s so much general advice and not enough specific advice. Right. And one of the things that I’ve discovered with, I worked with a lot of clients who, if you’re unfamiliar with me, I work with a lot of clients who, who have back pain and, and want to solve it holistically through building balance and, and their muscles correctly in their body.
Back pain is too general and it’s not a. One size fits all beast. Now. The thing that most. Don’t take into account is, and this is on Google and this is on YouTube. I’ve looked everywhere. Right? And I read the comments. I like to see what the pulse is and what people have to say. And it’s really just a debate back and forth.
His core work beneficial for back pain? Yes or no. Right. And it’s just people arguing. Yes. And people arguing. No. Right. Pretty simple. [00:02:00] But the reality of the situation. Is that it’s. It’s far more complicated yet, far more simpler than that. And. What I mean by this, getting back to what I originally said was yes, they’re right. They’re both right. And.
They’re both wrong. Here’s what it boils down to and here’s what they, aren’t taking into account. So one of the things that I have found that is incredibly important in. Working with clients on their bodies is it’s never about the situation that they are in currently. Right? When you see the body in front of you, when you’re working with somebody.
It’s never about where they are bright now. Like how they move the size of their muscles, their flexibility, their dexterity, whatever that is in front of you is not necessarily the full picture. And that’s the problem with back pain is a lot of people who set out to correct back pain. And there’s so many different people with so many different types of [00:03:00] trainings that correct back pain. They’re looking at what’s in front of you, just purely in front of you. Okay. So you’ve got pain here.
And you’ve got pain here. All right. Is it a muscular thing? Is it a skeletal thing? Is it something going on with your back? The actual spinal cord? Is it disks? You know, is it the piriformis? Is it the hips? And that’s great. And fine, but that doesn’t tell the full picture. And in order to get the full picture, you have to be able to understand.
Persons developed movement patterns, right? And this is one of the critical, critical things to ending this debate and understanding what actually does go on. In human bodies is that you can take two bodies that are exactly the same two human bodies that are exactly the same. Right. In the moment, meaning.
Same height, same weight, same muscles. Exact exactly the same.
But. If you don’t look at [00:04:00] their entire history of movement, the sports, the movements, the things they’ve done. Then you weren’t really getting the full picture. Right. And you could take these two identical bodies that have. Both back pain. One of them and on the surface, by the way, you can’t even tell, but when you dig into their history and you realize, well, one of them.
Was one of them has basically sat at a desk for 30 years of their life. Right. Sitting. Sitting no sports. Nothing. Right. Or maybe even sat at a desk for the last 10 years. Played baseball, maybe when they were kids swam. The other one has never once sat at a desk. There are farmer. They work with their hands are on their feet all day long.
They played football and high school maybe. And, you know, they had a broken arm when they were. 10 years old or something like that. Right. So. The histories of [00:05:00] each of those two people are different. But where they are currently is the same. Right. So the roads that they’ve taken, whatever they’ve done physically.
Have led them to look visually exactly the same.
And that’s where the similarities end. When you look at these two people with two separate backgrounds and histories of movement, our body creates what’s called movement patterns based off of what we do. And our brain. Is not conditioned to understand. What’s good and what’s bad. All it’s conditioned to do is say to itself. Well,
I’m repeating the same thing over and over and over and over and over. It must be a pattern or it must be a habit. So I am going to turn it into a pattern. I’m going to create a new neurological pattern in the body so that it becomes more automatic. For me to execute it, right? Like brushing your [00:06:00] teeth.
That’s pattern behavior. Right? We learn, we don’t have to think about it. To brush our teeth. We just learn. We don’t say, well, you know, I didn’t. I haven’t brushed my teeth for a month and hopefully you don’t do that, but let’s just say you did. It’s like, Hmm, my biceps. Didn’t forget how to hold the toothbrush or, oh, I got to go train my shoulder in order to hold the toothbrush up to move it back and forth. Right. We don’t think like that.
It’s a pattern that we just go through and we continue to execute. And the way our body creates these patterns is by looking for repetition. It looks for repetitious movement. And repetitious movement in the body. No matter what that is good or bad. So I should. Eh, what’s really important here is to understand is that whether movement is good or bad, what are the, whether the repetition, repetition that you’re creating as good or bad?
Your body doesn’t really care. It’s if you’re doing it all the time, it creates a powder, right? If you’re pitching a baseball and throwing curve [00:07:00] balls, like I was your body develops the pattern. You got some weird patterns going on in your shoulder. Right. If you. Our downhill, snow skier, your body develops patterns for how you bend the legs, et cetera, et cetera. Right.
So your body doesn’t know. Now. The more and more that you start to dig into this. The more and more, you start to realize that. Now addressing the patterns or addressing somebody’s history. And by the way, if you ha, if you’ve had like a broken bone or something, of course, Your body rapidly creates new movement patterns to adapt to having a broken arm or broken leg or anything along these lines. Right.
The more you dig into this, the more you realize that every solution is slightly different. Right. So what happens is, and let me talk now about both camps, but let’s first talk about the, the camp that says, well, you know, core strength [00:08:00] doesn’t work for back pain at all. Right. Now. Again, back pain is back pain is there’s a lot of different categories of back pain, which are also important to understand.
But. Let’s say, for example, you have developed a movement pattern. Like if you were sitting all your life and cause I see this a lot, right? Like I work with clients who do a lot of sitting, right? Busy people, business people. Yes. It’s one of the categories that people I work with. So they’ve actually developed a movement, a very simple movement pattern of.
My TVA, my core muscle doesn’t even have to engage because I’m sitting down all day long. So your brain basically creates a pattern to not use your core. So because of that though, there’s other muscles around it. You’ve got muscles which are called the QL muscles stands for the quadratus. Lumborum.
They attach the top of the pelvis to the bottom of the rib cage, the typical lower back muscles that get tight. So they function in the absence of your [00:09:00] TVA or your core. Right. And I have a lot of training on the TVA. If you, I have it all over the place. In fact, I have so much of it. If you shoot me a DM on Instagram and you want.
There’s something you’re looking for. Just tell me I’ll direct you somewhere. I’ll find you. Exactly what you need to see, that’s beneficial for you, but.
If someone has core muscles that aren’t engaging at all, because they’ve created a pattern. Well, doing all the core work in the world. Is not going to fix the problem and the reason it’s not going to fix the problem is because. Normally in that pattern, those QL muscles have been conditioned and trained and patterned to engage in the absence instead of the TVA. So you can do all the core work in the world, your TVA muscles, or your QL muscles are still gonna function like your core. And therefore it’s not going to do anything for your back.
Now, mind you, one of the [00:10:00] issues. That causes back pain is the QL. When it over engages, when it functions like a primary core muscle, when it’s not, it shortens it tightens, it pulls. And again, it attaches, it attaches the top of the pelvis to the bottom of the rib cage. So. The pelvis effectively tilts. Right? A lot of the time you’ll see it kind of pull the, the back of the pelvis up. That’s called the anterior tilt from the back of the pelvis goes up and the front goes down.
That’s called the anterior tilt so that when you tilt the pelvis like that anteriorly, you effectively compact the spine. So now QL pain has become. Now QL pain has become also pain in the spine, in the lumbar spine. Right. That’s when you get pressure on the discs and all sorts of other things that happen in there. Right? So.
If you have created that pattern. In your life in one way, shape or form. And that’s why sitting does it. That’s one of the reasons why they say sitting is the new smoking. The specific reason why sitting [00:11:00] becomes is the new smoking is because it enables your brain to create a pattern for yourself that.
A harmful pattern in your body. And that my core doesn’t have to engage because I’ve got a chair to support me. And then that pattern starts to permeate into other areas of your life. So you start to muscle things in your shoulders, which is why you start to get tight shoulders and tight neck muscles, and tight trap muscles.
And. All those are the things that go with it. So. When you’re looking at that from the holistic picture, you’re saying, well, this person has had patterned behavior. That’s trained the muscles. Act in a different way other than they should. Well, in that case, yeah. You can do all the core work in the world and it’s not going to correct the problem. What is the solution in that case? The solution in that case is you first, before you even get into any court work, you have to create a new pattern, right?
You have to create. A new type of movement pattern, which means you have to train your TVA to activate now. Understand the difference, the TVA Again, that’s it stands for [00:12:00] the transverse abdominis, the hollow ring muscle. It’s the deep core muscle that it’s, that it’s the first responder in all of our movements, right? Every movement in our body is initiated by the contraction of the TVA and a healthy functioning body. Now.
Pattern building, creating new patterns is very different from doing core work. Training your TVA to engage is very different from doing court work. Right? So in this case, if you’re doing core work without the TVA engaging, then your back muscles are just going to take over and it’s going to be tight and you’re not going to get any, anything from it. Right. So I suspect.
When people say it doesn’t work core work, doesn’t work and hurt their back more. Chances are they weren’t actually using their core. And instead, the core work that they were doing was actually just triggering their lower back muscles, which was creating more pain than they already had. Right. So.
That’s a really big piece to the puzzle, which is, [00:13:00] well, if you have a muscle that is. Truly not engaging. Well, it doesn’t matter how much work you do. It’s not going to work right. Now the other side of it is, and this is where core work is beneficial. For you to help with your back pain is sometimes your core does engage. It’s it’s actually just really weak, right? It’s actually just weak. So if you’ve already got, if you’re already conditioned to have a pattern where your core engages, it’s just weak for whatever reason.
Then. That is going to be beneficial for your back because it’s going to in turn help and a weak TVA also means that you’ve probably got tight. Back muscles because they’re working too. As a subsidiary to your core. Which again makes them tight. So you’re compacted in that region. You know, your lower back, you’ve got that interior tilt, but when you’re actually engaging your core and you’re making it stronger.
Then, theoretically, what happens is that the stronger, your core gets [00:14:00] the less your QL muscles work and they shouldn’t be working anyway anyway, to overly stabilize you or anywhere close to working like primary stabilizing muscles. So they just start to link them. Right. They LinkedIn, they open up and it resets the pelvis.
So. You’ve got to you’ve you’ve got two counts, which means you have to look at, you have to look at either side of it. Right. And that doesn’t, that’s the short answer that doesn’t tell the full story, which again, you can get into all the different characteristics of. Back pain and what causes it and disks coming out and pelvic orientation. I’ll save it for another show.
This is interesting for you. And you’ve got also your hip flexors to take into account. There’s lots of other things, but the reality of it is, is that fixing core work. I mean, fixing. Back pain comes down to understanding patterns, neurological patterns, right? Like for example, maybe you’re listening and maybe you’re a woman and you were.
And you were pregnant and you realized that, you know, I used to have a really strong core [00:15:00] before. And I became pregnant and, you know, I had a son or a daughter, but, and I’m no longer carrying a baby, but my core just never went back to the way it was. It never engaged because over that nine month period of time, while you were carrying your baby, that was enough time for your body to create a new movement pattern, which was.
Very similar to sitting, which is, well, you know, I’ve got a baby in the womb. It’s very hard for me to engage my muscles. So I’m going to start to use my back, my lower back to hold me. Right. So again, you’ve got the QL that’s working, that’s over working there and that’s not to mention if you develop things like diastasis recti, that’s where you get a little gap in the abs where the cartilage starts to tear apart.
The Linea Alba cartilage that sits in there starts to tear apart. You have other things, but it comes down to patterning and that’s why. And that that’s why. And I’ve had the unique vantage point to. To actually see this. I mean, having worked with hundreds of people who have had back pain, [00:16:00] It’s you, you start to see actual, real patterns from working with people and how this works and that.
Oftentimes it’s like a layer. You have to just go a layer deeper and understanding what that is. And that layer deeper means correcting movement patterns. Right. And that’s really where, you know, if you do have, if you do have back pain that isn’t getting fixed or it’s not salt, you haven’t been able to solve it through any traditional means.
Chances are that you’ve got lingering patterns that are movement patterns that have mates. You’ve had stubborn movement patterns that are in there. That are preventing you from doing that. And that’s, that’s just one of the things that is different for each person, right. And that’s really where you need some, you need some customized stuff in order to really get in there because every pattern is different. Right? You could have been a ballerina or a dancer, and that creates different issues.
Right? That creates different orientations of the pelvis, those kinds of things. And I mean, that’s what we do. Like people will ask, like, if you go and you, [00:17:00] look, you look up my program, body breakthrough. I mean, we have tons of testimonials of clients, but if you look. If you look up, why sometimes people like inquire why, which is, well, what’s the difference? And what are you doing that really is so different. That’s helping them to create this type of change. Number one.
It’s just it’s taking the time to address old movement patterns or sticky movement patterns. And I was lucky enough to learn this through playing baseball and creating all sorts of jacked up movement patterns and myself. I realized the same exact thing. I could be doing all the right things. But if under, if the underlying patterns that drive my muscles are off, it doesn’t really matter what I’m doing with my body or how I’m training my muscles. My body is still going to be off. So the takeaway of this and not get it, not.
Letting this episode run too long, but the takeaway of this. Is. To look at patterns, right. To, to understand the patterns and where that comes from. And you can [00:18:00] start to see that those patterns are driving. What’s going on with your back and typically back pain. People will say back pain is a result of muscular dysfunction, but to go even one step deeper muscular dysfunction.
Is a by-product of faulty patterns that were created in your body. Right? And that’s why learning to leverage your brain’s ability to create patterns is good when you’re teaching your body to create healthy patterns. But when you’re training your body, To produce unhealthy patterns. That’s where you get muscular dysfunction and that’s where you get back pain. So it’s a cycle, right? Which is unhealthy movement patterns create muscular dysfunction and muscular dysfunction creates back pain all in that cycle. If you are interested in you do I know I, I have got a couple of.
Messages from people. If you are interested and you want to check out body breakthrough and you want to see what it’s all about. You can go to www dot the Austin academy. Dot com slash apply. [00:19:00] You can go there and there’s a whole video. You put an email, there’s a whole video that you can watch there. Or if you have like some specific questions.
What’s going on with you, if you want to shoot them over to me on Instagram @brianaganad you can just shoot me a message there. Let me know what’s going on. And we can, we can take it from there. So that’s all I’ve got for you on today’s show. If this was beneficial, share it. If you know someone who has back pain share this.
This show this specific episode with them. I think it would be very beneficial. In my experience, movement patterns are really the key to solving back pain for. Good. And then.
Take some time to leave a review. Also leave a review on this podcast. I, I, if you go back and you look at my earlier shows, it was all just kind of technical stuff, but now it’s kind of like, there’s only so much technical stuff you can talk about. So if I do have stuff that comes up or I do have something about the yoga industry or something about.
Yoga teachers or anything along those lines, I’ll probably just, I’ll probably just. Share [00:20:00] it on this podcast or you have something specific you want me to cover? Shoot me a message too. And also let me know. All right. So let’s, I’ve got from. For today’s show have a good rest of your day. And I’ll talk to you soon.
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