The Best Breathing Exercise For Back Pain Relief
Believe it or not breathing and back pain go hand in hand.
There are a lot of breathing techniques aimed at targetting both chronic and acute back pain but most people tend to pass over them simply because it’s hard to make the connection between the way we breathe and the pain in our backs.
After suffering for 8+ years with chronic back pain from a ruptured L5-S1 disk I discovered that targeted breathing can be the most powerful tool you can use to combat chronic pain, tension, and stiffness.
In today’s video, I am going to cover a powerful breathing tool used by the military to maintain control over their stress and anxiety which for chronic pain sufferers can easily be the cause of their persistent pain.
Before you jump into the video let’s answer a few questions!
When your back hurts when you breathe what does that mean?
Assuming all major issues have been ruled out, a common issues I have noticed is that deep breathing causes muscles in the entire core to be stretched. If you have been dealing with years of persistent back pain and stiffness in the lower back this deep breathing is going to work against these stiff and achy muscles.
In a way simply breathing deep is causing these muscles to be stretched as you force air deeper in to your trunk via the diaphragm. Which is one of the major reasons why if done right and consistently it can over time allow these lower back muscles to relax and bring relief.
Does Deep Breathing Help Lower Back Pain?
When you are intentionally targeting your breathing for back pain yes, it does. As chronic back pain sufferers tend to stiffen and protect the area this causes unnecessary tension in the lower back. With more tension, stress, and anxiety around our pain and causing more of it, our breathing cycles become affected.
By having a consistent routine of both targeted deep breathing and checking in on the quality of your normal breathing cycle you can really see some awesome improvement in your pain experience.
Can a pulled muscle in your back cause pain when breathing?
Of course! Similar to a more chronic situation breathing during an acute back pain flair up can trigger the muscles in the lower back to contract and stiffen. This is super common after pulling a muscle in your lower back.
The body wants to protect the injured muscles ontop of the injured muscles being super sensitive to movement already the body will naturally contract the muscles to keep the area safe.
So when you breathe in these muscles essentially are bing stretched a bit which could be triggering hem to contract.
This is what I call the protection mechanism
Try out Box Breathing right now for yourself and let me know how you feel in the comment section below!
