Health and Fitness
How Flora Lowered Back Pain and Strengthened Her Core in 7 Steps
Learning about ergonomics, strengthening the core, improving posture, and boosting mood gave her a pain-free life
What is back pain, and why does it matter?
Before introducing Flora’s background and inspiring protocol, I’d like to discuss back pain and why it matters briefly.
Back pain is usually caused by overused muscles and stuck nerves in the spine, creating aches and sensations like stabbing and burning. Sitting, standing, bending, or carrying anything can be difficult with back pain.
There are many causes of back pain. Apart from underlying health conditions such as osteoporosis, arthritis, or chronic inflammation, the most common ones are sitting too long, working with poor posture, sleeping in an uncomfortable position, and immediately reacting to stimuli.
According to Mayo Clinic, “Back pain is one of the most common reasons people seek medical help or miss work. Back pain is a leading cause of disability worldwide.”
Back pain can make patients miserable, lowering the quality of life and preventing people from doing their job and daily chores.
A Brief Introduction to Flora’s Back Pain
As a mother of three young children, Flora used to work full-time as an executive secretary in a busy corporate organization. Unfortunately, her accumulated physical and mental stress caused severe back pain.
Flora tried numerous painkillers and anti-inflammatory medications her family doctors and specialists prescribed. These drugs gave her temporary relief, but over the years, her condition worsened, and the effects of medication diminished.
Her doctors’ efforts yielded no sustainable solution. Living with pain was not fun when she worked full-time and was responsible for three kids after work. She was tired of medication and needed sustainable solutions addressing root causes. The only option was the therapies covered by her private health insurance.
Therefore, she tried several alternative therapies. She obtained support from chiropractics, osteopaths, physiotherapists, myotherapists, massage therapists, acupuncturists, and kinesiologists. As a result, she consumed the annual coverage of her insurance policy each year.
These solutions relieved her temporarily, but her back pain persisted and made her life miserable. These therapists labeled her condition as chronic pain caused by excessive inflammation.
All these specialists only focussed on relaxing muscles, but none offered self-managing therapies that I covered in the subsequent sessions.
Here is a summary of the seven points that Flora used to improve her posture and sustainably defeat back pain.
1 — Yoga and Pilates
Working in frenetic and stressful workplaces, spending many hours in front of computers with several mobile phones, especially sitting longer than her body could handle, has adversely affected Flora’s posture.
Flora did not have the core strength to cope with physical pressure at work and at home with her three kids. Therefore, the most crucial piece of knowledge for Flora was the importance of core strength for maintaining a healthy posture.
One of Flora’s friends was a Yoga instructor owning her own education center as part of a health and fitness complex. One day when Flora mentioned her back pain, the instructor invited her to join her classes free as a guest.
This serendipitous invitation opened a new window to her healing journey and relieved debilitating back pain. The yoga sessions significantly increased her flexibility. As a result, she joined the center as a paying member.
Interestingly, during her yoga sessions, she met a Pilates instructor who volunteered to further coach her to improve her core strength. So Flora got several one-on-one sessions from this Pilates instructor who taught her valuable movements to strengthen her core.
A medicine ball was one of the most valuable tools the Pilates instructor introduced to Flora. Practicing pilates movements with this particular ball further improved her core strength and neuromuscular coordination.
While yoga improved her flexibility and agility, Pilates strengthened her back, neck, and abdominal muscles. In addition, they served as a preventative measure for Flora to keep her muscles, nerves, and bones in better coordination.
2 — Long and Joyful Walks
Flora always wanted to walk but needed more time due to hectic work and commitments to her young family. She was excited when her yoga and Pilates instructor suggested joining the bushwalking club.
To her surprise, Flora’s husband volunteered to look after the kids at the weekend so that she could join bushwalking sessions. In addition, she decided to join her neighbors for after-dinner walks. This healthy activity also cleared her mind after work and boosted her mood.
Walking was an excellent stress management tool for Flora. Thus, she also decided to walk 45 minutes during the lunch break with her colleagues around the parks behind her office building.
With lunch and after-dinner walks, Flora completed 10,000+ steps daily. She also used barefoot walking. She later joined Mark and Lucy (who reversed their diabetes) and increased her walking to 20,000 steps daily.
She used to use a pedometer, but her husband gifted her a smartwatch, further encouraging Flora to increase her daily steps. This sophisticated watch motivated her with inspiring graphs of her fitness progress and even showed heart rate variability and blood oxygen saturation.
3 — Resistance Training and Calisthenics
In her words, Flora became a fitness freak. She loved walking, yoga, and Pilates so much that she wanted to learn other exercise regimens and challenge her body more. One day she attended a public seminar at her fitness center.
The presenter emphasized the importance of resistance training with innovative machines, weightlifting, and calisthenics with body weight for improving posture and defeating back pain. Knowing that women could do weight training was music to her ears.
Since Flora became very fit with walking, she decided to join this community gym which was free for attending other sessions like yoga. The female instructor was extra inspirational for Flora as she had a defined body and a compassionate personality for students.
Flora loved working with modern machines in the center. In addition, she started with small weights. But her instructor also taught her calisthenics using her body weight.
Flora started with planks, which she was good at during the Pilates sessions. One of my friends, Audrey, also improved her back pain by doing planks regularly.
Then she learned to do push-ups and pull-ups. Isometric training, especially in calisthenics form, further strengthened her core, back, arm, and leg muscles.
4 — Swimming, Hydrotherapy, and Dry Saunas
Flora wanted to take her fitness to another level as her back pain significantly lowered, and her mood increased.
The center has a gigantic swimming pool, a heated hydrotherapy pool, a jacuzzi, and a dry sauna. She wanted to join as some of her friends were attending those sessions. But she did not know how to swim.
One of her friends in the fitness center volunteered to teach her how to swim. She learned it quickly and loved swimming. She wanted to take her kids to the swimming pool as they kept asking her for a long time.
Flora made swimming a family activity as her husband also joined them. While her husband looked after the kids in the swimming pool, Flora also tried a hydrotherapy pool with warm water and a sensory deprivation tank, which relaxed her muscles.
Furthermore, she sat in the jacuzzi for 15 minutes after weight training and did 20 minutes in the dry sauna, which relaxed her muscles and increased her blood flow.
In addition, some of her friends practiced laughter yoga in the hydrotherapy pool and other facilities. Laughter was a bonus for her mood.
She felt fantastic after each sauna session and a short cold shower. She did not know what was happening to her body until I explained the remarkable health benefits of dry saunas and thermogenesis to her.
After starting swimming, hydrotherapy, jacuzzi, sensory deprivation tank, and dry saunas, her back pain almost disappeared. All physical exercises made a significant contribution to beating back pain. She had no more muscle pain, cramps, numbness, or fatigue.
5 — Standing Desk and Hands-Free Phone
An occupational health and safety expert in a seminar mentioned that ergonomics aims to eliminate discomfort and fatigue and mitigate the risk of injury at work.
After the seminar, during the conversations with her friends in the fitness center, Flora heard about the benefits of standing desks and hands-free phones. She had never paid attention to these essential ergonomic devices before.
Her workplace happily paid for a standing desk and hands-free phone at work as she was a long-term and loyal employee supporting their executives. And her husband gifted them to her for home use.
Getting a standing desk and hands-free phone at work at home was the best decision for Flora. The main culprit for the formation of her back pain was sitting too long and using the phone all day at work and even at home.
These innovative solutions served as a preventative measure to keep her posture intact. She loved the progress and wanted to take her health and fitness to the next level.
6 — Supplementing with Additional Nutrients
Her compassionate instructor at the community gym mentioned the importance of micronutrients for muscle, nerve, and bone health.
Flora wanted to know more. She discussed the use of some supplements with her family doctor. The physician advised her to eat healthy food and consider supplements later.
Her instructor introduced a sports nutritionist to Flora. The nutritionist created a diet to support her muscular, neurological, and bone health. The key consideration was increasing bioavailable proteins and micronutrients such as calcium, magnesium, Vitamin D, and Vitamin K2.
Later the nutritionist also recommended supplementing with a low dose of creatine as Flora did not eat too many animal products even though she was on a keto-omnivore diet which allowed her to enter ketosis and lower her inflammation.
After handling the physical and nutritional aspects, Flora needed to address one more aspect of her health and fitness. It was the mental and emotional aspect.
7 — Hypnotherapy and Psychotherapy
Finally, Flora learned that back pain also has psychological and emotional components. She wanted to explore and take necessary cautions.
As one of her friends cured her stressful situations and mental issues with hypnotherapy, she recommended Flora see her hypnotherapist, who specialized in lowering pain in her clients.
Flora had a few hypnotherapy sessions that focussed on stress and sleep issues. When she had back pain, she couldn’t get restorative sleep. Eventually, her sleep hygiene got poorer.
But the hypnotherapy sessions helped her sleep better. In addition, Flora used to have some poor physical habits, such as crossing her legs and bending her neck when she types or reads.
The hypnotherapist, who was also a qualified psychotherapist, focused on behavioral changes training her subconscious mind. She learned to tame her overactive amygdala.
After several therapy sessions, Flora noticed that her behavior had significantly changed. She stopped crossing her legs and sitting straight or holding her head high, especially while using her standing desk. She started sleeping beautifully and responding to stress confidently.
The hypnotherapist taught her to scan her body, recognize sensations, and relax them. These mindfulness practices and behavioral changes increased her confidence, lowered her stress, and boosted her mood. Her back pain disappeared and never came back.
Conclusions and Takeaways
Pain is a signal of the body that informs us about underlying problems to make necessary changes and resolve them. Painful sensations indicate that there is something wrong with some parts of the body.
The body communicates the adverse reactions in cells, tissues, and organs, giving us pain as an unpleasant sensation. Stopping these signals with medication might lower the unpleasantness but does not solve the problem. In some cases, it can even make the situation worse.
Suppressing pain does not remove the root causes. We only numb the symptoms temporarily. So, the situation worsens as the body cannot heal when the symptoms are suppressed and root causes are neglected. It is like shutting the mouth of a crying baby who needs nurturing.
Physical and emotional stress can increase the cortisol hormone, which can cause other issues like sleep deprivation and visceral fat gain. We need to lower stress and balance hormones and neurotransmitters.
Body and mind are inseparable. The body’s discomfort directly or indirectly affects our mental health and life satisfaction. Therefore, balancing hormones and neurotransmitters is critical for our physical and psychological health.
These holistic health therapies Flora used can guide us to focus on the root causes of the discomfort and provide us with practical actions to correct them. In addition, these practices strengthen our core and improve our posture with sustainable results.
Like Flora, I also suffered from back, neck, and joint pain when experiencing chronic inflammation and stress when I was on low-fat diets with nutritional deficiencies.
Living with rheumatoid arthritis was awful, but I defeated the symptoms of arthritis by taking personal responsibility and using holistic health principles.
Apart from healing dynamics, such as listening to the body’s critical messages and taking corrective actions timely, we also need to learn about ergonomics. It is a workplace practice that can also apply to homeworkers.
The key takeaway of this story is to recognize our pain, accept it, explore options, take personal responsibility for our health, and seek timely support from loved ones, friends, colleagues, community members, and professionals.
Back pain can happen to anyone, and it is a challenging condition. But reversing it with healthy lifestyle habits and timely professional support is possible.
I shared many more inspiring stories like this, compiled in a collection titled Insightful Life Lessons from Personal Stories. I believe you might find some relevant and interesting ones from this collection.
Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.
Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.
As a new reader, please check my holistic health and well-being stories reflecting my reviews, observations, and decades of experiments optimizing my hormones and neurotransmitters. I write about health as it matters. I believe health is all about homeostasis.
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