The Cause of Lower Back Pain
Gravity & Postural Distortion

In order to get a handle on the underlying cause of lower back pain, it’s necessary to look at THE BIG PICTURE of the body. To do that I’d like to use an analogy…

Imagine you’re buying an old house, say a beautiful old farmhouse in Vermont. It’s a bit run down but that’s okay; you’re looking for a fixer-upper. When you go upstairs to the second floor you notice that the floor is uneven. In fact, it’s sagging like an old mattress throughout the entire second floor.

To address this problem, you’re probably not going to spend a lot of time inspecting the floor itself for the cause of the sagging. The floor may need to be repaired but that’s not going to give you much information about the cause of the problem. Of course not. In order to understand the cause of the problem you’ve got to go down into the basement to look at the support beams. You’ve got to see what’s going on with the foundation, with overall structure of the house.

At very least, you’ll need to prop up those beams so the sagging floor doesn’t get worse. But if you want the floor to be level, you’re going to have to improve the overall structure of the house. You’re going to have to jack the house up so that its weight is evenly distributed across the foundation. In a sense, you’re going to have to get the whole house into better alignment.

The body, of course, is not exactly like a house. But addressing the cause of lower back pain is not so unlike dealing with that sagging floor. You have to look at the big picture.

When a client comes into my office and points to a spot on their back where they have pain, it makes no sense for me to only evaluate that particular spot. It’s likely the muscles there are tight or fatigued or strained and will need to be treated. But I need to look at the person’s overall structure if I’m going to understand what has caused the muscles to start hurting in the first place.

For example, I need to ask: Is my client’s body leaning off the center line of gravity? If so, then I’ve got a strong clue as to why those back muscles are in pain.

Gravity is a powerful force and if your back muscles are having to contract in order to hold you up then those muscles are being forced to oppose gravity.

To illustrate the point, put your elbow on the table in front of you with your forearm pointed straight up to the ceiling. Now imagine you’ve got a bowling ball resting in your palm.

If your forearm is completely straight up and down, the weight of the bowling ball will be supported by the bones of your forearm. Theoretically, you could hold that bowling ball there indefinitely.

But if you shifted off that center line, even a tiny bit, then the muscles of your arm would have to engage in order to hold up the bowling ball. Even the strongest human in the world wouldn’t be able to hold that ball there for long. Well, this is precisely what can happen with your body. If your alignment is off such that your head is not centered over your shoulders over your hips over you feet, then the core muscles of your body must perpetually contract in order to hold your body up!

This is called structural imbalance, also known as postural distortion. In order to comprehend the cause of lower back pain, it’s essential to understand the power and prevalence of structural imbalance.

Whether the pain in your lower back is the kind that has slowly nagged and worsened over time, or the kind that seemed to appear suddenly full blown out of nowhere, the underlying problem, a vast majority of the time, is muscular compensation caused by structural imbalance.

In many instances, herein lies the crux of the cause of lower back pain. The numerous potential problems that can result as a consequence of structural imbalance and muscular compensation include: Sciatica, herniated disc, trigger points, nerve compression or entrapment, functional scoliosis, and various types of muscular spasm and strain. Also, such imbalance can make the body more susceptible to injury because of the instability it creates.

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