There's a lot you can do to ease your pain and speed your healing. An exercise program designed to stretch and strengthen your back and core muscles can help you heal from a bout of acute back pain and help prevent a repeat episode.
To promote harmony among muscles, bones, and joints, you need to stretch the muscles. If you have recurring (chronic) low back pain, you can do this when the pain strikes.
Stop normal physical activity for only the first few days. This helps calm your symptoms and reduce swelling (inflammation) in the area of the pain. Apply heat or ice to the painful area. Use ice for the first 48 to 72 hours, and then use heat.
Do wait three days to a week after the injury, depending on severity and symptoms, to begin stretching. Using pain as a guide; if you feel sharp pain in the injured area, it means it is too early to start stretching. Do wait until the inflammation mostly goes away before the first stretch.
The gentle, rhythmic strokes used in Swedish massage help to increase the flow of oxygen-rich blood to affected areas, which can reduce inflammation and promote healing.
Heat or ice therapy can be an effective treatment option for back pain. Cold treatment can reduce inflammation of the muscles, while heat treatment can promote the healing and relaxation of damaged muscles. It is important for people to remember to never use extreme temperatures on bare skin.
Acute inflammation, on the other hand, is a normal immune response. In fact, this type of inflammation actually is beneficial to your health and can support processes such as muscle growth.
Pulled back muscles can become tense and stiff after the injury. Gentle stretching can relax the injured muscles, promote healing and help prevent muscle spasms.
Severe cases may require medical care but for many patients, gentle exercises that target the affected area can help relieve minor nerve pain. These stretches lessen the pressure placed on the nerve and loosen the surrounding muscles. Plan to make these exercises part of your daily routine, two or three times per day.
Going on walks: Initial research suggests that going on a walk or brisk walking (Nordic walking) can help relieve back pain if done regularly – for instance, every two days for 30 to 60 minutes.
In general, cold temperatures lower inflammation and decrease swelling. Heat can assist with relaxing your muscles. Depending on your low back pain symptoms, you may try cold or hot therapy for 20 minutes at a time, several times a day, until back pain lessens.
"Not surprisingly, the pressure is lowest when you're lying down." But there is more pressure on the discs when you're sitting than when you're standing. "In fact, if I come into the exam room and a patient is standing, rather than sitting, my suspicion that the person has a disc herniation goes up a lot," he says.
Stretching Relieves Inflammation: Here's How
Stretching helps to: activate the parasympathetic nervous system to lower stress hormones like cortisol that can increase inflammation. enhance posture to support better breathing, improving oxygen flow and reducing inflammation.
Signs of pulled back muscle are that the pain is usually dull and aching. You'll find it feels like it is in the back and often gets work if you don't rest that area. With a slipped disc, the pain is much sharper. It can even feel like it's radiating through the back, into the shoulders or surrounding areas.
Rest, ice, compression and elevation can help relieve pain and inflammation during the first few days of your recovery. After the first few days, you can start moving it again. Crutches. If your injury is in your lower body, you might need to use crutches to keep weight off the muscle when you walk.
However, exercises like yoga, swimming, and resistance training can be great resources to reduce inflammation in the body. Recent studies from Brain, Behavior, and Immunity have found that just one 20-minute exercise session helps boost the immune system, having an anti-inflammatory response on cells.
The most frequently used inflammatory markers include acute-phase proteins, essentially CRP, serum amyloid A, fibrinogen and procalcitonin, and cytokines, predominantly TNFα, interleukins 1β, 6, 8, 10 and 12 and their receptors and IFNγ. Some cytokines appear to be disease-specific.
A back specialist can typically diagnose a mild strain or sprain by reviewing your symptoms and learning how your injury occurred. Depending on the severity of the pulled back muscle, they may recommend additional treatments, such as: Prescription medications for pain or inflammation. Muscle relaxant drugs.
“Heat actually has the opposite effect of ice,” Dr. Behr says. “It causes small blood vessels to open which can stimulate inflammation rather than relieve it.” Heat treatments should be used for chronic conditions to help relax and loosen tissues and stimulate blood flow to the area.