Why is my low back pain always near the hip?
Picture this – you’re out in the woods, on a trail, soaking up the joy you feel when you’re outside. Suddenly you feel a twinge in your low back, near your hip, and you suddenly start to see dark clouds on the horizon. Whether or not your low back pain gets worse during your walk, you spend the whole time worrying about it, instead of enjoying your favorite activity.
This is a really common experience we hear about when we’re first talking to patients at Twin Cities Movement. We understand why you would worry about this. These unexplained pains can be alarming and frustrating. Many state that they feel held back by their pain, or even by the fear of it.
Read ahead to find out some possible causes of back pain near the hip, some explanations about what you used to be able to expect, some ways we’ve come up with in our office to help people with hip-related low back pain, and maybe a story or two along the way.
Understanding Hip-Related Low Back Pain
The low back and the hip are closely connected in function. Our hips are strong, allowing many of us to walk, run, jump, sit actively, and lift heavy things. Our low backs are mobile enough to allow efficient transfer of energy between the upper and the lower body, and stable enough to participate in and strengthen that transfer.
At least, this is the way our bodies used to develop over time, in response to our lives.
Our modern lives are very different, and if we don’t search actively for challenge we will not be challenged, and our bodies will respond by limiting our range of motion, experiencing anxiety and depression, and even heart disease or diabetes.
Muscle imbalances develop throughout our life, and while they are rarely the cause of any sort of pain or injury, they are often factors. Age mainly becomes an issue when it’s a matter of the number of years you’ve been limiting your movement.
Many people wonder why sitting would be bad for them, and this is a great example of why the hip and the back are so intertwined.
Our body is always getting better at the things we do the most. What’s one thing we start to do at around age 7, possibly even earlier depending on the circumstances? Chair-sitting. And the unluckiest of us continue chair-sitting as their primary resting position for the remainder of their lives.
In this case, the body gets better by shortening the hips, increasing the spinal curvature, and usually introducing a lean on one side or another. Try to track how often you catch yourself leaning in the same way on the same elbow. Hopefully you won’t think about anything else now. This even introduces side-to-side curves that can further affect your movement range.
Because the front of the hips are now shorter, compression is created in the spine, leading to low back pain.
Approaches to Low Back and Hip Pain
Traditional approaches to treating low back pain have been pills, surgeries, rehab exercises, stretches, yoga programs, gadgets, gizmos, and so on. Chiropractic, physical therapy, strength training, even pain management therapy, all have methods of helping manage pain symptoms with the low back and the hip.
Unfortunately, all of these tools and approaches focus on removing the back or hip pain. I know that your goal is to have no pain. Our goal for you is not that. That would be one of many outcomes you would have using the Movement Method, but it isn’t the goal.
Using the Movement Method, we’d first assess you in order to properly meet you where you’re at. We’d also ascertain what the root cause of your issue is. This part confuses some people, because we end up working in areas where there moght not be pain, and we even might not work directly on the area that hurts. This is probably where you’d first find out that your low back wasn’t the part of you that was causing you pain.
At the same time, we’d work with you to direct adaptation, making you stronger, more resilient, and helping you move better. This will make our pain relief efforts less necessary, because when you’re moving better, everything you do becomes therapeutic. So you’d learn stretches and exercises for your hip and your low back.
Following our plan for the duration, and consistently doing your self-care, you will undoubtedly find yourself thriving, and your hip-related low back pain would likely be a memory.
A Real Life Example of Hip-Related Low Back Pain
I’ll give you an example in a recent patient Dr. Brandon saw, named “Dan.”
Dan is a lawyer, spending “10 hours a day at his desk.” He said this is very common in his industry, and I would tend to agree. He’s also very into strength training and fitness. Movement and self-care are very important to him.
When his low back started to bother him after a group workout at his gym, he was concerned. The next day it was even worse. He had pain and stiffness in his low back, he said it was incredibly sharp, took his breath away. He worried that he might have a spinal disc injury, so he found us.
He made it into our office the next day, saying that his back pain was already much better than the day before, but he still wanted to come in, “just to make sure there was nothing wrong.”
Dr. Brandon found out Dan’s history, and took him through a series of movements designed to figure out where pain is and isn’t and what the patient can and can’t do. Through this, and Dan’s sharing of the amount of time he spends seated, Dr. Brandon concluded that Dan had very limited hip extension, which led to hip-related low back pain. This isn’t an official diagnosis, mind you, but it does direct our treatment.
Basically, because of the amount of sitting Dan had been doing, his body adapted by shortening his front hip muscles and making them weaker in the process. He was losing his hips because he wasn’t using them enough, but then when he was using them it was with heavy weights and challenging movements.
He was taking his hips through full ranges of motion but they were only prepared for part of the motion. The result of not enough movement in his hips was too much movement in his low back. The low back is able to move, but the muscles involved aren’t big. They’re stabilizers, meant to stiffen, not lift something.
During a deadlift one day, he lifted the weight, and his hips weren’t able to extend all the way. His low back hyperextended to complete the movement, and that was the last straw. Sharp pain in his back, near his hip.
Since coming to see us and identifying this trend, he submitted to his workplace for a standing desk, and has been getting stronger and moving better. If he hadn’t gotten a standing desk, he would probably be in the same place now he was then, even after seeing us for a period of care. This is because he wouldn’t have removed the primary method of injury and he would have just kept hurting himself.
We had to teach Dan that he spent too much time in one position, and he needed more variety. We showed him ways to stretch his hips and strengthen them in that sustained standing position so we would be able to adapt and get better at working that way. We talked to him about ground-living for his hips, as another way to limit the amount of time he spends in chairs.
Basically, because of the amount of sitting Dan had been doing, his body adapted by shortening his front hip muscles and making them weaker in the process. He was losing his hips because he wasn’t using them enough, but then when he was using them it was with heavy weights and challenging movements.
He was taking his hips through full ranges of motion but they were only prepared for part of the motion. The result of not enough movement in his hips was too much movement in his low back. The low back is able to move, but the muscles involved aren’t big. They’re stabilizers, meant to stiffen, not lift something.
Is it Time to Challenge Yourself to Get Rid of Your Low Back Pain or Sciatica?
Dan made a significant choice, and some big changes in his life, in order to manage the hip-related low back pain he had been experiencing. We were happy to work with him, and proud of the work he did.
Again, our human bodies are made to move. They’ve developed that way over the last couple hundred thousand years, so that is the expectation of our nervous system. But if you don’t use it, you lose it.
Don’t feel too bad if you happen to not move enough in your life, and that’s leading to some discomfort. Modernization has led to convenience, which has made many tasks quite a bit less grueling. Your semi-sedentarism is also the brain’s ancient mode of survival through conservation of energy. But the benefits of discomfort have always been in front of us, and we’re starting to notice the drawbacks to all of this convenience.
Meditation is challenging, but so beneficial for your mental health. Weightlifting is very challenging, and it almost inevitably will extend your life and make it better, if you do it consistently and sustainably. Trying to manage your anger so you can be a better parent is so tough, but you, and your kids, and thus their kids, will all benefit from that effort.
If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you. If you have hip-related low back pain, and it’s been bothering you for a long time, maybe it’s time to make a change.
Use the link below to get our FREE guide to getting rid of your low back pain .That’s a great place to start.