Low back pain

If you’ve had low back pain for any length of time, someone has probably told you to rest, to stretch, to strengthen your core, to lose weight, or to live with it. The pain came back anyway.

Most low back pain doesn’t go away on its own because the thing that caused it — how the body moves under load — hasn’t changed.

What we see in low back pain

Low back pain almost always comes from a pattern, not an injury. The back works too hard because something else has stopped working: the hips, the glutes, the breath, the brace.

The most common pattern we see is a body that’s overusing the spine and underusing the hips. The glutes and hamstrings — the muscles built for hinging, lifting, and load-bearing — go quiet, and the small muscles around the spine try to make up the difference. They can’t. Over time the spine takes more load than it was designed for, the tissues get irritated, and the nervous system turns up the volume on the pain signal.

That’s why “fixing the back” by treating the back rarely works for long. The back isn’t the problem. It’s the part that’s complaining about the problem.

How we evaluate low back pain

Every patient at Move Better starts with a Movement Paradigm Evaluation. We watch how you breathe, how you stabilize, and how you hinge — three foundational patterns that show up in nearly every low back pain case.

In low back pain we usually find one or more of these:

• Breath — shallow chest breathing instead of diaphragmatic breathing. The back muscles end up doing what the diaphragm should be doing, and they stay tight.
• Brace — midline stability that depends on stiffening the spine rather than pressurizing through breath. The result is excessive spinal load on every step, every lift, every cough.
• Hinge — bending from the back instead of the hips. Efficient movement comes from the glutes and hamstrings; when they’re not doing their share, the spine pays.

Read more about the Movement Paradigm →

If you want to see how each pattern is scored, the full reference is on the Method page.

How we treat low back pain

What treatment actually looks like depends on what we find in the evaluation, but it’s almost always a combination of:

• Movement retraining — building the breath, brace, and hinge patterns that are missing, so the back stops compensating.
• Soft tissue work — releasing the tissues that have been holding the compensation.
• Spinal manipulative therapy — chiropractic adjusting where it helps the nervous system reset, not as a stand-alone fix.
• Targeted strengthening — usually glutes, hamstrings, and the bracing system, so the new patterns hold.

Some patients need more than what’s offered in our clinic. We work with a multidisciplinary network — acupuncturists, massage therapists, MDs, imaging centers — and refer out when that’s the right call.

Why it’s not too late

Most of the people we see for low back pain have had it for years. Movement patterns are habits, and habits can be rebuilt at any age — they just need consistent input. What we don’t do is hand you a generic exercise sheet and send you home; the retraining is specific to the patterns we find in your evaluation, and you’ll practice them with us until they feel automatic.

If you’re carrying a back that’s hurt for a long time, you haven’t missed your window.