the CRAIG VAN cast
Hey, I’m Craig. I've dedicated more than a decade to understanding the human spine. Now I’m sharing what I’ve learnt. Get started with my SPINE STRENGTH project - Part 1 is free. Subscribe and you’ll receive my work as I release it.
the CRAIG VAN cast
55 | The truth about fixing back pain
Are you struggling with persistent back pain, despite trying various treatments? Do fears of worsening your condition hold you back from activities you once enjoyed? If you're seeking a breakthrough in managing your back pain, this episode is a must-watch/listen.
Join us as we explore a groundbreaking dual strategy that delves into the root causes of back pain and the fundamentals of back strength. Drawing from my personal journey as a mover and exercise clinician, and backed by the comprehensive research of Professor Stuart McGill, we unlock the potential of transforming back pain into back strength.
This episode is more than just a discussion on back pain treatment; it's a journey towards self-improvement and lasting wellness. By the end, you'll be equipped with the knowledge and tools to take control of your back health and experience a newfound confidence in your body's strength and resilience.
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Most people with back pain never get to the root of the problem and, as a result, they never fully or successfully overcome it. This could be you if you can't escape wondering whether the therapy or the work you're doing is even working. This could be you if you're not getting any closer to restoring or reintroducing the activities which back pain took away from you. This could be you if you are terrified of one wrong move, one bad posture, and that it's going to put you right back where you started. This could be you if you feel like nothing you are doing is building your confidence back to where it was before you had back pain. These are some of the reasons why we need a deeper understanding of the root causes of back pain and why we also need a deeper understanding of the root causes of back strength. I'm going to share the very effective and very practical dual strategy that I've used to overcome my own back pain very successfully, a strategy which I have also used to help hundreds of other people successfully and effectively overcome their back pain too. And from a first principles perspective and from experience and research, this is, hands down, the most reliable way for you to guarantee success in overcoming your back pain. In short, we need to prioritize finding, understanding and addressing the root causes of our back pain Instead of just chasing quick fixes and symptomatic relief. Let's zoom out for a moment. Our universe is governed by cause and effect. I've said this many times All effects are caused by conditions that came before the appropriate and relevant conditions. Now, the thing about universal laws of nature perhaps the quality which qualifies a law to be a universal law of nature is that there are no exceptions. It is an unbreakable law that governs activities in the universe as we know it. So we have to work with cause and effect If we want to change the effects we are experiencing or the results, or we want to strive towards results that are other than what we are experiencing. And we have to work within the bounds of cause and effect. We have to understand the forces which will produce the results we seek. Now, of all the forces in the universe, none comes close to shaping our experience as humans, as individuals, as our own actions, as our own choices, as our own habits and behaviors. It's our personal action which is the primary shaping force in our experience, and, for this reason, this is where we will focus all of our attention. This is why this strategy or this approach, prioritizes our individual action as the means to change our experience as the primary cause producing our effects, and so, by using our own actions and understanding of cause and effect, we can change the effects of our. We will be able to redesign our experience and the dual strategy that we must use the two wings of the one bird, the two sides of the same coin. One is to remove or reduce causes which are creating unwanted effects, harmful causes and effects. The other wing is adopting or improving causes which are producing wanted effects the beneficial, the healing causes and effects.
Speaker 1:Now we're gonna take a look at each of these the beneficial or wanted causes and effects, and the harmful or unwanted causes and effects. First, we're looking at the beneficial or wanted causes and effects. For some reason, this is much easier. This is much obvious for most people. We realize that for something to change, we need to do something. We need to do something about it, because that's how we're gonna change it. It's through our action, adopting some new actions which are missing and will cause the results we want, and this is true.
Speaker 1:Two of the major things we're gonna change regarding back pain are the structural weakness that we've adopted or inherited from sitting excessively over the course of our whole lifetime. And sure we need to perform some sort of movement practice, some exercise program, to load the structures in the way they've been missing, load the structures appropriately and then allow them to recover, to grow, to strengthen. This is almost always a process of adopting the specific, intelligent exercises we need to develop the strength and to cause the growth in the structures which have become so weak. The same is true for our neurological development, our coordination, the skill and the complete lack of awareness and control that we've also inherited from sitting, which leads to the poor movement patterns that we experience or that we exhibit in our daily life, which lead to the excessive breakdown which causes back pain. And in order to address this coordination, we need to adopt also movement practices which give us the opportunity to practice, to refine, to improve certain movement patterns, skills, coordination, to develop the awareness. And this comes from introducing things we have been missing specific practices or exercises which give us the chance to develop in ways we are missing development.
Speaker 1:And so I see a lot of people engaging this. They know that when they have a problem, they go seek the application of something which is missing, whether it's physical therapy, apply to them. This would be seen or interpreted by most people as taking an action to produce a result to produce a beneficial result, or if it's taking medication, this might also be perceived as taking an action to feel better, to improve our experience. We're going to have a surgery, much the same, we're going to make a physical change that will improve the situation beyond where it is now. This sounds like taking action or producing causes to get us towards the effect improved effects from where we are. These are some more true. Not nearly as sustainable or effective is a well-defined or a well-designed movement practice, however, they would probably fall under this category.
Speaker 1:But what I see most people really struggle with is the other wing of this bird, the other side of this coin, and this is reducing or removing unwanted causes which are producing unwanted effects. Often they are wanted causes which produce unwanted effects. Let me explain Now what I believe is the reason. This side of the strategy is much more difficult and missing from most people's approaches in their therapeutic plan or recovery plan, and this is because our problem, the condition or the issue we are facing, and if we break things down for a moment, we've got causes producing unwanted effects and we've got causes producing wanted effects, and there's continuously this balance, this harmony that needs to be maintained. We can't possibly only have one side of the spectrum. Life just doesn't work like that. We're constantly exposed to stresses and placing demands on our body and dealing with different threats and challenging conditions. But the balance of the healing versus the harmful is something we would like to achieve and definitely push it a little bit, push ourselves across the spectrum a bit more towards the beneficial side, the wanted side.
Speaker 1:And so, even on a microscopic level, what a lot of us are, how our body is working, is this balance of breakdown and repair. Our body, by being a dynamic, alive system, is never static. Things are, cells are maturing, they're aging, they're dying, they've been replaced, structures are being loaded, being strengthened, and when they are loaded and strengthened, this is also a process of applying loads, stressing the structures, causing microscopic damage, and then this leads to the growth and repair which leads to strengthening. And so when we have an injury, when we have pain or we have complete breakdown, this is the consequence of an imbalance over time, an accumulative imbalance, where the breakdown has far exceeded the repair and has led to a chronic condition of either information, pain or deterioration and then structural breakdown, and this in turn implies that there is an excess of some force at play and excessive exposure to some stressor.
Speaker 1:And then, if we consider what are the kinds of things that we are likely to expose ourselves to excessively, that we are likely to Be addicted to, or these are the habits that are difficult to let go of, these are the behaviors which are convenient, easy, pleasant, that we are attached to and that we have become addicted to. These are often the behaviors which need to be addressed for us to reduce Some of the excessive causes, the causes creating unwanted effects. And because these behaviors are so convenient, are so pleasant, are so easy, whatever the reason is, that leads us to Simply engage in an, even over long periods of time, it's the same reason that we then find it extremely difficult to let go of them, to reduce them, to change them, to improve them, because these habits have become deeply ingrained, these conveniences have become deeply ingrained or familiar, and so changing them becomes really difficult. And it's quite Fascinating. I don't know if this is also the exact reason that I see most people pursue their recovery or their therapy through the lens of doing something to make a change instead of abstaining from something to make a change, and it's almost to the point that most people have blinkers on and even when I make this clear, there is a certain denial, and people simply just do whatever they need to avoid addressing these causes which they are so attached to.
Speaker 1:And in this specific scenario, when it comes to back pain, the unwanted cause is setting, and this is a tricky, difficult beast to address. First of all, I think it's impossible to completely escape it. You would have to not drive in cars anymore, you would have to not use public transport planes, you would have to never use a bicycle, sit in a meeting again, sit for meals, sit on the toilet. Sitting is inescapable, so it provides a, a challenge which demands us to be intelligent about it. So then, how do we Improve our sitting? How do we reduce our sitting so that we're not sitting unnecessarily, excessively? How do we improve the quality of our sitting so that, when we are sitting, it's less stressful? So this is the kind of approach we would have to deal with when it comes to sitting, but asking people to change their sitting habits is a huge ask.
Speaker 1:You are someone who's been sitting, lazily, slouched, without awareness, unintelligently, for 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, say now, let's do this differently. Let's be active, let's be aware, let's do it as little as possible, let's bring awareness to this activity which, by definition, has allowed us to become completely unaware of our body While we use it. That's the point of it. We can forget about our body, we can use no effort or awareness to maintain a somewhat useful posture, and that's what sitting gives us. And so to change this, especially when it's around us all the time, the kind of diligence and motivation, discipline that it requires, it's a big ask now, what is important about this dual strategy? Firstly, I have learned over and over again Trying to solve the problem through one of these lenses, through one of these approaches, is not enough.
Speaker 1:You can do your therapy till the cows come home, but if you don't address or reduce the insult itself, if you don't remove the poison Causing the problem in the first place or reduce it to a manageable degree, you can do your exercises and it probably won't change. You can go have your surgery and you might feel better temporarily, but your problem will come back. And if we consider, think about it for a moment when we exercise and we are doing some of the good work to strengthen and develop the skill stress it's. Exercise itself is of stress, stress which we also need to recover from. And so even if we're doing the best exercises in the world and we're doing them with the best technique and we've really got that part of the strategy down, if we sit excessively, we're a proper knowledge worker, desk-bound warrior, and we're at the desk sitting unintelligently for 12, 14, 16 hours a day. Our back also needs to recover from that stress, because it has also become a stressor. And so then these two insults can actually compound one another. Our back never gets a break, and so one of these approaches is just not enough.
Speaker 1:Second major point these are two similar but different approaches. They give us two lenses to approach the problem through. We can use this to curiously analyze how we are trying to solve this problem and help us to identify different opportunities, because we need to be approaching it through both angles, and this gives us a framework to think about the problem. What I've seen emerge, when we do fully optimize both of these approaches both reducing the harmful and increasing the helpful there is a kind of synergy that emerges that produces miraculous results, a kind of synergy that I don't see applied often enough, that I don't see realized often enough. And so, by taking full responsibility for all of our causes, all of our behaviors, by taking full responsibility for the results we are experiencing, we begin to access a different kind of power. And in this situation it's nicely described as a synergy between these two different approaches, which are not necessarily that different, just behaviors with slightly different directions, but there is a synergy that takes us to a whole new level of possibility where our recovery becomes extremely reliable and our success becomes guaranteed. And it's because we have a much fuller, more complete understanding of the forces at play and we have complementary forces working for our benefit, and we understand that we have dealt with the forces which were causing our problems in the first place.
Speaker 1:In summary, we cannot forget the influence or the role that caused an effect place. We have to appreciate that our current effect, our current experience, is the result of consequences that came before. We also need to acknowledge that it is our behavior that is the primary force shape in our experience, and that if we want to change things, we have to identify our behaviors which have brought us to this unwanted experience, and we need to understand which behaviors we need to adopt that will take us to the experience we are seeking. By applying it. In this way, we have this dual strategy where we are reducing the harmful and increasing the healthful, and we find ourselves with a dual strategy that, yes, it does ask us to comprehensively approach the problem we are navigating, but it gives us a new found power or opportunity where we can overcome, being surmountable, things which just felt impossible to master before. It also gives us a much deeper appreciation of what is happening and why these things are happening.
Speaker 1:By using applying this framework, your understanding of your back pain and injury will be taken to a whole new level. Mine has. This gives me such a clear and confident approach to dealing with my back pain, to staying free of back pain. I'm constantly aware of the causes which would take me back to back pain. I'm constantly keeping the causes that strengthen me away from back pain as a part of my program and by using both of these continuously, I feel completely immune to back pain as most people commonly experience it.
Speaker 1:Despite the fact that I work at a desk job in tech and I do have to navigate the sedentary life, the knowledge workers life, I feel like I am my back ears bulletproof, and this has been for years and years. And since I've adopted this strategy, as long as I am constantly keeping both of these sides of the coin in check, I know I'm safe, and the same is true for many people that I've shared this with. So use this framework, this dual strategy, to self reflect, to understand how your behaviors are shaping your experience of back pain, and also use it to help you design a way out of it. This is what the Kanedi Keystone protocol is based on, and this is, these are the two forces. I can't think of a better way to. I haven't been able to find a better way to approach these problems, and until next time, I wish you wellness.