Dangers of Playing Chair

Why is back pain so pervasive? Could it be our ratio of time spent in chairs to on dance floors.

As a massage therapist, I see plenty of people who are enduring low back pain. Some estimates indicate as many as 80 % of the population has experienced low back pain at one time or another. I don’t want to read to much into this as the term low back pain is vague. Low back pain could mean anything from life debilitating chronic pain to feeling a bit sore. That said I am never surprised when someone says their back is sore. I have pulled my back out twice and have an all too real of an understanding of how much that pain sucks. And I do mean sucks. I could hardly move without pain. All my energy was reallocated to making sure my movements caused the least amount of pain of possible.

So why are we so susceptible to low back pain. Vertebrates have existed for over 500 million years according to the fossil record. Giving how important spines are to us vertebrates that should have giving evolution more than enough time to craft a truly robust spine. Of course, back injuries would still occur. Nothing is perfect, and the world is infested with danger. But shouldn't the estimated number of people who experienced back pain be closer to 8% than 80 %?

So why is back pain so chronic. We each inherited a spine that been tested by the harshest of testers, natural selection. For right or wrong, spinal inefficiencies and weaknesses have been genetically widdled away for at least half of billion years. Of course, for most of us, dai;y routine has changed dramatically in the last few hundred years. How many generations of people been confined to chairs? How many of us spent endless hours “playing chair” as a child? How many of us learned to dissociated from our lower back and hips while we were still in grade school? At the stage of life where we are supposed to be perpetually imprinting new neuromuscular pathway, as to have many movement options as adults, we are taught to ignore our natural impulses and stay seated. The more time we bind our hips to seats the easier it is to lose connection to that general region of the body. Our sensory nerves have little incentive to stay attuned to our now stationary hips. We actively repress our motor neurons from firing into this tissue so we can remain seated The more we hold ourselves in these fixed positions the more clumsily we become with our movement. Our dance through life loses sensation and intent as we move in more biomechanically awkward ways. We open ourselves up to injuries, as we become detatched to our bodies.

How did it become normalized to ignore such a crucial facet of our body’s? The part of my brain where I stash conspiracies entertains the idea that there is active repression which shames us into not moving our hips as we evolved to. From Elvis gyrating his hips to Miley Cyrus twerking there always the voice of cultural disapproval shouting shame. Is it coincident In an age when we are sitting on our glutes more and more the kids are doing a dance that fires and wires neuromuscular connections in our glutes? Some will and have criticized these dances for their seemingly sexual nature as if that wasn’t an indication of their intrinsic health benefits. Is there a version of physical therapy that predates people working out their injuries through dance? Yet simple actions that fortify our neuromuscular pathways are slandered and demonized while we collectively experience so much unnecessary pain.

Anthony Bruni