Hi, I’m Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy. Are you a runner that isn’t really able to run consistently? Certainly not as consistently as you’d like. You enjoy all the health benefits of running and you know that you need to do things to keep yourself healthy, but there’s always that nagging back pain after you get done running, which makes running a little bit less enjoyable than you’d like.
If that is you, this video is perfect for you. I’m gonna go over and explain two of the most common reasons why low back pain occurs after you get, after you’re running. Then I’m gonna give you seven tips on how to stop that from happening because who doesn’t love to run and I want everybody to run that likes to run. So let’s get started.
The first most common reason that I see is the impact of running. What I mean by that is when your foot hits the ground, the ground hits you back essentially, and that force has to be absorbed by something. Ideally that shock when your heel hits the ground, that should be absorbed by your muscles. They create a sort of a bounce effect. They should absorb the impact and then help you spring back up just like a springboard would.
For many of us, since we don’t train that and some other things have gone on. We just sort of hit the ground like lead bricks, dun, dun, dun, and all of that force gets translated up. Some people end up with fractures, some people end up with knee problems, some people hip problems, and some people with lower back problems. It just sort of depends on where your body translates all of that force from hitting the ground.
The second most common reason is a lack of core strength and or core endurance. I have met many, many people who can do all these amazing ab exercises, but they can do 10 of them and then they become fatigued. Or I’ve seen people who can do long durations of ab exercises, but they can’t use a whole lot of weight, they might be able to tolerate body weight.
When you run, you really need a specific type of strength to tolerate all of that running, because as you’re running your abdominal muscles and your hip muscles really are helping you propel yourself forward. They’re the powerhouse, where everything starts. You have to have this balance of strength and endurance in those muscle groups to make sure that your back is fully supported.
If your abdominal muscles or your hip muscles start to fade out on you for whatever reason, then your back really has to do a whole lot of work to keep you upright. Otherwise you start to fall forward and actually that ends up putting more stress on everything.
Those are the two big things. When you’re an intermittent runner, sometimes these are things that aren’t being trained or maybe they weren’t as strong as the last time you ran for a variety of reasons.
Now let’s talk about the tips on how to prevent that back pain.
My first tip, like it always is, is icing. Okay? Icing is great. If it truly is that you just haven’t run in a while and you’re just achy and sore, which could just happen, right?
People who work out every day can still be sore, could be absolutely nothing, to test that theory, you can ice.
If you just grab a bag of ice, or if you have them in the freezer, you can grab a bag of frozen peas, frozen corn, they bend really well and they don’t hurt so much when you lean against them. Then you’d simply find either a chair to sit in and you just put that ice pack where it’s uncomfortable, or you could even lay on your stomach and put that on your lower back. Just 10 minutes. You don’t have to be there forever. You just wanna have that for 10 minutes.
The next thing that you can try is looking at your shoes. Most running shoes are designed to only last 500 miles, and what that means is the manufacturer has created a cushion that’s going to absorb the impact for approximately 500 miles.
If you’ve owned the same tennis shoes for 10 years, you’ve probably fully worn out all the shock absorption in that. Like I said in the previous section, being able to absorb that impact is key to making sure that you don’t end up with all sorts of things, but in this case, specifically low back pain.
You can make things last longer if you buy alternating shoes. If you are gonna start putting miles, you could buy two pairs of shoes so that you, you know, every other day and you let those shoes rest. If you’re wearing them every day, they tend to wear down faster. But the moral is if you’ve owned them for a long time or you have any questions about it, maybe transfer those to your everyday walking shoes and purchase some new running shoes, just to make sure that that cushion is really there.
Things like Asics and Brooks and all those really nice shoes. The other thing that’s in that cushion is all of the arch support. If you’re somebody that also needs arch support. After a while, if you’ve owned those shoes for a really long time, that arch support gets broken down. In addition to the shock absorption that gets kind of worn down over time, all of the art support that you paid for initially with that shoe sort of gets degraded. Especially if you’re putting large amounts of miles on your shoes.
All right, now we’re onto number three. Check out the surface that you’re running on. There are positives and negatives to these surfaces, right? So you can run on concrete, you can run on trails or like grassy areas and you can run on a treadmill.
Those are kind of the really big popular things, right?
So cement is nice and smooth, you don’t have to worry about uneven surfaces for the most part. Realize we live in Houston, potholes and things are real, but for the most part it’s a smooth surface. You’re not worried about not seeing something coming up, but it is not forgiving. You hit that ground and it hits you right back. There’s no give in that ground at all. If you’re somebody that is dealing with low back pain, that might be something to look at, especially if you’re running in old shoes.
The next one is gravel. So you can run on the grass by cement. You can run on a gravel trail and that is great. It does give you a little bit more of the shock absorption that a lot of people are looking for, but then you have to deal with unseen holes. You have to deal with rocks and pebbles and sometimes roots from trees and that can make an unstable surface and having to adjust very quickly can also sometimes cause low back pain.
There are positives and negatives. You just have to be aware of what you’re running on and make sure that you’re buying the appropriate shoes for those two suggestions right there.
For a cement road, I would suggest something that you make sure you have cushioning in your shoe.
And for the terrain I would make sure that you are actually buying trail running shoes because they have a lot of extra grip and it helps you keep your traction better and helps with that stability while you’re running.
The last one is the treadmill. Now the treadmill, especially for low back pain, it is normally the suggestion for running and the reason is it’s smooth and it helps you absorb the impact, because it’s not normally a hard stop. It normally has a little bit of a give, which can help, especially if shock absorption is your problem.
The only caveat to that, that can be negative, is that it really can mess with your stride length. Depending on how long your legs or how long you stretch out during your stride while you’re running. If you’re running on a treadmill, people tend to shorten that just for lots of reasons, but they do tend to shorten it. The other thing you have to worry about is not catching your foot on the side where the tread hits the machine part because you’ll send yourself backwards.
All of them have positives and negatives. It really depends on your lifestyle because a lot of people can’t stand around on a treadmill because you’re not going anywhere or you’re just staring at a monitor or staring at nothing, but it does have a benefit.
I just wanted to go over those. If you’re having low back pain, kind of weigh those and see if you could try one, see if one works better for you and then, and then go from there.
Now let’s talk about stretching. This’ll be my fourth suggestion stretching. If you are having low back pain and you’re not stretching that would be a very beginning thing to do is to try to stretch before and after your run.
As I talked about before, the impact of running compresses your bones together and makes it very tight. If you’re already a stiff person and your muscles are pulling those bones really close together, then there already isn’t any room for shock absorption because they’re already right on top of each other.
By lengthening your muscles and relaxing those ligaments and helping to make the joints move better, you can loosen up your hips, you can loosen up your low back, and that right there can be a pain relief just by having more space to move around because your muscles are a little bit longer.
If you have not already started that habit, I would start that habit immediately stretching before to get you warmed up for the activity and then stretching after to help you cool down.
So strength training would be number five.
So there is a certain amount of strength that you need to be able to run. As I was talking about in the prior section, your hips and your stomach muscles need to be able to be strong for the whole time you’re gonna run.
You might be great for the first half mile or so, but then by the time you’re hitting that third mile, you’re noticing that your low back starts to hurt. Well that tells you that you might initially be strong, but that endurance of those muscles, something is going wrong.
By training your muscles the way that you want them to work during your run, you’ll be helping to save your back because you’re gonna be protecting it by giving other things a way of helping it.
That strength training and, honestly, full body strength training because anybody who’s run knows your shoulders help you with momentum. Your stomach muscles are helping you, your upper back muscles are helping you, your hips, your ankles, it’s a full body workout when you run.
When you’re adding your strength training, you wanna take that into consideration that you’re training to be able to run. So you don’t necessarily have to be lifting the heaviest weights, but you do need to be lifting some amount of weight because at some point you’re trying to propel all of your body weight on one leg. You need to be able to do that for however many miles you’re running. Okay, so strength training, it’s very important
Then 6 plyometrics. Plyometrics is a fancy weight of saying practicing jumping. It is your way of taking time out to specifically train how you explode up and then how you come back to the earth and how your body absorbs all that impact.
You get to practice how you’re gonna land and, and how to make your muscles absorb all that impact versus your bones. That is key. There’s lots of ways that you can practice plyometrics. You can be barely leaving the earth or you could be jumping on boxes. There’s a wide range so you don’t have to feel like that one size fits all.
There are several things that you can be doing. The whole point would just be finding a way to practice jumping and then landing smoothly and quietly. If you’re landing well, you barely hear your feet hit the floor. If you’re landing poorly, you hear that big budd, it makes it sound like horses are coming through the runway, right? The quieter you land, it means the more shock absorption your muscles are helping you with.
My final tip is let’s say you’ve tried all of these things or a variety of these things and you’re still having low back pain or maybe all these suggestions are so overwhelming you don’t even know where to start with stretching. You don’t understand anything about strength training and you’re just overwhelmed by all these thoughts.
The easiest and the fastest way to make sure that your lower back does not hurt when you’re running is to talk to a physical therapist that specializes in helping runners because that’s what we do all day.
We help people figure out what exactly is going wrong and what’s causing your problem. Come up with that root cause so you don’t have to scour the ends of the earth trying to find the exact right video that explains what you think right now might be the problem.
You try that exercise for a while, you get somewhat good results, but not great results. You’re still looking on the internet trying to figure out, is this really my problem or is it something else? Do I need to wait longer? That is a lot of guesswork. It takes a long time and if you really like running, that’s a whole lot of time not running.
If you wanna take the guesswork out and just spend one hour with somebody to figure out exactly the root cause of why you have lower back pain when you’re running, then call me because this is what I do.
In one hour, I’m gonna see how strong you are, how flexible you are. I’m gonna watch you do some functional movements. I’m gonna watch you run and then I’m gonna figure out exactly what’s going on, create a specialized program for you to get you back to exactly what you’re trying to do, so specifically what your goal is.
You won’t have to worry about any of that guesswork and you won’t have to have any more anxiety or deal with the overwhelm of all the information that you’re trying to process and figure out about your own body, which is very, very difficult to do.
If that is the type of service that you’re looking for, that’s great. I would be honored to help you get back to running the way that you want to. I will leave a link below with a button that says ask about cost and availability. You’ll fill out a quick form and then my office will get back to you and help you set up that session.
Now, it is not uncommon. You’ve probably sifted through thousands of videos and you’re trying to figure out what’s best for you. If you’re skeptical, but this kind of sounds like what you’re looking for, then let’s set up a phone call. You just click the link below that says, talk to a PT and we’ll send you to a form, my office will call you back and we’ll schedule it.
It’s a 20 minute conversation. It’s you and me talking about your specific goals, what your problem is and where you wanna be at the end. We’ll be able to sift out whether or not I am a good fit for you and then we’ll schedule accordingly, however that needs to work.
Whether I need to suggest you go someplace else or we set up a meeting time.
I hope that this information is helpful. If it is, if you liked it please hit like, it helps other people see it. If you know somebody specifically that would benefit from this information, feel free to share it with them. Let’s get everybody running. Until I get to see or talk to you next time, I hope you’re having a great day. Bye.
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