Back pain in your 30’s? You can fix it.
Of all the terrible things I see on social media, let me tell you my least favorite (aside from current events): memes about turning thirty and immediately being incapable of moving without low back pain.
It drives me insane. There are a few reasons why and I want to get into them one by one.
It is factually incorrect: Nothing magical happened at the start of your thirty first trip around the sun to impact your lower back. You went to bed twenty nine years old and woke up thirty years old the same way that you go to bed on Monday and wake up on Tuesday. In addition, treating thirty as if it is the beginning of your “elderly” years is not based in reality. Even limited internet research could tell you that a professional athlete is still considered in their prime at age thirty. If a professional football, baseball, or basketball player is still at the peak of their powers, what happened to everyone else?
It does not take lifestyle into account: Age is just a number. Lifestyle is what can truly determine how we feel. You’ll hear a lot of fitness professionals talk about posture and while that plays a role, it’s not everything when it comes to back pain. More of the issues are caused by prolonged periods of sitting. When we sit, especially for work or even to watch television, we’re not sitting upright. We’re either hunched over or slumped back. This does two things to cause pain in the low back. First, we spend a long time completely relaxing the glutes. Our glutes are the biggest muscle in our body. When we don’t use them, we often end up recruiting low back muscles for tasks that are above their pay grade. Second, we end up with shoulders slumped over, tightening in front and weakening in back. The combination of these two things requires more out of the smaller muscles around our spine than what they are built to do.
It removes the empowerment to fix the problem: If your back is already causing problems at thirty, I want you to consider playing the tape forward a bit. Do you think it’s going to improve at forty? Fifty? Sixty? You can safely consider back pain at thirty to be like a warning light on your car. If it is left ignored or simply chalked up to your age you are risking far, far worse problems down the road. I understand the urge to see things online and view them as evidence that something is normal. This is a case where that is simply not true. The good news is that just because you have pain now does not mean you’re doomed to have pain forever.
What can you do? It comes back to lifestyle. Spend more time walking. Get into a gym and lift weights. If you don’t know how to approach the gym, hire a trainer (hi), buy a program, find good online sources, or even bring a trusted friend with experience. You’ll be shocked how much progress you can make in just a month of dedicated consistency to changing your lifestyle. As someone who had back pain in my late twenties and does not any more, I feel like I’m a good source on this subject. You can do this. Don’t let your age tell you anything different.
