I have found that most chronic back pain first occurs as either an acute episode or quite mysteriously.
You wake up one day in pain or move a certain way and feel something give and end up with a pain that won't go away.
The reality is you could have done something the day before, a week, or even a month ago that overworked or injured muscles in your body in some way and started an imbalance or deterioration that weeks later led to the chronic problem you now have.
As a result of overuse, a trauma or strain, even bad posture, tension will build up in a muscle to the point where the circulation is impaired and eventually that muscle will weaken and in a certain situation fail, causing the body to compensate and eventually get out of balance.
Like someone who is hunched over when they sit at their desk or lean on one leg as they stand.
A muscle imbalance invariably leads to the pelvis moving out of position causing it to either tilt forward or back, up or down or rotate.
These 5 positions it can end up in will have a flow on effect to the spine and will upset the position or spacing of the vertebrae.
This can then encroach on the discs or nerves leading to back pain.
As tightness builds up in a muscle due to poor circulation, that muscle becomes weak causing other muscles to have to compensate for the weakness.
These other muscles then start to overwork, fatigue and tighten and the odds become higher that one of the joints in the spine will be put under pressure which ends up causing pain and inflammation.
As the different areas of the body compensate, the muscular system gets out of balance and you slowly lose flexibility.
When there is no more potential to compensate something has to give and it's often at the weakest point which is generally the joint.
This is where many treatments are incorrectly focused, leading to expensive and unnecessary X Rays, MRI's or CT Scans which invariably show very little.
Even when they do identify a structural problem with the joint, it is not the cause of the pain anyway so treating it has little or no lasting effect.
The muscle imbalances that set all this up are rarely considered by most Doctors and therapists.
These imbalances can be confined to one area such as the back or shoulders, or spread throughout the whole body causing a build up of tight muscles and pressure that eventually leads to weakness and pain.
I have treated many people who have been doing regular exercise for years yet their muscles are weak and painful.
Some treatments you get for pain will exercise and stretch you until enough compensations are put in place that your pain goes away, but it doesn't remove the imbalances, it just covers them up.
The more your body has already compensated for previous injuries or damage, the less effective these types of treatments will be.
Usually the older a person gets the less they respond to stretching and exercise based treatments and people end up having to curtail their activities as a way of relieving their pain.
When we move, especially doing vigorous exercise, we exert a force which, as a result of even a minor imbalance, is distributed unevenly throughout our muscle system causing any imbalance to spread and go deeper into the body, especially if the body is unhealthy and holds onto its tension.
This sets up a condition where we have a greater potential for injury if we over exert or over extend ourselves in a certain way.