What Does it Mean When You Have a Back Spasm?

Let’s pretend you were pulling laundry out of the washer to put it in the dryer, and you feel an old back injury flare up.

It had been bothering you for a few weeks but just a little, not enough to keep you from doing anything.

Now you feel the muscles tighten up around your spine, and you’re having a full-on spasm.

What does that mean? Is it an emergency?

No, probably not. Most musculoskeletal issues aren’t medical emergencies.

What they usually need is time, not a medical intervention. That’s especially true for spasms.

Why?

A muscle spasm is nature’s version of a splint. It keeps things immobilized to avoid further damage.

In the case of moving some laundry around, there probably wasn’t any damage, so how could you end up with a spasm?

If your nervous system doesn’t feel safe and/or confident, that can lead to a spasm as well.

We see this most often in people who have old lingering injuries that flare up when they are stressed and or tired.

When they run out of bandwidth to deal with everything going on in their busy lives, their nervous systems sense the “danger” and puts that protective spasm in place before any damage happens.

So what do you do? How do you stop the cycle?

You have to rebuild the confidence of your nervous system! 

Ways we do that are: desensitize the movement patterns, build strength through the ranges of motion, dose dynamic movement back into your daily life. Movement is key!

Not to be overlooked is better management of the stress you have to deal with on a regular basis.

That’s what we do with our clients at SOAR.

After an in-depth assessment, that’s our playbook.

That’s how we’ve helped so many others reclaim the active life they want to live.