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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.

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If you suffer from sciatica then sharp shooting pains and constant state of discomfort will be all too familiar to you. Like most back problems, treating it successfully can be difficult, and usually involves regular medical treatments.

However, by understanding what sciatica actually is, it becomes clear that the Alexander Technique can be of great benefit to sufferers of all ages.

What is Sciatica?

Sciatica is the result of a trapped sciatic nerve. When this nerve is trapped, pain can be felt from the lower back, down the buttock to the back of the knee, and sometimes right to the bottom of the feet. Irritation can be caused by accidents, a slipped disc or infections.

A fully trained Alexander Technique teacher will be able to easily identify the symptoms of sciatica and will know how to use the technique in order to make a noticeable difference to the client.

How can the Alexander Technique help Sciatica?

The symptoms of sciatica can be very painful and it is important to stress that there is no quick fix or magic cure. However an Alexander Technique teacher can effectively treat sciatica buy identifying some of the bad habits and stressful postural tendencies that the sufferer has picked up over the course of their life. By simply correcting the way you sit or walk, the stress and tensions that the body creates for itself are removed, resulting in less pain from ailments such as sciatica.

A STAT qualified Alexander Technique teacher will use gentle hands-on techniques to correct the bad habits, rather than rigorous massage methods, meaning the patient should feel no pain from the technique itself.

Discovering and correcting the faults over time

By discovering the actual cause of sciatica in an individual, the Alexander Technique teacher will be able to adapt and create a unique programme of postural reconfiguration and re-education that can in time reduce the pain caused by this condition.

As mentioned, this cannot be achieved in one visit. It takes time to re-learn how to walk, sit and run properly again, but the Alexander Technique has been proven to greatly reduce the chronic pain associated with sciatica.

Investing in a local Alexander Technique course can make a big difference to sciatica sufferers.

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Ergonomic sitting will not only help your back pain, it will cure it. I say this with confidence, because it has cured the postural scoliosis in my back from one leg being longer than the other by 3 centimeters or one inch.

It may not seem a significant leg length discrepancy caused from a growth spurt as a teenager in one leg. But it gave me a lot of problems as an active teenager. It created an unnatural curve in my spine thus widened the opening of the lower vertebrae, causing scoliosis- an impingement of the sciatic nerve through the opening.

The best possible way to fix scoliosis is to get on a bicycle and pedal for the day around for the day. Sitting on a bicycle is to sit on your pelvic bones. By sitting on your pelvic bones, you are rotating your hip joints enabling movement in the spine. This movement will allow movement all over the spine and will help to allow the sciatic nerve to return to its original position.

As an Occupational Therapist myself, I know that a chiropractor will use a machine that moves your hips around performing the same technique. The only difference is that you have to pay for a chiropractor and your cycling is free after the initial cost of purchasing the bike.

Once you know how to ergonomic sit, through sitting on a bicycle then you should apply the same technique to sitting in an office chair. By sitting on your pelvic bones, you are then able to change positions of your lower limbs for comfort and your upper limbs for productive tasks.

I have learned to use this position quite by accident, when I took up cycling, as a way to help me lose weight. Cycling has done more than help me lose weight, because it has taught me that by sitting on my pelvic bones, I can get rid of the sciatic pain down my leg.

By constantly sitting on my pelvic bones, I have corrected the scoliosis in my spine. It has taught my spine to stay vertically erect, instead of accepting an unnatural curve. This is important to realize because I have trained my spine to accept a vertical spine, even though my pelvic bones are not level.

This was only found 2 years ago, when I had to visit a chiropractor during the winter of 2008-09.  As I live in Vancouver, Canada, we suffered an unusual winter with so much snow. Normally it only rains and the city had no way of clearing so much snow, so I had to walk everywhere instead of cycle.

One day, I slipped and wrenched my back. I could not cycle, so I struggled with the pain until I could barely move. Then I had to visit a chiropractor. After giving him the history of the scoliosis, the chiropractor looked at the Xrays and informed me that there was no scoliosis in my spine. He told me he could see the imbalance in my pelvic bones, but my spine was straight. He then said “Whatever you are doing, keep it up; as you are doing the right for thing for keeping your spine straight!”

Now I am not expecting you all to go out and immediately take up cycling. It is a choice that I have made to cycle for many years for keeping my weight down and because I love being outdoors in the open air and exercising my legs. I had not idea that it was going to be of enormous health benefits to my back.

My leg length discrepancy will never be eliminated. But I know that if there is any stress on my back; all I need do is get on my bike and pedal for a nice long bike ride. The vibrations going through my spine from cycling, will dislodge any impingement in the nerves in my spine.

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The author, Gail McGonigal is a qualified Occupational Therapist, who has overcome postural scoliosis in her spine, by accidentally taking up cycling as a recreational hobby.

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