If you are having low back pain, this may be of interest to you. The #1 Thing you can do to help yourself is to identify what are you possibly doing that is either causing or irritating your back pain or both? Ask Yourself, "What am I doing that may be causing or irritating my low back pain”? Here is one of the most common causes/irritants that I see with my patients that have low back pain. 1. Improper standing to sit and sitting to standing. You may be thinking "how can that cause my back pain"? Lets review what the spine does when you bend forward. When you bend or lean forward you put your spine into what we call "flexion". "Flexion" causes the tissues to be stretched excessively to their "end range of motion" and it causes the discs in our low backs to get compressed. Flexion periodically is not bad, however when repeated over a day, week, month, years then the cumulative stress' on the tissues, (mainly the intervertebral discs that act like "shock absorbers" between our vertebra in our spine) cause a major source of pain and irritation. If you are going into “flexion” when changing position, you are not alone, many people do this and I used to be one of them.😁 Hopefully, you are seeing a pattern here. Lets do some math. In one day lets assume you stand to sit and sit to stand at least 10 times, which is a very low estimate but stay with me here. So 10x/day with 7 days = 70. ------ 70 x 4 weeks in a month = 280 x 12 = 3,360 So 3,360 times if you sit to stand and stand to sit putting your spine into flexion then you are constantly irritating those tissues and they are not having a chance to heal. Kind of like a cut on your knuckle that you keep bending over and over again. Try this: When sitting down and rising from a chair try and keep your spine straight and your chest up and use your legs instead. You will need to get your feet more "underneath" you if that makes sense so that you can have leverage to do so and if needed use your hands to help push yourself up.