You walked into the clinic confused. There was no fall, no heavy lifting, no obvious moment of injury. Just a dull ache in your lower back that has been showing up around 3 or 4 PM for the last few months and won't go away.
In our practice, this is the single most common complaint from people under 40. And in nine cases out of ten, the cause is one of these five things.
1. Your chair is the problem
A chair that flattens your lumbar curve loads the front of your discs and starves the back. Six hours a day for two months is enough to produce the exact ache you're feeling. The fix is a lumbar cushion — not a new chair.
2. You sit on your wallet
A back-pocket wallet tilts your pelvis a few degrees off centre every time you sit down. Multiply that by hours per day, and one side of your spine carries more load than the other. Move it to your front pocket or a bag.
3. Your hamstrings are tight
Tight hamstrings pull on the back of your pelvis. Your pelvis tilts. Your lumbar spine compensates. Your lower back hurts. Two minutes of hamstring stretching morning and night fixes it for most people inside three weeks.
4. You sleep on a worn-out mattress
If you've had your mattress more than seven years and your back hurts most in the morning, the mattress is a strong suspect. A medium-firm mattress beats both very soft and very firm in clinical studies.
5. You haven't been moving enough
This is the boring answer no one wants. But the discs in your back get their nutrition from movement. Six months of mostly sitting will create exactly the symptoms you're describing — even if nothing else changed.
When to see a doctor
See a professional if the pain radiates down a leg, gets worse at night, comes with numbness or weakness, or persists for more than two weeks despite changing the obvious things.
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