The importance of regular walking for lower back pain
Manual practitioners have long suspected that regular walking is helpful for people suffering recuring lower back but we finally now have some research that directly addresses this question. Even better is comes from our one of the Universities that trained one of the practitioners working at Okinawa Sports and Spinal.
Researchers from Macquarie university Australia recently published an article in the prestigious journal The Lancet asking the question ” What happens if we prescribe regularly walking to people with the lower back pain ? “.
And the short answer is that helps !
Using a control group they randomly divided 700 people to either a group that did some regularly walking each week and a control group that did nothing different. The group that started walking more reduced their occurrence of a lower back pain episode within a 12 month period by about 50%.
It’s important to note that we can’t generalize these results too much. If you are already walking a fair amount each week then result of walking more may be less, the subjects studied did not walk much before the study. It was also performed on people that did not have a specific diagnosis so perhaps some types of lower back pain may not respond as well.
..But ! if you are somebody that gets the occasional bout of lower back pain and you are not walking regularly just increasing your weekly walking by amount you feel comfortable and achievable may decrease the number of episodes of lower back pain you experience. It’s certainly worth a try and cardio vascular system will thank you too.
Fortunately here in Okinawa we have some amazing seawalls and hiking trails just waiting for you to find them so get out there and move.
If you would like to consult a professional here in Okinawa about how you can integrate walking into managing your lower back pain feel free to schedule an appointment with our native English staff here
References
- ” Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of an individualized, progressive walking and education intervention for the prevention of low back pain recurrence in Australia (WalkBack): a randomized controlled trial ” Pocovi et al. 2024 The Lancet Volume 404, ISSUE 10448, P134-144, July 13, 2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(24)00755-4
