Best Sleeping Positions to reduce lower back painThere are a lot of opinions regarding sleep positions. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard from my patients, “I know it’s bad, but I sleep on my back.” It’s a myth. The realistic truth about sleep position is two-fold:
Rest and recovery are crucially important. If you sleep better laying like Sid from Toy Story than in the perfect supported position on your back, then I’m saying be like Sid, other than the dismemberment of toys. Don’t do that -- it’s just weird. Many times, pain at night and in the morning is the hangover of your postural habits and movement behaviors causing your lower back pain in the first place. You see, the shock absorbers between every one of our spinal bones, or “discs,” are loaded and compressed by movement and gravity all day long. At night, the discs decompress and fill with fluid in a physiological process called, “imbibition.” Envision a sponge in water: you press it down and the water pushes out, but if you let go, it sucks water back in. Because those discs are plump with fluid in the morning, you can be more sensitive to your symptoms for the first hour of the day where you're getting your body initially moving against gravity. In the clinic, I rarely mess with sleep unless needed. However, there are some helpful tips and tricks I give patients to test out on their own to determine if it’s a useful strategy for their case of lower back pain. Rather than go through “the Top 5 Sleep Positions,” we’re going to go discuss tried and true useful strategies for sleep, whether it’s during or leading up to it. There is not one better strategy than another — it comes down to trial and error to discover what works for you! More information check the link below: Best Sleeping Positions to reduce lower back pain |