High-Risk Moments for Your Low Back

When it comes to your lower back and injury risk, there are two critical times when you need to be especially careful:

1. Your back is actually swollen in the morning. The discs have extra fluid in them. A careless forward bend or twist first thing in the morning can do substantial damage to your discs or other back structures.
2. The other critical time is after you have been sitting. Long car drives or airplane trips are especially challenging. In this case, the culprit is something called "creep." This means that your ligaments and tendons lengthen into the position that you have been in. Ligaments do not provide protection properly when they have been lengthened by creep.
   
   How to minimise risk
• The longer you have been sitting, the higher the risk.
• If you have to sit for extended periods, take regular breaks. A short walk, some simple movements, can make a real difference.
• Don't do any heavy lifting immediately after getting out of bed
• Don't bend over immediately after sitting. After a long sit, give yourself at least a few seconds of backward bending and/or moving around to reset your spine. Then you can carefully, using your hips rather than your back, bend over to pick up something.
• Sit up straight, and keep your back in neutral. Neutral means that you keep a bit of a lordosis in your lower back, keep the lumbar spine from slumping forward, stay more upright.

Source: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150197445930596&id=253880671739