Are you tired of suffering with miserable muscle ‘knots’ in your back? Would you like to know how can you get rid of the muscle spasms in your back naturally and forever?
The first thing is to figure out WHY you are getting these muscle knots. I’m not being silly here.
There are always reasons why you have pain. Usually the reasons involve muscles.
Muscles move bones. Without muscles, we go nowhere. But sometimes muscles get unhappy and cause symptoms like pain and knots.
It’s a big deal that muscles are usually overlooked as being causes of pain. They shouldn’t be overlooked because they are responsible for probably 90% of all soft tissue pain.
So the answer is not to attack only the area where it hurts because those are just symptoms.
The answer is to get to the root cause of your knot. Figure out the cause of your back pain and get rid of the cause.
It could be posture-related. Do you slouch or slump?
It could be that you always lean into the same corner of the couch.
It could be your heavy book bag that causes you to lean forward.
It is something and that something needs to be changed so you will stop getting these knots.
And muscles need minerals to function their best. Do you eat a good diet that supplies lots of vitamins and minerals or do you eat mostly pre-packaged, highly processed foods and fast foods? They cannot supply what your muscles need.
You cannot fool your muscles with fake foods.
One more thing: The knots in your back may be caused by tight muscles in the front of your body.
Most of the time we have our hands and heads in front of our body and this shortens the muscles in the fronts of our chest, abdomen, arms and neck. That means the muscles in the front of the body need to be stretched. They are most often the culprit!
If you can give your body movement, nutrition, stretching in the right directions and good posture you can get rid of the knots in your back naturally.
Hi,I’m writing on behalf of my husband. For 15 days he’s been in a lot of pain. He’s left-handed and he’s whole left arm went numb with a tingling sensation all the way down to his pointer finger. He’s movement has become much better, but he still has a really hard time sitting down. He’s not overweight, he works out religiously, runs, doesn’t smoke and has excellent posture. He has knots between the left shoulder blade and the spine. He’s been to a physio, he said that he has a herniated disc, last week he went to another physio and said that is wasn’t the spine but the muscles and he gave him a deep massage and also performed cupping to increase blood flow. It seems like everyone says something contrary to the next and he’s so depressed and broken. Please help and point us in the right direction! Thank you.
Hi Rebecca,
We do tend to feel depressed and broken when we don’t understand what is going on when we have pain. We feel old, too. But the good news is that bodies heal all the time! Here are my best long distance thoughts.
From this distance, I’m kind of leaning to the culprits being muscles on his upper chest and under his collar bone as well as the muscles on the back side of the shoulder blade itself. Those may be the instigating factors but now muscles in the neck are probably involved, too.
My question is: Did your husband have some relief after the massage and muscle treatment? If yes, that is the route to continue. (But I cannot say that the physio is exactly the correct one to continue with.)
The way that bodies work, it’s possible that BOTH physios may be correct. How? Because muscles move discs and bones. So if tight muscles are pulling on the disks and spinal bones, they can actually push or pull the bones and disks out of the normal position.
The symptoms indicate a nerve is being compressed (pressed on or squeezed) somewhere in the neck area. This happens when muscles or bones press on nerves. Nerves hate pressure! So they cause symptoms like your husband has.
Just saying, “you have a herniated disk,” is not helpful. Saying, “let’s figure out WHY you have pain and the steps to take to get rid of it,” is very helpful. That is the therapist you want to find.
Even though your husband has excellent posture, something is out of balance. Maybe the muscles in his chest are a bit too tight, maybe he slept crooked, maybe he works with his shoulder hiked.
At any rate, using cold packs or ice packs on his neck and upper back and upper chest will help more than heat. Cold is the best drug for nerve pain and also helps relax tight muscles so that’s what I would suggest for home care.
A good massage therapist or physio who knows how to LOOK at the body and determine the most likely cause of pain will be the one who can help most. Also if your husband has access to an inversion table that can help take some of the pressure off the spine. It lengthens the neck a bit. And it only has to be a slight incline to help. But actually manually releasing the muscles will help the most.
The knots MAY be caused by whatever is going on with the nerves in the neck. OR the knots were developing and are part of the reason for the nervy symptoms starting. (And knots start for a reason, too. Everything has a reason.)
The thing is: Most therapists will want to work almost exclusively on the knots between the spine and shoulder blade. That is probably NOT where the cause of the problem is. He needs someone who can address the muscles on the sides of his neck and also in his chest–all the sides of his body.
But the thing that will help the most is releasing the muscles that are causing this pain. Those may be muscles on the side of his neck called the scalenes. You might like to check out http://CarpalTunnelPainStoppers.com She offers self help stretches for those muscles and a woman wrote to me just last week to say how helpful they had been.
You cannot force the muscles to relax. But you can help them relax with ice, massage, tiny subtle movements and gentle stretches.
Oh, another helpful resource would be to go to http://SimplePainRelief.com and scroll down on the right hand side. You will see a blue trigger point book. It is a wonderful self help book. And it’s worth its weight in gold! Very inexpensive. You can order it there by clicking on it or ask your library to find a copy for you to borrow.
The man who wrote the blue book had pain and needed help because the only therapist who ever helped him had moved far away. So he researched trigger points (irritated areas that cause pain elsewhere) and the whole book is easy to read and understand and do the self-therapy. That’s how he got rid of his pain and he had a lot!
Thank you for writing on behalf of your husband. Please write again if you have more questions. This is just a temporary thing but the sooner the muscles causing his neck, arm and hand pain are relaxed, the sooner he will feel better.
Kathryn
The Pain Relief Coach