Back pain: the enemy of parents

Being a parent, you know, is a tiring job, even from a physical point of view, especially when the children are still small. Even a simple gesture, such as taking the baby in your arms, perhaps to make him stop crying, can be insidious: just bend (or lift him) in the wrong way, and you find yourself with your back blocked. It can happen to everyone, even the youngest and fittest parents, and it can be quite annoying.

Prevention first of all

Taking care of yourself is often the best cure, and back pain is no exception to the rule. The spine and back muscles are all the more prone to trauma, contractures and tears the more physical fitness is neglected. Poorly trained muscles are weaker, and are damaged more easily; Not paying attention to maintaining proper posture causes stress and unbalanced loads on the spine.

Even herniated discs, a pathology usually associated with advanced age, in some cases (sedentary lifestyle, obesity, repeated trauma) can emerge earlier. This explains the importance of maintaining a good physical shape and correcting any postural problems that can damage the back.

The importance of posture…

When sitting, it is advisable to calibrate the height of the chair, so that the thighs remain parallel to the floor; the head must not remain too bent forward, in order to avoid excessive loads on the cervical vertebrae; Finally, the shoulders and back should always have adequate support, to avoid hunching and soreness in the back.

A similar argument is valid for when lying down: it is always preferable to sleep on your side or in a supine position. Sleeping prone, in fact, does not guarantee adequate support to the back and accentuates an unnatural curvature of the same.

Particularly important for a parent is to avoid the famous “witch’s blow“, an annoying disorder that can happen, for example, bending down to pick up the child. In this case, the rule that always applies to lifting weights remains valid: the correct way to do it is to bend over the legs and use them to lift the child.

Bending over the back instead facilitates joint and muscle trauma, as well as putting us “out of use”. It is a simple trick, maybe a bit tiring (especially if you are not trained), but it is an effort that pays off and saves many annoyances.

… and good physical fitness

To strengthen the muscles of the back, increase flexibility and save yourself annoying contractures there are various exercises that, if performed correctly, can be very useful. Some of these are beneficial for the whole back, others are more specific:

• Lying down, in a supine position, flex your back by raising your head and bringing your knees to your chest, repeating the operation two or three times. Exercise is beneficial for the whole back
• For the dorsal tract, a good exercise is to be done sitting, legs apart and with your feet resting on the ground, bend your torso forward bringing your head down, exhaling: during exhalation, you slowly return to the starting position
• For the lumbar tract, you can instead perform push-ups in this way: from prone, elbows and hands resting on the ground, in line with the shoulders and keeping the abdomen on the ground, the head and the upper part of the torso are raised, remaining in this position for about twenty seconds.

And if the back pain comes anyway?

Bearing in mind that most back injuries are not serious and tend, with a little rest, to resolve within a few days, a parent can not always allow himself the luxury of resting too long. It therefore becomes necessary to relieve pain in some way and at least partially recover the reduced mobility that is typically associated with pain itself.

Most of the drugs useful in this regard are available without a prescription and belong to the class of non-steroidal anti-inflammatories. The most common active ingredient for this type of drugs is ibuprofen 10% lysine salt and comes in different forms. In the case of back pain, ointments and gels based on ibuprofen have the double advantage of having a targeted action (being applicable directly on the painful area) while maintaining the typical effectiveness of the forms to be taken by mouth.