Top 10 Tips for a Healthy Back

What is the basis for a healthy back?

The spine is one of the most important foundations of your body and how it manages to keep itself straight and standing. The spine provides the foundation for how your upper and lower body parts attach to each other. However, most of the time, our spine withstands a number of forces acting on it all day, and repeatedly over time.

Back pain is a result of this constant and repeated stress and pressure, and can effectively become an obstacle for your everyday tasks and chores. Believe it or not, one of the most common reasons on why people visit their doctor is to consult about their back pain. So it is important to ask, are you doing what you can to achieve a healthy back? Some of the most common tips and pieces of advice you can take to heart  when it comes to keeping your back healthy are listed below:

Top 10 Tips on How to Achieve a Healthy Back

1. Stand up Straight and Properly – one of the most common things we hear from most people, even early on as kids is to stand up properly. Little do we know that this is not just something parents say to scold you, but actually helps in maintaining a healthy back. Stand properly by maintaining the normal curves of your spine, and take constant breaks if you are always standing.
2. Aerobic Exercises – aerobic exercises, and generally being healthy and fit will help you achieve a healthy back. Exercises will not only help you achieve proper cardio, but will also help strengthen your muscles, strong joints, and a proper weight for your age and height.
3. Avoid a Sedentary Lifestyle – Move around frequently and avoid doing one thing for a long period of time namely: sitting on the desk for extended periods of time. Get up and do stretches from time to time to achieve a healthy back. Remember, especially when you have back pain that it is better to get up and move around rather than staying still.
4. Lift properly and not too often – Sometimes when we lift, we rely heavily on our back muscles. Lifting objects with an improper posture is a recipe for a back disaster. In order to achieve a healthy back, you should lift the object by bending your knees and hips and using your leg muscles to lift the object. Do this while maintaining proper curvature of the back.
5. Stay Constantly hydrated – by staying constantly hydrated, you can effectively avoid the degeneration of the discs in your spinal cord. This is because the discs in your vertebrae are almost 88% water. A good measure would be to keep yourself constantly hydrated while not forgetting to urinate from time to time, this will effectively give you a healthy back.
6. Quit Smoking – Smoking can increase the likelihood of back pain, in that it reduces the flow of blood into your vertebral discs that cushion the vertebrae. And lack of blood flow in these parts can result in disc degeneration.
7. Achieve Proper Amounts of Sleep – sleeping properly and adequately will help you achieve good overall health and not just a healthy back. To do this, you can try placing a pillow under your knees in order to help relieve the pressure on your spine. Sleeping on your side also works. Strive to achieve a good night’s rest every night.
8. Maintain Flexibility – Maintaining flexibility especially in the areas of your back is important to avoid misalignment of the spine and achieve a healthy back. Strive to always include exercises where a full range of motion in the joints and muscles of your body is achieved, most especially in the areas of the pelvis and spine.
9. Eating a Healthy Diet – you may not know this but eating healthy and maintaining your weight can also contribute to a healthy back. This is because having the right weight for your age and height will help you distribute stress evenly on your bones, especially in your spine, as opposed to being overweight and giving your bones extra stress and pressure.
10. Core and Back Strengthening Exercises – Always maintain a strong core in order to achieve a healthy back. This is because a well-exercised core and back serve to cushion the bones and joints of these areas and provide additional support to bear weight. 

Always make sure to see your physician in case you are feeling any symptoms of back pain, and make sure to consult him or her before doing any exercises and methods to help you achieve a healthy back. This is especially useful if any of the above methods don’t have any effect in relieving the pain and stress you feel in your back. Always make it a point to do regular check-ups.