If you’ve ever said, “My back went out”, what you likely meant is that you have pretty severe pain in your lower back.
Expressions like “my back went out”, or “throwing my back out”, or “my back locked up” are laymen’s terms that refer to back pain.
While there are many possible causes for low back pain, including disc herniations, sprains, etc, which we will discuss in future articles, today we’re going to talk about symptoms of back pain.
“My back went out”: Symptoms
If you’ve injured your back, here’s a list of the most common symptoms you might have:
Pain
We all know what pain feels like, but the “quality” of back pain can vary significantly. You may feel sudden, sharp pain that occurs with certain movements (like bending forward at the waist, putting on shoes in the morning, or getting up or down from a chair.
You could feel a dull, achy pain in your back, or just off to the right or left of your back. This pain may not be severe, but tends to be exhausting when you have it all day, every day.
You may get sudden “electrical shock”-type pain, than may shoot up your back, or down a leg. These back pain symptoms are often brief, but can be quite severely painful.
It’s also common to feel “burning” pain or a sensation of heat in your back, or in the muscles around your back.
Spasms
Also known as “muscle splinting”, spasms are simply an involuntary contraction of a muscle in your back, or a cramp.
Back spasms are super common with lower back pain, and a big cause of the pain and disability associated with common back injuries.
Muscle spasms in your lower back are actually your body’s response to a “joint insult” or injury to your back. For example, if you were to bend over and pick up a heavy object with poor lifting form, and strain your lower back, your body tells the muscles around that joint to tighten-up protectively.
The spasms are actually your body trying to help you, but immobilizing the injured joints.
The problem is that cramps are painful, and their sudden and severe nature can scare you into being afraid of moving normally, which can cause your lower back to get even stiffer, tighter and more painful.
The fear of pain from the muscle spasms can actually prolong your recovery from a back injury.
Also, spasming muscles in your lower back can make your low back “crooked”, or leaned forward or to one side.
This can be especially alarming to experience, but it’s actually not typically a scary thing at all. It just means that the muscles in one area are tighter than the muscles in another area, and they’re “pulling” off to one side.
Once your body is convinced that it no longer needs to protectively spasm, the “crookedness” resolves.
Numbness / Tingling
While it can be alarming to experience, tingling or numbness in your lower back itself, or even running down your leg, is not automatically a scary thing.
Numbness just means that the nerves whose job it is to carry sensory data from your back or leg to your brain are being prevented from doing so.
This can be due to either nerve damage, nerve irritation or enough compression of a nerve to prevent it from carrying sensory data.
With numbness or tingling that occurs during back pain, very often it’s caused by a “pinched nerve”, or pressure on a nerve caused by a disc bulge, or simply by the muscles around your back or hip being too tight.
Stiff, tight, inflexible muscles can easily compress nerves that run down your leg and give you the effects of a pinched nerve, or sciatica (which is compression of the sciatic nerve, specifically). Sciatica is caused by compression of the nerve that starts in your lower back and runs down through your glute, back of the thigh, calf, and through the sole of the foot.
Sciatica isn’t automatically a scary condition, either, and often resolves on its own fairly quickly, or with a few sessions of quality physical therapy or rehab.
Stiffness
Stiffness in your back, or difficulty bending, turning or twisting with your back, is a very common symptom associated with common mechanical back pain.
As we discussed above, the most common reason for the stiff, achy and limited movement you feel when your back “goes out” is often caused by the muscle splinting — or protective spasming — around your injured back.
This cramping makes it difficult to move, since you’re having to “fight” with the spasms during all your movements in daily activities.
Low back stiffness itself is uncomfortable, and may make it difficult to fall asleep at night, or perform simple daily tasks.
As with any serious pain or injury, it’s always best to get yourself checked out by a doctor right away if you suspect something serious is wrong.
If you’re looking for a chiropractor in Austin, TX, give us a call and we can get you checked out, then back on the road to recovery pronto: (512) 386-1876
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