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Your physician or chiropractor mostly likely refers to your suffering as thoracic back pain. But you probably call it upper back pain. Who hasn’t had some pain in the back at one point or another? If you’re a grown up, you’ve likely had some ache in your back from moving the wrong way or injury. Typically, this pain stems from a stress of some kind to the upper part of the back area. But the cause can be from something far more serious and destructive. Often the cause is a slipped disc or degeneration or something along those lines.

As a group, adults are much more sedentary than we once were. There was a time when as a society we were very active. Our jobs were physical. Now the bulk of sit down all day long. And then when we go home, we’ve mastered the couch potato routine. The average workers these days sits at a computer all day. Very few people even have an ergonomic work space. We work jobs that are very unnatural from a physical standpoint. The stress of these unnatural positions and actions causes the muscles in our upper back to be tense and cramped all day. As a result, we don’t have the muscular strength in the thoracic area like we do in the lower back.

Right now, trying to take notice of in which position you sure those are. If your shoulders are a little high then you are putting enormous pressure on your shoulder and neck muscles. Keeping your shoulders high all the time will give you pain in your upper back.

By being aware of how you are using the muscles in your back, you can reduce and even eliminate back pain. Throughout the day you should stop and check how you are carrying your shoulders. If your shoulders are hunched and not relaxed, then you need to work on proper posture. Imagine that you are carrying a heavy grocery bag in each hand. This is the proper position your shoulders should be in to ease the strain on the muscles in your upper back.

If changing your posture, along with your work environment doesn’t bring you some relief then you might want to consider an exercise program that’s designed to strengthen the muscles in your back. Or you can take the easy way out and see your doctor and get a prescription for pain pills. But pain pills won’t help you get to the root of the problem, and they will only make it worse in the end.

Tags: Gymnastics

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Gymnastics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.