Are you an engineer with back pain?

I am not a doctor nor a physical therapist, but what helped me a lot was focusing on fixing anterior pelvic tilt. If your hip flexors are too tight due to prolonged sitting, there are a couple of things you can do that will combat that:

1. strengthening your abs / core muscles (planks, hollow holds, deadbugs, loaded carries, etc) 2. strengthening your glutes (air squats, lunges, glute bridges, etc) 3. stretching your hip flexors (kneeling hip flexor stretch, couch stretch, 90/90 stretch, etc)

I have an exercise physiology background (BS & former personal trainer), so I know a bit about this topic. I'm now a SWE and have had my share of back pain. Back pain can be caused by an imbalance of muscle strengths/weaknesses (e.g., strong anterior and weak posterior muscles) or poor stability during movement like walking and squatting.

The commonly-suggested treatment is to perform weight training- squats, deadlifts, lunges, rows, pull-ups, core stability exercises like planks and suitcase carries, anti-rotation core exercises like pallof presses. The idea is to strengthen weak muscles to improve muscle imbalances and stabilize your body when you move.

Exercise alone may or may not work. You need to screen for the root cause. This is a bit more involved, and the best advice I can give is to find a really good physical therapist and/or read "Rebuilding Milo". There's an entire chapter dedicated to back pain- anatomy, how to screen for back pain, classifying the back pain, and treatment. Other chapters are dedicated to hip and ankle. These joints can also be a cause too.

You can step away from your sitting position more often or buy a fancy chair but exercise is the ultimate solution here.

I started getting lower back pain last few years (41 now) and in my case, it was just bad habits, lack of exercise, extra fat on abdomen area etc. I started paying attention to it by working out especially the Core including squats and deadlifts (nothing crazy and light weights only). It helped tremendously and I am fortunate not to have back issues because of other reasons and just my own negligence. Hope this helps.

If it's awful and doesn't improve over time (I'm talking weeks), try pushing your doctor to get an MRI. I visited three doctors before they ordered one and found two bad herniated and degenerated discs, and at that point, surgery was the recommended option. It's been a year after my surgery, and I'm finally pain-free after almost three painful years.

UPDATE: Due to the great response to this thread, I built a tool for back pain relief:

https://chat.openai.com/g/g-N4KUPUUox-back-pain-ai

Trained it on leading research papers and the suggested resources below.

What dyou think? I hope it helps someone!

It used to haunt me to the point where I was worried about the longevity of my career.

It took many many years and several steps to address it.

1. My walking posture was bad with flat feet. So I addressed it with physiotherapy to change the way I walk. It was a success, my legs no longer pulled my hip incorrectly.

2. And then I need to change my home office to standing desk. It helped tremendously, no more pinched nerves.

3. And then my wrists, shoulders, and core are simply too weak. I started lifting weights and do core exercises. It helped tremendously as well. It makes me aware of my anterior pelvic tilt.

> What did you do to help it, what did your company do? Did anything help in the end?

My company did nothing about it specifically, but no problems because they give me a really good health insurance plan, so I'm not paying anything to go really good doctors or taking exams.

Currently, I'm seeing 3 doctors to take care of it: endocrinologist, gastroenterologist and physiatrist. We're investigating it because it looks like the pain it's being caused an inflammation pinching a nerve.

Also: exercises, it helps a lot.

I work from home and had back pain for maybe a year. It effectively went away after I switched from a crappy budget office chair to a quality ergonomic chair. I opted for the Steelcase Leap.

These chairs are over $1k new, but it seems you can find them used for around $400, maybe even less if you have a local used office furniture store. The downside is that you're giving up a good warranty by purchasing it used, so if this is a 10+ year purchase then it may actually worth be getting new.

Not an engineer, but doing a small amount of exercise each morning to limber up and keep my core muscles from atrophying due to my sedentary lifestyle has done wonders.

For me the solution ended up being very simple, going for walks.

This wasn’t easy at first because shortly in I’d have back pain just from walking, but over time this subsided and I was able to walk longer.

Now I go for a walk over lunch and use it to think about my work (which is great for brainstorming). Any time I stop my regular walking routine my back pain starts to creep back in so I know the walking has helped a lot.

If you workout your back more often it should take care of you back pain(unless you have some type of injury). If your back is used to pulling weight then keeping you upright in you seat shouldn't be an issue. Do some bent over rows, lat pull downs, cable rows, pull-ups, etc. It shouldn't take more that 30 minutes once a week.

Make sure you exercise your core muscles - don't go overboard if you're just starting out and make sure you include some good stretches before and after.

Look at how you're sitting, make sure your chair gives you good support for your back.

Look at how you're sleeping, a bad mattress can give you all sorts of problems including back pain.

Standing desk, stretching, jogging and losing weight

Some pushups/situps/barbells

Have done some yoga classes when things were really bad

For me, I found two causes: sitting too long with feet off the ground (either against wall or sitting cross-legged), and glute tightness. The glute tightness is strange because it feels like back pain, but really it's muscle tightness that goes away with foam rolling or dry-needling.

Not a SWE - I'm a WFH DevRel Eng who is starting to get back pain.

I work on the sofa and my colleagues are urging me to get a proper office chair, but I don't really want to because my living space is tiny and I intend to move out soon (3-4 months ish).

Cannot understate how strongly I recommend reading about mind body syndrome for anyone with chronic pain. Decent summary: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BgBJqPv5ogsX4fLka/the-mind-b...

the tl;dr of it is that a lot (probably even the majority of chronic pain) is psychological, not structural. This isn't obvious because the pain is in fact entirely real. What causes it though is that if you think there's something wrong/sense minor pain in your back, brain thinks 'oh no somethings wrong' and sends more pain - this reinforces your sense of something being wrong and makes the pain worse and stay.

This normally doesn't happen that often but if you're stressed, you're much more sensitive to pain making it much easier to trigger.

My story with chronic pain: I had bad RSI for 2-3 weeks. Went away over a weekend after I read a story [0] of how someone treated their RSI. Your thinking about pain influences you're brains perception of it - you can halt the brain pain amplification cognitively.

For more detail on the nitty gritty of how this works neurologically, I recommend Unlearn Your Pain by Dr. Schubiner: https://www.amazon.com/Unlearn-Your-fourth-Howard-Schubiner-...

[0] https://sjbyrnes.com/rsi.html

- the best posture is the next posture. Move. (drinking non-caloric fluids, standing during meetings can help with that too) - firm pillow for the back - resistance training of any kind (barbell is great)

Squats and deadlifts 2-3 times a week mean I almost never get back pain.

I do a 30s to one min plank for every 30 min I sit.

And every 30 min I get up and look outside anyway to rest my eyes.

Squats fixed my back so fast it was like magic. Do squats.

are you trying to "talk to potential customers about a problem" for your startup idea, or are you genuinely trying to fix your back pain?