8 Tips to Decrease Back Pain From Travel

It’s summertime and vacations are in full swing. And while vacations may be about rest and relaxation,  it’s not uncommon to suffer back or neck pain from traveling. Don’t be the next vacation gone awry due to injury.

This summer try these tips to decrease the risk of the injury while on vacation:

  1. With travel comes prolonged periods of sitting. Bring pillows, towels, or even soft jackets to support your back for sitting. Prolonged sitting can leave you vulnerable to hurting your back.
  2. Plan for frequent stops. At each stop get up, stretch, and move around.
  3. While in route adjust your posture frequently to avoid static strain to your neck and back.
  4. When you’ve reached your destination, take several minutes to loosen up in order to re-activate your muscles, before unloading your luggage.
  5. When loading or unloading your bags, take the extra trip. Don’t try to carry everything at once. Use rolling carts or even the bellman if available, it is your vacation.
  6. Make sure to schedule some exercise while on vacation. Your body needs and thrives on movement. Try to include some walking, biking, or at least some stretching to help keep the body moving.
  7. For those going to the beach  “get out of the beach chair”. Yes even sitting in the beach chair too long can lead to unwanted back problems.
  8. Try to exercise just before traveling home. This will help your body be more relaxed and better able to tolerate being cooped up in the car or plane.

For more tips on staying healthy during travel contact us at Baudry Therapy Center.

Awe, it’ll go away

How many of you have recurrent nagging aches and pains.  Do you just blow them off by telling yourself and others, “Oh, I just have a bad back”, or “sometimes I get a crick  in my neck…it’ll go away”?   But does it?

I treat people all of the time for aches and pains that started 10, 20, even 30 years ago as a little nag.  The kind of pain that temporarily goes away with Ibuprofen.  Unfortunately, these aches and pains are often recurrent–each time coming back worse than before.  When these people finally get to me for treatment  the problem is out of control.  The pain and disability is significantly affecting their lives and the medicines are no longer working. Now it is a real challenge just to manage the symptoms much less change the course of the problem.  What could be corrected in one to two weeks now takes months to recover.

The truth is that most of us often postpone tending to those nagging little aches and pains. We tell ourselves, “Awe, it’ll go away.” But it often doesn’t. Each of our aches and pains are little warning signs that we need to pay attention to.  If we heed the warning early on and do something about it we can most likely eliminate it…for good.

So next time you get a little “crick”, “pull”, or “strain” don’t blow it off.  Seek professional help. Talk to a physical therapist to get you on the road to feeling ache & pain free. It will save you plenty in the end!