Sometimes I can, for back relief, get a small pillow (or sometimes a larger one) and lay it on the ground and then lay on it so that the pillow is where the small of my back is and then I rest on it for a short while. Then I lift each leg, move my right leg to my left side and my left leg to my right side, then both legs to my stomach, and this tends to generally take the pain away enough for me to do some housework and so on.

If you are really going through a back stretch with your back, the couch may help out.

I have talked to a few people who do this and I have been doing this for maybe 8-10 years now.

I sleep on my couch in the lounge sitting up. I made a big pillow, a fat one, that I hug and rest my head on each night when I go to bed. Most of the time when I sleep on a bed flat on my back I wake up in pain, so I just stopped doing it, and now I sleep on the couch all the time. This may help you if you have been having back issues for a while. When you finally are over your back issues you can go back to sleeping on a bed.

In the past they would strap a person to what was called a plank, back down, and the person could be strapped to it for 6 months or so, I assume this was to straighten their spine. These days you get lots of pills.

It seems to me that if that was a common practice in the past that sometimes, for a while, laying on a hard surface may be a good idea.

Another thing I do when I do warm ups and exercise is put my feet shoulder-width-apart and hands on hips and turn on a sharp angle while leaning backwards, and sometimes when I did this from one side to the other side I can hear the disks moving back into place.

Another popular thing to do is to hang your body over a bar at the waist so that you are folded in half and you are facing your feet. The theory is that the discs in the spine separate and when you get back up they go back together the right way.

Another popular idea is to lay on your stomach on the floor and then with your hands either side of you, you push your front half of your body upwards. Do this slowly and with a bit of pressure until your arms are fully extended and then go back down, do this maybe ten times, experiment.

Trust yourself and your body to help you and tell you what is wrong

and what you can do to ease the pain or to help your back.

A good piece of advice is to try to not let pain stop you from being mobile if you can.
Not doing exercise means gaining weight and that is not good for the joints like lower back, knee’s, ankles and so on. Also the human creature tends to stiffen up if they don’t do physical activities so keep moving around, even if the pain means that you do it and it takes longer and you are s;lower.

Have faith in your body, mind and what you are doing.

All the best from
James M Sandbrook.

29th pf April, 2021.