Chronic low back pain often goes far beyond posture, injuries, or structural problems. Recurring tightness, stiffness, and pain can be driven by underlying internal dysfunctions — especially gut health imbalances, inflammation, food sensitivities, and microbiome issues. When the gut becomes irritated, stabilizing muscles like the abs and quads may weaken neurologically, forcing the low back muscles, glutes, and hamstrings to compensate by tightening excessively.
Poor core stabilization, fascial tension patterns, diaphragm dysfunction, and muscle imbalances can all contribute to chronic pain patterns that repeatedly return even after temporary relief methods. Digestive symptoms like bloating, gas, constipation, and food reactions may correlate closely with chronic low back pain and disc issues.
The episode breaks down how bacterial overgrowth, fungal overgrowth, parasites, and inflammatory foods may disrupt muscle function and spinal stability. Functional medicine concepts, muscle testing, myofascial dysfunction, low FODMAP nutrition, antifungal dietary approaches, and herbal support strategies are explored as ways to address the underlying causes of chronic low back pain rather than only managing symptoms.
Hey guys, welcome to the Freedom to Flourish podcast.
I’m Doctor Joel Miller here with my Co host and colleague Dr. Tim Augustyniak. Today we’re talking about the root causes of low back pain and in our previous episode, you know, we talked about the root causes of chronic neck pain.
So same kind of story, but different kind of area of the body here talking about the low back, the the episode, if you didn’t listen last episode talking about chronic neck pain issues.
We talked about a lot of the different muscles that stabilize the neck and sometimes how you can foster imbalances and sometimes you need work on those muscles and the fascia.
But we also talked about how a lot of those issues actually stem from internal chronic health problems like with hormone imbalances and with immune system issues and even sometimes with gut health.
So in this episode, here’s kind of what we’re getting at.
A lot of people deal with chronic low back pain issues for years, whether it’s athletes or it’s just kind of your typical 9 to 5 desk worker or if it’s just the stay at home mom.
People deal with low back pain for years and years and years.
And they might stretch, they might get adjustments and they might get a massage and those things help.
But then the pain or the tightness or the stiffness comes back.
And so what we wanted to get into with this episode is really talking about, OK, what’s going on there from a, from a muscle and fossil basis there, what’s causing these issues?
But then also, and, and I would argue most importantly, what are the underlying health issues that are causing this?
And a little bit of insight into this.
We find a lot of this goes back to gut health.
So we’re going to talk about that a little bit there.
So Doctor Tim, good morning.
I’m glad you’re here.
Let’s kind of jump into this.
Yeah, happy to be here.
This is an issue that kind of hits home with me.
I’ve had issues where my low back will act up as a result of gut issues.
And until you get that sorted out, a lot of times things will stick around.
So, you know, there’s a lot of topics on here that I’m like, man, I’m really happy that we do this for work and this is just what we do because it helps us in our own health quite a bit.
So, you know, like you said, gut health, yeah, that’s going to be one of the biggest emphasis of today’s episode.
But there’s other things that it’s not like your gut just magically poof creates low back pain.
You know, there are reasons for that that we are going to cover.
And it relates to muscle dysfunction related to organ issues.
So like we talked about in just about every episode, there are embryologically derived connections between organs and muscles.
And so when organs become irritated, muscles become dysfunctional if they are the muscles correlative to whatever organ.
And so for example, stomach muscles are, you know, your pecs and then the forearm muscles, your biceps, all of those, you’ve got liver related muscles, which are actually your pecs sternal division.
And then your rhomboid muscles, you’ve got sinuses that are tied to your SCM muscles and neck muscles.
So you’ll get some neck weakness and issues there.
That’s why headaches are super common with sinus issues.
Even beyond sinus pressure, you have your reproductive system related muscles.
Those are going to be your glute muscles, your piriformis, your glute Max glutamide, your pelvic stability muscles.
And then the reason that gut health is so heavily correlative to low back pain is your small intestine related muscles are your quads.
And so they help with hip flexion, but also extension of the knee.
So the, the, the medium muscles in the front of your thighs and then your AB muscles.
And so if you have a chronic inflammatory issue in your gut where you’ve got say like a SIBO issue, some sort of microbiome issue, parasites, food sensitivities, you name it, and your small intestine is not happy, Your abs will not work, your quads will not work.
They will be neurologically turned off a little bit and they will not accommodate resistance like they’re supposed to.
If your abs are not accommodating resistance like they’re supposed to, they’re not going to stabilize.
And when your abs do not stabilize and your quads don’t stabilize, what’s going to pick up for it?
Pull back muscles, your glutes, your hamstrings, everything’s going to just hold on really tight and, and try to stabilize.
And so where there is inflammation in the gut leading to that, you can try to adjust things.
You can try to do PT, you can try to exercise, you can do whatever you want.
But it’s like trying to turn a light switch on when the light bulb just doesn’t work.
If your light bulb does not work, you can try to turn it on all you want, but it’s never going to cause the room to brighten up.
And so the same thing goes on with your muscles.
If the room does not brighten up or if the muscles do not fire, it’s because of the underlying organ issue typically.
And so you got to fix those things.
So even beyond the organ issues, there is dysfunction. There are things that can become dysfunctional with diaphragm issues, force transfer between like your TL junction, your thoracolumbar junction through like your lab muscle, your low traps, things like that, fossil chains.
That’s the, if you want a big umbrella term for what causes, you know, shoulder issues to cause low back pain on the opposite side or like foot pain to cause opposite side low back pain, stuff like that.
They are fossil chains.
It is the connective tissue chains that all of our muscles have connecting one another to, to transfer force.
And then of course there’s other layers of muscle dysfunction where, you know, if we, if we look at it from a bird’s eye view, if a muscle is weak, we have to fix that.
And that’s where typically they’re weak because of underlying organ issues.
But then from there, there can be after you fix the muscle, there can be compensatory trigger points, there could be a need for flushing out the fascia through muscle scraping.
But then there’s also other Malfascia challenges where we can use the system self-care technique to kind of figure out what’s going on.
And so that’s, you know, moving something to it hurts and then it weakens another muscle or we can kind of pinch over it, drive pain into it and other Malfascia challenges.
So as a whole, we try to figure out where the hierarchy is, each of these things false.
And so the most important thing is if muscles are weak.
And so how do we correct those weak muscles?
And so Doctor Joel, what do you say we get into gut issues and get a bit more into how these things come about, what our diagnostic process looks like, maybe different challenges and indicators that we find using our technique and different symptoms that go along with that stuff.
And then from there we can get into how to fix it.
Man, such a huge topic and Doctor Tim, we could go into this, we could probably talk about this for at least an hour.
And of course we’ve had other episodes talk about gut health.
So I’ll try to keep it more on the concise side and, and for patients that are like, you know what, some of this does resonate with me.
We would definitely recommend going and watching.
You know, we’ve got different episodes on gut health.
If you just go to our podcast and search gut health.
We’ve got different episodes on fungus and bacteria and parasites and stuff like that.
If you think those are playing a part with your health.
But 2 two things I want to mention, Doctor Tim, you talked about the relationships between the muscles and organs, which are huge.
And Doctor Tim, before we got into applied kinesiology, before we got into muscle testing, I didn’t know about this.
Chiropractors are not taught these things.
Physical therapists aren’t taught these connections, Medical doctors are not taught these connections.
It’s, it’s when you step into the muscle testing world, the applied kinesiology world that we start to learn these different connections that were discovered by Doctor George Goodheart and so forth, you know, 60 years ago.
And so, some of the other connections I want to mention.
So you mention how the quads are related to the intestines, and that’s really interesting because obviously the quads help with, yes, the knees, but they also help to stabilize the hips with the rectus femoris a little bit.
And then, you know, I think another point too that’s worth mentioning is that a lot of times when people have a tight low back, what’s actually happening there?
Well, like you said, it’s not just like the guts angry and then therefore back pain.
There’s a connection, the connections through the muscles.
So the core muscles are related to your intestines, your small intestines specifically.
And so like you mentioned, if you have an issue there with an infection or food sensitivity, the core muscles will not be activated.
Does that mean you can do sit ups?
Does that mean you can play and have abs?
Yes, you can still have those things.
But when we test the muscles for the reactivity and, and basically like stabilization ability, we find that they’re not activated like they need to be.
And so what happens is the muscles on your back, the erector spinae muscles which go along your entire spine, they’re these huge like rope-like muscles, they tighten up, they try to stabilize things to protect the spine.
And that is usually the tightness and pain that people experience.
The other thing people experience is, you know, when it comes to the large intestine, we have the tensor fossil out of the TfL muscle, which is on kind of the front of the hip and turns into the IT band.
So if you’re a runner or some kind of athlete, then you know, if you’ve ever had IT band syndrome or some kind of tightness, a lot of times that goes back to gut health.
But the other muscles related to the large intestine is the quadratus lumborum, which is kind of on the back sides and it connects from the top of your pelvis and goes up and connects to the bottom of your ribs.
And that’s a huge stabilizer for your spine and, and for your core as well.
And so again, what we find is if there’s an issue with, let’s say the large intestine, then you don’t have the quadratus lumborum stabilizing things.
And so then you have the erector spinae muscles, the rope like muscles along the spine that tighten up.
And sometimes you can have other core muscles tighten up because of that.
Remember, tight muscles occur because your body’s trying to protect itself, not just because of no reason.
So when we jump into these things with low back health, you know, yes, adjustments can be helpful.
Yes, acupuncture can be helpful.
But if it’s an issue that keeps coming back, majority of the time it goes back to your logo, your your goes back to your gut health.
So Doctor Tim, you mentioned, OK, what things are going on with gut health?
Well, you touched on a few of them already, most of them I would say.
So bacterial imbalances, OK, fungal imbalances in the gut, parasites in the gut and food sensitivities.
Those are probably the top, top contenders for sure.
Occasionally you can have like gut irritation from, you know, if you’re getting too many oxalate foods, too many foods high in salicylates, too many foods high in lectins, you know, things like that.
But it’s probably on the more minor side.
So to kind of be direct doctor Tim, when it comes to bacteria and fungus, I, I like to group this together because if people have any kind of gas or bloating, they have some kind of bacterial or fungal imbalance.
And so if you’re a patient, if you’re like, yeah, I got this low back issue and then I have gas, OK, you’ve got a gut microbiome in balance, you need to fix that in order to help the low back.
If you have bloating, same thing, gut microbiome in balance, you need to fix the bloating.
Whereas, you know, parasites can also contribute to bloating, but I would argue that parasites are a little bit less consistent with issues.
But I would say if you don’t have bloating or gas, then you know, but you still have chronic low back pain, inflammation that is chronic like disc bulging, disc issues that just aren’t healing well.
I would say I find parasites to be a huge key in that.
But the other thing that’s easy to look for is food.
So the top foods that people are sensitive to are gluten and dairy.
There’s other foods as well like nightshades, corn, soy, chocolate and things like that.
But the majority of the time, if you wake up 1 morning and your back is killing you, OK, number one thing, you’ve got to look at what you ate the night before.
So if a food sensitivity is what’s driving the gut issues, then if you look back the night before, you’re probably going to find you had either a ton of gluten, you had a ton of dairy, or you had a ton of sugar, or you had a ton of seed oils, OK?
Those are like the top things that typically flare things up there.
And if that’s the case, then you have to focus on avoiding those foods for some time, taking the right kind of natural antihistamines to help calm down the inflammation from that, and then of course, figuring out the right herbs to help heal your gut.
So that’s kind of the kind of as sure as I could kind of make it there, Doctor Tim, but what kind of things do you find is important to mention with patients?
And maybe what else would you kind of add to that or, or, or any tips you would add?
And then we could also, I think it would be helpful to talk about like, hey, if you think one of these things is your issues, what are maybe some common herbs that we find that that patients could try or even maybe specific diets and, and that kind of thing?
Yeah, I, I honestly think the most important thing in the 1st place is the patient patient education piece of what we do.
So obviously having conversations like this may be a bit more in depth and a bit more personalized to the patients that we see in the office.
But I mean, you, you do it just as much as I do.
We have phone consultations that we have with new patients before they come in.
And so with having those phone consultations, we’ll talk about like, hey, so do you find that when you’re working out your abs don’t really want to work all that well?
Like, do you feel like you struggle to stabilize?
Do you feel like, feel like, you know, maybe one side, like 1 glute is stronger than the other?
Do you feel like, you know, you eat certain foods and you get bloated, like what’s the timing on things?
You name it.
How long has it been going on?
Have you sought out other treatment?
You know, there’s all kinds of things that will, kind of take a mini history when we are having these phone consultations with people.
So then that way we can get a good idea of where things are rooted and just kind of express ideas of like, hey, yeah, I, I think it’s probably this, this and this and we, we’ll just have to work through those things.
And this is what things look like if you come into the office.
But with doing that, you know, I always like to talk about, you know, there’s the functional medicine side of what we do.
And if labs are necessary, it’s great.
We’ll look at those, you know, develop a good plan based on that.
But there’s a lot of stuff that’s left out.
And when it comes to pain complaints, labs aren’t going to tell you basically anything.
And so with pain complaints as they relate to gut issues or other internal issues, there are muscle imbalances that will lead to pain.
So let’s take this back to a more traditional chiropractic approach.
So anytime there is pain, there’s typically some sort of myofascial dysfunction or some sort of subluxation.
And so we have to figure out where that is, what’s going on and, and treat those things.
And so traditional chiropractic philosophy says you treat the subluxation by adjusting downstream neurologic tone regulates, muscles regulate and therefore pain improves with what we do in our philosophy.
And you can give your two cents on this too, Doctor Joel, but I think we’re pretty aligned on this.
Our philosophy is more so myofascial tone regulates the bones and subluxation.
And so if you fix that, subluxation goes away.
And so with that being said, a part of our process with, with figuring out low back pain and figuring out if it is a gut issue, a lot of times I’ll go through and I’ll figure out, OK, well, you know, if quads are weak, ABS are weak, Well, yeah, that’s a small intestine issue most likely.
But we can then stimulate the reflexes for the small intestine, stimulate Chapman’s reflex and rub over the VRP, you name it.
And if that improves it by placing a calming stimulus into the small intestine through the nervous system and it strengthens that muscle, it tells us, OK, well, that’s tight end, but that is one piece of that whole process.
Beyond that, it’s not like your abs and your quads are going to be the only muscles that are weak.
And so very, very common that I’ll see that one side of glutamine piriformis will be weak, weak as well.
And so you’ll basically exaggerate, somebody will be standing with one hip just stuck way out to the side.
And so their spine will be all curved and they’ll get lumbar disc issues, you name it, super, super common.
And so if that’s an issue, we can then figure out, OK, well those muscles are weak.
If I stimulate the small intestine again, is that going to correct those?
And so if it, when it does, that tells us, OK, well, these aren’t necessarily classic small intestine related muscles, but they are pointing to the small intestine.
And so all of our indicators will kind of funnel towards this underlying gut issue.
Those ones are super common.
There are other malfascial things that we can do to assess and see if your, your body as a whole is holding on really, really, really tight and it causes tension and low back.
There’s like a ligament stretch thing that we can do to see if under stretch, sustained stretch things let go, but instead they’ll guard and, and that will be corrected by correcting the small intestine oftentimes as well.
And so there’s a lot of different things that we’ll do to gather these indicators for dysfunction.
We will, you know, say somebody has a SIBO issue or a gut issue, and has some low back pain, but they’ve got Constipation.
You know, we’ll push up on the ileocecal valve, push up on the valve of Houston, see if those things are neurologically stuck closed and not working properly.
And when we create that weakness off of another muscle, we can then figure out, OK, well, just the small intestine fix this too.
And so everything, everything related to the complaint, you know, low back pain indicators, gut indicators, valve indicators, all of those things should funnel towards the same common root, which is the gut.
And so very, very important that we gather, gather indications for every single symptom that a patient has.
And so I’ll go through and find as many things as I can because not only is it awesome for us to be able to, I guess, track progress using as using those to see improvement each visit, But when somebody’s ABS don’t work or somebody’s glute me doesn’t work or when they bend over and touch their toes and they can’t do it.
And then you correct a small intestine issue by treating the Chapman’s reflex and then they can magically touch their toes or even put their palms on the floor.
That is a whole lot more believable than like, hey, you know, I pushed on this, poked on this, rubbed this reflex, you know, told you to take this supplement and that’s going to fix you.
It can come off a little funny sometimes, but if you say, OK, you couldn’t touch your toes and because of all these muscle weaknesses and treating these reflexes and all this stuff, we corrected that and it’s related to the small intestine.
There’s objective feedback in the visit that tells the patient we have made improvement to the neurology.
And so there’s a bit more buy in with that.
And so I like that aspect because if somebody has pain and you’re able to correct that or improve it and along with range of motion and other things like that, immediately on a visit, somebody’s like, Oh my God, this is really cool stuff.
I can’t tell you how many patients I’ve had where I haven’t touched your toes or try to.
And they’re like, I can’t do that.
And then we treat a reflex and all of a sudden they’re like, Oh my God, I’ve never done that before, touch my toes.
And it’s just from treating the small intestine where they need related reflexes.
There’s other examples where that’ll happen too, but that’s honestly the biggest one.
It gathers, gathers these indicators, funnels it, you know, sees where it’s going and then treats that underlying issue, which is usually the small intestine.
So anyway, on that note, let’s kind of get into, you know, what are some practical steps to, to fix these things, maybe some general herbs, things like that.
I would argue the most common thing that people have going on here is some sort of microbiome imbalance.
Whether it’s bacteria, fungus, parasites, they all kind of tend to be lumped into the same category.
It’s just a small intestine dysbiosis food somewhat common.
Those are a bit more general as far as recommendations go.
And it mainly from an at home perspective, involves like a food journal to help figure out what’s driving stuff.
But herbs.
So Doctor Joel, why don’t you tell us for each of those things or whatever you would like to add, what are some of your go to nutrients that you’ll get for this stuff?
Yeah, for sure.
So if it’s bacterial or fungal issue, meaning hey, they have bloating, they have gas, we jumped in with the muscle testing, you know, and and Doctor Tim, I apologize, I need a side tangent on this just a little bit in regards to like what about stool tests, right?
A lot of patients ask about stool tests.
We talked about this in our gut episodes, but essentially the stool test can sometimes be good.
They’re sometimes very inconsistent and was at a seminar this last weekend and essentially they’re talking about how, you know, the top SIBO Dr. in the world, this guy that’s considered the top SIBO Dr. He always sends a stool sample to two different lab stool companies because they’re going to find different things.
And so it helps them have a bigger picture.
And I’m like, wow, that’s really discouraging for, you know, doing, you know, lab tests because, you know, it’s like, man, who knows if this is even the full picture?
It sounds like it’s not.
And so now Doctor Tim, we don’t run it.
We don’t run a ton of stool tests because, you know, in general, we, you know, we offer it to patients.
But what we find is it gives you a little bit of information, but like for example, it’s it, it’ll show you bacteria well, it doesn’t usually catch fungus very well.
It definitely doesn’t catch parasites well.
But even if you find a perfect test here for bacteria, what herbs are needed to fix the problem?
The lab test doesn’t show you that.
And there’s 25 to 30 different things that we’ll use for bacterial imbalances.
So what we do is we love muscle testing.
The muscle testing allows us in the office to muscle test the different reflexes on patients using the homeopathic vials as well to test, OK, what’s going on here?
What herbs do you need?
And we get really, really specific results of that.
So number one for bacteria and I would say fungus, those are pretty closely tied.
But I would say olive leaf is probably number one.
I would say an herb called Malia is number 2.
I have found that astragalus tends to be helpful, not the top one necessarily, but also, but very helpful in the long run.
And then also an herb called Uznia that’s spelled USNEI finds that those tend to all test well enough for me to recommend them to people.
I find in general with fungus that yeah, olive leaf is usually good and Alea is good, but golden thread is amazing.
Occasionally gold and seal and Morinda, those can be really helpful.
And then for parasites I find black walnut and artemisia, which is Wormwood.
I find there’s a ton.
And then I would say like Morinda, like really high dose Morinda occasionally.
Those are probably my top recommendations there.
And then as far as nutrition goes, I would say if you have any gas or bloating, like usually following a low FODMAP diet, it’s really, really helpful.
But what I’d also recommend doing is looking up things like high oxalate foods.
You can look this up online, high oxalate foods, high salicylate foods.
Salicylate is spelled SALICYLATE, high salicylate foods as well as foods high in anti nutrients with that up as well.
And then look up like an antifungal diet.
Antifungal diet is essentially where you take out like all sweeteners, you take out like all fruit juices.
I’m actually going to read a little bit of this year.
Like Stevie is the only thing that you should really have with that.
But you take out all other sweeteners, take out dried fruit, take out alcohol, take out anything like fermented anything with yeast.
And so in office, what we do is we find, hey, there’s usually 234 herbs that you need.
You need to follow this certain nutrition plan for like 3 weeks and things radically improve over that time.
Sometimes it takes six weeks, sometimes it takes a little bit longer.
But when with the muscle testing, we can be really specific outside of that, it’s a little bit of, you know, like, hey, you probably need to follow this plan, nutrition plan probably for more like 4 to 8 weeks and then try to figure out what herbs are really going to help you.
It’s a little bit more of a kind of a trying and, and kind of trying to figure out things process.
So, that’s generally what I recommend.
Those are the herbs and then that’s the nutrition plan.
Doctor Tim.
And then of course, I didn’t even mention, but a low FODMAP diet can be really helpful as well.
That’s probably the one of the top ones.
I have some really smart colleagues that have said, no, you don’t usually need to do that usually if you avoid the other things like the food sensitivities and the antifungal diet.
But I find a lot of people do really well with a low FODMAP diet.
And so I tend to recommend that a lot.
So, and these are all things that again, you can just look up online, you can find them pretty easily. If you need something like a handout or something, you can always reach out to us, but pretty, pretty easy things to find.
And then of course, we didn’t mention this, but herbs, we love Supreme Nutrition, the herbal company, super high quality stuff and definitely the top herb company that we use here in our office.
So, Doctor Tim, anything to add to that?
I was going to add low FODMAP and then you took it, you know, took it right out of my mouth.
To reinforce your point, I’ve got one patient who, you know, we’ve done all kinds of stuff to get to where her gut appears to be totally healthy.
But as soon as she adds in any FODMAP food back foods back in and get some mess in her back immediately.
It’s like just crippling.
And that’s what that’s always what causes it.
It’s eating Fodmaps.
And so she just always has to avoid them.
I wish, I wish we could uncover more and, and get to where that was tolerable.
But I mean, she’s like, if I got to eat like this and I feel good that whatever, cuz I had pain for, you know, 15 years and now it’s gone, you know, and every now and then, like once a year, maybe it’ll act up and we’ll have to do some stuff.
But that’s that.
But yeah, there’s plenty of herbs.
We’ll use a lot of Andrew Graffis and Morinda, we’ll use Oregon grapefruit, gentian root.
Those are probably pretty common as well.
It just all depends.
Like you said, we’ll use the muscle testing in the office to figure out exactly what patients need.
And so we’ll just have to work through things with patients and see.
So just all depends, all depends is this is of all the topics that we cover, this is not something that we can give, you know, hey, try these three and we’ll see how things do.
That’s why we don’t do a whole lot of telemedicine.
It’s because things just do not tend to sort themselves out all that well if we don’t actually see patients in the office.
So, but yeah, I heavily encourage everybody, if you have some sort of low back pain that’s been around a really long time, you’ve got some maybe some gut symptoms with it, then maybe go find somebody who does the systems healthcare technique near you and then hopefully they can help you out, get it, get through that.
And if it’s all this, if your issue is what we’ve talked about today, usually it takes about six weeks.
Herb day, 1-2 weeks later, do another, two weeks later, do another.
Doing that for two weeks should be good to go.
And your page should be gone.
Things should be totally back to normal.
There are some outliers.
If any of my patients are listening and they’re an outlier, I apologize, but it does happen.
But the overwhelming, overwhelming majority of people, it falls within that category.
So anyway, anything else to add, Doctor Joel, or do we wrap things up?
No, that’s good.
That’s good.
Let’s go ahead and wrap up.
So I’m Doctor Joel Miller.
The practice here is Freedom Health and Wellness.
We’re in Flower Mound, TX.
The website is Dr. joelmiller.com.
You can find us online there.
You can reach out to us if you have any questions.
If you have any suggestions on future episode topics, we’re open to considering those as well.
Otherwise, I hope that this episode has been helpful for you and definitely consider going into our podcasts and checking out.
We’ve, we’ve done 100 and you know, 16 other episodes.
So if there’s a condition you’re dealing with or loved ones dealing with, we’ve probably made an episode on it.
So search around and see if there’s anything there that may help you.
Awesome.
I’m Doctor Tim Augustyniak here at Flourish Functional Wellness Center in Bentonville, AR.
If you have any questions, comments, concerns, feel free to find me at flourishfwc.com.
At the top of the page we have links to all the socials.
At the bottom we have all the contact info for the office, so let us know if you want us to chat about anything else.
And thank you everybody so much for listening.
Blog post
Chronic low back pain is one of the most common health complaints, affecting people of all ages and activity levels. While injuries, poor posture, and muscle strain are often blamed, these factors don’t always explain why pain keeps coming back.
Many people experience temporary relief from stretching, massage therapy, chiropractic adjustments, or physical therapy, only to have the stiffness and discomfort return days or weeks later. When this happens, it may be worth looking beyond the spine itself.
In some cases, chronic low back pain may be influenced by underlying issues such as gut health imbalances, inflammation, food sensitivities, and poor muscle activation. Understanding how these systems work together can help explain why some people continue to struggle with recurring pain despite trying multiple treatments.
Low back pain isn’t always caused by a structural problem alone. While muscles, joints, and connective tissue certainly play a role, recurring pain patterns may develop because the muscles responsible for stabilizing the spine are not functioning properly.
When key stabilizing muscles become weak or fail to activate correctly, the body compensates by tightening other muscles to create stability. Over time, this constant compensation can lead to chronic tightness, stiffness, and pain.
This is why some people feel better after treatment but notice their symptoms gradually return. The underlying reason the muscles are compensating may never have been addressed.
One of the major concepts explored is the relationship between the small intestine and several muscles responsible for supporting the lower back.
According to the discussion, irritation within the small intestine may interfere with normal muscle activation. This irritation can occur from issues such as:
When these issues are present, the abdominal muscles and quadriceps may not activate as effectively as they should.
These muscles play an important role in stabilizing the pelvis and spine. If they become neurologically inhibited, the body recruits other muscles to compensate.
As a result, the low back muscles, glutes, and hamstrings often tighten in an effort to create stability, leading to recurring discomfort.
Many people assume that tight muscles are the cause of their pain.
In reality, tight muscles often develop because they are trying to protect the body.
If the muscles responsible for stabilization are not doing their job, surrounding muscles work harder to keep the spine supported. This protective response can create ongoing tension that returns repeatedly, even after massage, stretching, or adjustments.
Rather than simply trying to loosen the tight muscles, it’s important to understand why they became tight in the first place.
Your core does much more than create visible abdominal muscles.
The abdominal muscles help stabilize the spine every time you bend, lift, walk, or change positions. The quadriceps also contribute to pelvic stability during movement.
When these muscles aren’t functioning properly, the spine loses some of its natural support.
The body compensates by increasing tension in muscles such as:
This protective pattern may explain why some people constantly feel tightness in their lower back, despite regularly stretching or strengthening the area.
The discussion also highlights additional muscles that may become involved when gut health is compromised.
For example, dysfunction involving the large intestine may affect muscles that help stabilize the hips and lower back, including:
When these stabilizing muscles are not functioning efficiently, other muscles along the spine may tighten to compensate, creating additional stress throughout the lower back.
Over time, these compensation patterns may contribute to recurring stiffness, reduced mobility, and ongoing pain.
Muscles don’t work independently.
They are connected through fascia, a network of connective tissue that transfers force throughout the body.
Because of these fascial connections, dysfunction in one area can influence movement elsewhere.
For example, abnormal movement patterns may contribute to pain that extends from the feet to the lower back or from one shoulder to the opposite side of the body.
Diaphragm function and overall movement mechanics may also influence how force is distributed through the spine, affecting stability and muscle tension.
