One of the most followed fitness educators on YouTube has tens of millions of views on a video called "How to Fix Low Back Pain (Instantly!)." On a podcast, he admitted his back still goes out about twice a year. He's one of the most knowledgeable people in fitness. And his back still seizes up on him.
Mine went out putting on my pants. Not during a triathlon. Not during a heavy lift. Putting on my pants.
That's the thing about back pain. It's rarely about the moment it happens. It's about everything that was already wound up underneath.
If you have recurring back pain, you know the cycle. Something goes out. You rest. You stretch. You see someone. It gets better. Then it happens again. There is no shortage of fixes and some have been viewed tens of millions of times. Every approach has its believers. And yet the cycle continues for a lot of people, because most treatments address where the pain is rather than what's causing it to keep coming back.
Back pain is the leading cause of disability worldwide. Most of the protocols people cycle through address the symptom. Fewer address the underlying movement patterns that create the vulnerability in the first place.
PT, chiropractic, and yoga each have genuine value. Chiropractic care has solid research behind it for acute back pain. Physical therapy builds strength and teaches body mechanics. None of that is wrong.
The problem is that recurring back pain is often a muscle imbalance problem stemming from inefficient movement patterns. The back goes out in the same place repeatedly because the underlying pattern hasn't changed. Most treatment approaches interrupt the cycle temporarily. The question is what interrupts it for good.
The cycle works like this. Back goes out. Body guards against movement. Guarding creates more tension. Tension creates more pain. More pain creates more guarding.
Most people are told to expect this. "Once your back goes out, you can expect it to keep going out." I heard that from doctors and practitioners for years. But that's only true if the underlying pattern doesn't change. The nervous system learned that pattern. It can learn a different one.
Movement is important for back pain recovery. The research agrees on that. The distinction that doesn't get enough attention is what kind of movement.
Effortful, corrective movement — the kind that shows up in most PT protocols and a lot of yoga — asks the nervous system to perform while it's still in a guarded state. That has value. It also has limits.
Awareness Through Movement lessons work differently. Especially once the acute inflammation has settled, the lessons are designed to maximize efficiency in movement and minimize effort. Small, slow, exploratory movements. Nothing forced. The instruction is always to do less than you think you can.
Many lessons are based on early developmental patterns — rolling, crawling — to reorganize the musculoskeletal system from the ground up. They work to even out muscle imbalances through the torso. And critically, many of them address the spine indirectly. Rather than telling you to move your spine, the lessons focus your attention on your limbs. What we're actually after is getting the spine to move in all directions. Flexion and extension. Sidebending. Rotation. Counter-rotation.
A spine that moves well in all directions is a spine that stays out of trouble. Spinal movement keeps the discs hydrated, lubricates the joints, and improves communication between the brain and the rest of the body. The nervous system, instead of bracing against movement, starts to get curious about it. That curiosity is where the change happens.
This is what that fitness educator identified: The muscles supporting your spine are constantly calculating safety. When that calculation goes wrong — even for something as ordinary as leaning over — the back seizes. Feldenkrais lessons are specifically designed to retrain that calculation. To teach the nervous system that movement is safe, in any direction, at any time.
My own story
I had a history of back pain going back to high school. My golf team had to forfeit the rest of our season because we only had four players on the women's team — and my back was out.
As an adult, I had occasional back pain and a team of practitioners to help me get back on track. But deep in perimenopause, it all caught up with me. The recurring pain was a signal that my underlying patterns were asking for attention. I ignored those signals. My doctors reinforced the belief that this was just how it would be. Once your back goes out, expect it to keep going out.
Then it went out badly. Not the usual "my back is a little sore" version. The "I think something just broke" version. I went to the doctor. Nothing was broken. I was given pain pills.
When the pills wore off I went back to what I knew. Yoga. Stretching. Eventually PT. Some of it helped temporarily. None of it stopped the cycle.
In desperation, I tried a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement class. I had never heard of it. The instructor kept saying the same thing: do less than you think you can. Don't push into a stretch. Move in a range that feels easy.
That was the opposite of everything I'd been taught.
I started doing the lessons daily because I was scared of the pain coming back. Something else started happening that I hadn't expected. After years of trying to fix my posture, I began standing upright without thinking about it. The chronic tension I'd carried in my back started to ease. Not because I'd strengthened my core. Because something had shifted in how my nervous system was organizing my body.
I was 47. That was twelve years ago. My back has never gone out since. Not once. But I do have a consistent Awareness Through Movement practice. And, I still run, bike and swim.
Awareness Through Movement lessons work at the level of the nervous system. The slow, gentle movements aren't about building strength or flexibility. They're about giving the brain new information about how the body can move.
When movement is painful or frightening, the brain narrows its options. It holds certain muscles in constant tension. It stops trusting certain movements. These audio lessons gently expand that map. The brain starts to register that movement is safe. The guarding begins to release.
That's not a metaphor. It's how motor learning works. The nervous system is plastic. It learned the pain pattern. It can learn something different.
I felt different enough that I enrolled in a four-year training program and became a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner. In my private practice, I saw a version of my own story over and over. People who had done everything right for years. PT, chiropractic, yoga, stretching. They came to me as a last resort, most of them convinced they were broken.
They weren't broken. Their nervous systems had learned a pattern that was very hard to shift with the tools they'd been using.
Some of them, when they paused everything else and focused only on ATM lessons for a period of time, had significant changes. I'm a movement educator, not a diagnostician. I can't tell you why any individual's back hurt or why it stopped. What I can tell you is that the pattern I saw in my practice matched what I had experienced myself.
More effort wasn't always the answer. Sometimes the answer was learning to move differently, with less force and more attention.
That's still the answer I come back to, twelve years later.
