How common is lower back pain do you say low back pain or lower back pain. It’s low back pain and it’s very common it’s almost the number two visit to medical office present for patients in the United States and unfortunately the prevalence incidence is increasing over time so more Americans are experiencing back pain in our industrialized nation. Because we’re sedentary or because of what? Right most injuries are associated with desk and office workers so we see a lot more back pain with individuals of sedentary sitting a lot not changing positions we also have the weekend warrior syndrome where you are sedentary throughout the week and then try to do all your exercise in one bout. So that’s bad? In general yeah you should have a balanced exercise program where you combine aerobic activity with flexibility warm-up cool down and some resistance exercise most days of the week not try to get everything in in one day or two days. Okay that’s interesting because I always feel like people have more time on the weekend so they try to go for there like two hours on Saturday and why is that bad just because your body’s in shock or what? Right because weekend warrior syndromes essentially you injure yourself when you’re not warmed up and not prepared for an exercise and that’s kind of when you see our sprains and strains in the lower back very often or anywhere else in the body. And now why is the lower back the area people get the problems and more than like the mid-back or upper back? Right so there’s a common misconception that we have like upper back pain or traps have all these trigger points many times the upper back pain is really coming from the neck so when we examine patients we often find that the pathology or the problem pain generator is from the cervical spine or the neck mid-back pain is very uncommon I would say and then low back pain is the number one cause. So blame the neck not the upper back. If it’s not getting better in a couple weeks go see a specialist.