Yes, this is r/oddlysuspicious but im tired, and I this broken down barney style as this is a personal issue and I want to know more.
In: Biology
Your entire body is basically a system of muscles, ligaments and bones moving as one big machine. It’s through coordination of all those moving parts that the body moves itself, completes actions, takes load, and generally functions the way it should.
When you have those abnormalities- tight muscles, bad arches and such, your body compensates by doing things like limiting range of motion, shifting load off of some muscles and onto others, and more. All of these can cause chain reactions that upset the optimal balance of all their moving parts. In the back, the literal and figurative backbone of the body, this imbalance can lead to muscle strains, soreness, and degeneration of the tissues.
Here are some examples of how some lower extremity abnormalities can affect the back.
Tight hamstrings: Your hamstrings tendons connect to your pelvis. If they’re tight, they pull on your pelvis and rotate it posteriorly causing your lower back to round more than it should. Since your lower back naturally should have some arch to it, tight hamstrings can decrease this arch and cause pain (sometimes due to excessive pressure on the intervertebral disc).
Weird arches (Too little pronation): One function of the arch is to pronate as the foot hits the ground. Pronation facilitates more surface area of the bottom of the foot to contact the ground, which aids in balance and proprioception. It also helps absorb shock during foot strike. If the arch does not pronate (high arches) and remains supinated, the unabsorbed shock can travel up the leg toward the knee, hips, or back, causing pain. However, overpronation can also be a problem.
Weird arches (Too much pronation): After we pronate at the foot, we need to re-establish our arch to make the foot rigid and push our bodies forward. If we overpronate and never get back to supination, our entire lower extremity might rotate inward. This inward rotation can increase stress at the knee (genu valgum), hip, and eventually carry up to the back, as the entire lower extremity is now poorly positioned.
Poor hip range of motion: If our hips lack range of motion, our bodies will create that motion elsewhere. One example is if our hips can’t extend backward. When we walk, poor hip extension can be compensated by rotating the whole pelvis. What happens when we rotate the pelvis excessively? The shearing forces at the low back increases and can cause pain.
*This isn’t an exhaustive list, just some interesting examples of how things might occur to help wrap our noggin around how things are connected.
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