Why is it always the little things that put my back out and not something big like moving a sofa?
In: Biology
It is difficult to generalize because there are so many different “little things”.
That said, you may not be bracing to lift things the same way. If you prepare to lift the end of a sofa or a heavy box, you probably take a breath and set the muscles in your abdomen. This helps maintain spinal rigidity and allows you to more efficiently lift loads with your hip and leg muscles. You also likely place your feet and bend your knees and hips a bit differently.
If you grab a small object that is unexpectedly heavy or awkwardly placed relative to your body, you might start lifting in a disadvantageous way and thereby load smaller muscles in your low back with more than they can suddenly handle — potentially enough to strain one or more of them.
This is why you hear things like “lift with your legs, not your back”, and it is also a large part of why people lifting heavy weight for sport (e.g. with loaded barbells) tend to take specific starting positions and emphasize deep breathing and deliberate bracing of core muscles to provide added stability and favorable leverage.
When you do big things, you are being careful. When you do small things, you arent going to pay as much attention.
Because typically the problem isn’t now it is a buildup.
If your back has already been overloaded via repetitive stress then a small thing could be the straw that broke the camels back. It just manifests at a certain time. Basically I threw my back out once in a very nasty way. The reason was one muscle was so overstressed it got careless and tired. During a motion the muscle over pulled and literally moved my spine slightly out of place. Took me a month to be able to sit straight.
It isn’t that my motion was bad, but the system was mid breakage if that makes sense.
Meanwhile when doing big motions intentionally you brace yourself. Though I know someone who did and still overworked his muscle so bad he ripped his entire shoulder off. Lost the use of half his upper body. That was because he ignored the I’m overworking signal because he was transporting a patient and refused to let him get hurt. Ems workers are heroes.
Also to add, other replies are also accurate. There is more than one reason.
When you expect something to take a lot of effort, you prepare your body to exert the required force. This can be conscious actions, like making sure you have a solid footing, and getting down to “lift with your legs,” and unconscious ones, like bracing your core, and taking a breath. Also, when you’re lifting something that’s close to the limits of your strength, you’re probably paying a lot more attention to the signals your body is giving you, and will stop the second anything starts to feel funny. On the other hand, when you don’t expect something to be challenging, you’ll usually just start pushing or pulling from the position you’re already in. This is normally fine, but when the task ends up being harder than expected, something goes wrong halfway through (like losing your footing, and thus your balance), or you repeat the same awkward motion over and over again, injuries happen.
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