What is back support?
Back support means external support to the back bone or the spine of your body. Our spine consists of four main regions the upper most region around the neck is called the cervical area, the second one is thoracic are present around the chest, the lumber region or the third area is present around our abdomen and the lower most is sacral region. Although some types of back supports are designed for your whole back, the term back support is most commonly used for lower back or lumbar support.
Back Pain
There are a number of medical conditions that cause back pain. You should also check with your doctor to exclude any medical problems. But a large percentage of our population suffers back pain unnecessarily due to incorrect ergonomic positions in our daily activities. One of the common causes of back pain is improper posture when you are sitting. This occurs when we sit for a long time without a proper lumbar support. Another cause is lifting heavy load in improper way. These back pains usually occur in the lower region of the spine and frequently referred as lower back pain.
Why back support is required?
When we work daily for a long period of time in the office in the sitting position with continuous mental stress or work a lot on the computer than this working may lead towards the occurrence of back pain specially the lower back pain but this pain can be avoided with the use of back support or lumbar support.
How to get proper back support?
There are a number of ways by which your back can get proper lumbar support. We can use back pillows, back belts, back stretchers, back braces, and ergonomic chairs etc. Let us discuss these back supports briefly.
Back pillows
Many of us need to work for a long period of time in our office chair. This frequently causes tension in the back and then back pain follows. But this problem can be simply reduced by using back pillows on your sitting chair. If your chair doesn’t come with back support, you better get a back pillow.
Back belts
There are mainly two types of back belts
- Full back support belts used to support your full back and used usually in spinal injury
- Lumbar support belts used to support the lumbar region of the spinal cord and used for heavy weight lifting and exercising
Back stretchers
As the name indicates it stretches the back muscles and relieves the muscles tension. These are used to decrease nerve pressure and relax the muscles of neck and spine. Back stretcher also increases the blood circulation and improves the body posture.
Back braces
Back braces are used to limit the motion of back bone when the spine is injured. Being injured, even slight motion can cause unbearable pain so its motion needs to be limited with the help of back braces when the spine is deformed due to some reason as occurs in the early age that is in adolescent then its reformation is only possible with the use of back braces. Actually scoliosis is the medical condition in which spinal cord deformation occurs.Scolioisis is less common in adults. So in scoliosis back braces are used.
Ergonomic Chairs
These are chairs used in office with fixed back support. These are used to avoid back pain when you work for a long period of time in the office in sitting position.
