You're not getting old, you just need to stretch
How I got rid of back pain + 4 of my favourite hip health routines
Hello! This is Leyla from A Day Well Spent, a newsletter seeking pathways to more purposeful living.
Here’s what landed in subscriber inboxes the past couple of weeks:
after recently being presented with a restaurant menu of 250 items, I wrote a piece called the tyranny of too much choice
setting our New Moon intentions for the upcoming lunar cycle
a slow travel walking guide to hidden Tuscany complete with all the places I ate and aperitvoed in 🍸
the reasons we enjoy having no one else around
If you’re reading this by chance - welcome! You can enter your email below to ensure you never miss my twice weekly posts (Thursdays and Sundays).
In today’s post I talk about my history with lower back pain, how I got rid of it, my theory that pretty much every person has it but often doesn’t even register it, the sciatica in my household, the importance of hip health and some of my favourite exercise routines to counter the fact we sit on our asses for most of our lives.
The routines are all less than 20 minutes long, accessible to all and require no equipment. You can even do one of them on your bed in your PJs before you go to sleep. I’ve been doing them for years and the effects are pretty amazing.
As always thank you for being here and I hope you enjoy this post!
My early 20s and back pain
In my early 20s there was a time when I couldn’t be on my feet for more than an hour without a dull pressure building in my lower back — an uncomfortable, nagging, low level throb.
This coincided with graduating from university where I had spent most of my time on my feet throwing shapes at various London clubs, to starting an office job where I was sitting at a desk for several hours a day.
The only way I could relieve this pain was to bend at the waist, either by sitting down or doubling my body over whilst standing. It wasn’t uncommon to find me in the middle of the street folded in half and reaching for the floor.
I couldn’t understand why I was having back pain at such a young age; I thought physical discomfort was an inevitability reserved for our later years? Surely youth afforded me a pain-free existence for now? Was I already getting ‘old’?
I eventually made an appointment with my doctor who asked me one simple question that changed the course of my physical wellbeing forever.