Your Back Hurts. Here’s Where You Can Start.
Another article on lower back pain?
That was my first thought as I read through a recent study on walking and chronic lower back pain. The findings were impressive: Walking for more than 100 minutes per day was associated with a 23% lower risk of chronic low back pain compared to walking less than 78 minutes per day.
My immediate instinct was to write a long article explaining it all.
Original from: Volume and Intensity of Walking and Risk of Chronic Low Back Pain, modified by Optimize Chiropractic.
But then I stopped. What would that article really say?
"If you aren’t walking enough, you should walk more, because it's good for you, it can reduce your risk of developing lower back pain and reduces your risk of nearly every disease."
While great advice it’s not actionable and if you’re looking for lower back pain relief you most likely don’t need another article on what you can do to relieve your lower back pain. You need a strategic actionable plan on how to get there.
Telling someone in pain to simply "walk for 100 minutes" isn't just unhelpful; it can feel impossible when walking for 5-10 minutes causes pain.
So, instead of just presenting the research, I want to offer a better approach. This is for the person who currently has lower back pain and wants to use walking not just for prevention, but as a tool to actively start feeling better.
The path out of pain isn't about trying the latest thing on the internet that might help it's about starting where you are and intelligently progressing from there. To do that, we need to use two powerful concepts from the world of rehabilitation: Graded Exposure and Progressive Overload.
Teaching Your Back It’s Safe: Graded Exposure
When an activity causes pain, our natural instinct is to stop doing it altogether. If your back hurts after walking for ten minutes, it’s easy to conclude that walking is causing your back pain.
But the most important part of that experience isn't the pain at minute ten; it's the nine minutes you walked without pain. This is the crucial shift in perspective that I try to help all my clients understand. The discomfort at the ten-minute mark could be happening for many reasons. Maybe your brain has flagged that limit as a threat and sounds a protective pain alarm. Or maybe the supporting muscles and tissues in that area begin to fatigue irritating hypersensitive structures that then leads to pain.
Regardless of the specific factors contributing to the pain at minute ten, the fact remains: you had nine minutes of pain-free movement.
So, what do you do? Walk for nine minutes. Your goal is to find a "dose" of movement that doesn't set off the alarm and doesn't cause a flare-up. This pain-free nine minutes becomes your safe, repeatable baseline.
By successfully moving within that limit, you begin to prove to your body and brain that movement itself isn't the enemy. You establish a foundation of safety and confidence, and from this baseline, we can begin to gradually increase the duration—which is where this principle blends seamlessly with our next one: Progressive Overload.
The ‘Just a Little More’ Rule: Progressive Overload
Our bodies are brilliant at adapting. Quit walking and over time walking will get a lot harder. Start walking more and over time, walking will get easier. That’s progressive overload in a nutshell.
This principle simply means that we need to gradually and consistently increase the demand we place on our body. This steady, predictable increase is what turns a simple walk into a tool to be utilized to start walking without pain.
So, what does that look like?
Step 1: Find Your Pain-Free Baseline
Before you can progress, you need a starting line. The goal is to identify how far you can walk without causing a significant increase in your pain. This number isn't "good" or "bad"—it's simply your data.
Option A: Use Time or Steps. For the next 2-3 days, use your phone's health app, a watch, or a fitness tracker to find your pain-free baseline. You might find that after about 10 minutes of continuous walking, your back starts to ache. Your pain-free baseline, in this case, would be 9 minutes.
Option B: Use Neighborhood Landmarks. If you don't want to use an app, take a walk and pay attention to your surroundings. Notice where you are when you first feel your pain begin to increase. Is it the stop sign? The big oak tree? Your pain-free baseline is a landmark just before that point—for example, the neighbor's blue mailbox.
Step 2: Apply the Progression Rule
Once you have your baseline, the plan is to add a small amount each week. This is the "sweet spot" for progression—small enough to feel safe for your nervous system, yet significant enough to stimulate your body to adapt.
For the Time/Steps Method: Aim to increase your average daily walking by approximately 10% each week.
For the Landmark Method: Your goal is to add a small, noticeable distance each week. You're not aiming for a specific percentage, but for a tangible increase, like walking to the next house's driveway.
What This Looks Like in Real Life:
If your baseline is 9 minutes of pain-free walking:
Week 1: Your goal is to consistently walk for 9 minutes each day.
Week 2: Add ~1 minute. Aim for 10-minute walks.
Week 3: Add ~1 minute. Aim for 11-minute walks.
If your baseline is the blue mailbox at the corner:
Week 1: Your goal is to consistently walk to the blue mailbox and back.
Week 2: Walk to the blue mailbox, and then continue on to the next driveway.
Week 3: Walk to that driveway, and then continue on to the lamppost just beyond it.
The Most Important Rule: Listen to Your Body
Above is a rough guideline. Progress is rarely a straight line, especially when dealing with pain.
What if your pain flares up? If walking to the next driveway causes a flare-up, simply retreat to your last successful landmark—the blue mailbox. Stay there for a few more days until your body feels settled, then try advancing again.
Consistency trumps perfection. Some weeks you may not feel ready to increase your distance. That’s perfectly fine. Staying at your current level is still a win because you are reinforcing a foundation of safe, consistent movement.
This slow progression is how you can gradually expand your capacity, build strength and resilience in your back.
A Place to Start
Whether you're navigating a recent flare-up or dealing with your first-ever episode of back pain, it’s important to see this walking plan for what it is: a powerful place to start.
The same principles you just learned, graded exposure and progressive overlaod, are the key to your entire recovery. The process of using graded exposure to find a safe baseline and progressive overload to slowly do more is exactly how you get back to everything else you love.
Whether it’s playing with your kids, gardening, hiking, or just moving through your day with confidence—you must gradually and intelligently reintroduce variation into your movement.
The journey back to "normal" takes time, it’s a series of small, consistent, and intelligent steps and walking can be a great place to start.