Doctors and physical therapists have long incorporated aerobic exercise into treatment programs for lower-back pain. Movement can simultaneously ease lower-back pain and also strengthen the muscles that support your back. Still, many people with back pain can be hesitant to exercise.
A new study, published Wednesday in The Lancet, offers more evidence on the power of movement. The study found that a regular walking routine can be very effective for preventing the recurrence of back pain. The study focused on adults with a history of low-back pain; those who walked regularly went nearly twice as long without their back pain coming back compared with the control group.
The findings are in line with a large body of existing research that has established an association between physical activity and better outcomes for back pain. A 2019 systematic review found that physical activity lowered the prevalence of back pain. And a 2017 study found that yoga worked as well as physical therapy for relieving back pain.
The new study builds on this research by following patients outside a tightly controlled clinical setting. Mark Hancock, a professor of physiotherapy at Macquarie University in Australia and a senior author of the study, sought to evaluate the effectiveness of a less-expensive intervention that could be easier for many people to access than in-clinic treatment. Hancock and a team of researchers targeted a relatively sedentary sample group.
The researchers collected data on 7.
