Posture and Pain Expert skeptical about big myth about back pain

April 13, 2012 - PRLog -- The same message comes from doctors, chiropractors, physical therapists, friends, family, and people on the street.  "Lift with your knees, not your back!"

But San Diego pain and posture expert Matt Hsu (pronounced like "shoe") thinks this approach can actually do more harm than good.  

Hsu is the founder of Upright Health, a small San Diego clinic that specializes in developing individualized exercise and massage programs to help people get their muscles and bodies back into pain-free balance.

"After years of working with people with pain of all kinds and after years of working through my own extraordinarily long list of aches and pains, I've learned a few things. One of those things is that conventional wisdom on lifting is wrong," says Hsu.

"The reason everyone says you should lift with your knees is because so many people's hip and back muscles are too deconditioned to lift properly. Lifting with your back should be a perfectly normal activity. It's not a bad motion for the back. It's a bad motion for weak backs and hips."

By working with individuals to correct body wide muscle imbalances, lifting with your back becomes a much more comfortable proposition, according to Hsu.

"When you lift with your back properly, you're actually relying on hip muscles to help you. People who sit all day have hip muscles that have stopped working, so the back gets strained easily from overwork. When you tell people to lift with their knees, you're just telling them to strain their knees instead.  But if you show people how to train the hips and the whole body to work correctly, you can give them the freedom to do a lot more with their lives than just think about proper lifting technique."

To help spread the word, Hsu recently put out a short youtube video covering the dangers of lifting with the knees. "The world of medicine focuses on what you shouldn't do as you get older. I want people to know what they can do to make sure they can keep doing the things they love without fear of pain."

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Upright Health is San Diego's leader in pain reduction and posture improvement. Focusing on restoring proper muscle balance throughout the body, we work hand-in-hand with our clients to ensure that they understand how to keep themselves independent and pain free.