Knowing The Cause Of Your Upper Back Muscle Pain Helps Treatment
Sometimes, we experience upper back muscle pain. Maybe you feel it in your shoulder blades, maybe it’s right in that spot you can’t quite reach to give yourself a massage. Maybe it’s not quite at your shoulders, but it’s working up that way. Upper back muscle pain can happen because of a number of reasons, but you need to know what’s causing it, in order to properly treat it.
You should know that many times, the upper back muscles are used and abused without much thought until they get hurt. Then they affect most aspects of everyday life, which is why it’s so important for you to know how you can treat your upper back muscle pain and get back to living.
Identify the Area of the Back Pain
Often, upper back muscle pain can seem to “float” around the back, which can make it difficult to find the exact location of origination. However, if you can tell where the pain is starting, you can work to ease the pain and get on with your life.
Think back to the time that your upper back muscle pain began. Were you playing sports? Doing yard work or lifting something that was heavy? Whatever it is that you did that caused your pain in the first place needs to be put off while you’re healing. So, if you have an unfinished yard project, you’ll have to leave it for a while because if you don’t, your back pain will become much worse. Remember that you are dealing with an injured muscle and that means that you have to let it heal or hurt it worse.
Remember that many times, upper back muscle pain will go away on its own, but you can help to speed the area by gently stretching the muscle. For instance, if you feel it between your shoulder blades, you might find that you gain relief by gently stretching your arms out in front of you. This will give your back muscles a nice stretch and help bunched on knotted muscles to stretch out a little.
Ice and Massage
Before you decide to just wallow in your pain and pop a bunch of pain pills for your upper back muscle pain, you should consider icing the area for no more than 20 minutes at a time. Make sure that you have your shirt and a towel or cloth between your body and the ice, but this is one of the most effective ways to reduce swelling of the muscle that can cause more pain and even muscle spasms.
The next thing you should do is massage the area. Usually, you will be able to feel the area that is causing the upper back muscle pain and that is the area that should be focused on. By working to gently release the tension, you will also find that your circulation improves in that area and can help your back to heal much more quickly.
Upper back muscle pain is no joke and it hurts – bad. However, when you know how to treat this type of pain, you will find that you’re back to your normal life in no time. Next time you have upper back muscle pain, don’t medicate it, work to heal it. Moreover, for faster results in pain relief, you can also check out washingtonian as well.