The best-sounding advice may be the worst

What sounds like more attractive advice for lower back pain?

"Do these two stretches for 5 minutes per day to eliminate your back pain for good."

Or...

"It's important to understand your back pain and how your mindset can affect your experience of pain. Using short-term relief methods like stretching, massages, and chiropractic adjustments to help springboard you into lifelong movement and training of your spine is how you give yourself the best chance against back pain."

The uncomfortable truth is that you're more likely to listen to people who make black-and-white, definitive statements about health and fitness (or anything else).

And you're significantly less likely to listen to people who give gray, nuanced, but informed takes.

Call it a human flaw or simply a desire for simplicity in a complicated world, but we crave certainty and security.

A nuanced answer to a complicated question like lower back pain isn't satisfying, but it doesn't make it any less correct.

I would love for there to be magic exercises and stretches that I could use that I know with 100% certainty would cure someone's back pain. The reality is that every case of pain is different and unbelievably complicated.

But this only makes these absolute claims highly effective at convincing you they work. If those two stretches cured everyone's back pain, it wouldn't be one of the most common afflictions worldwide.

Here's how you protect yourself from misinformation in an overloaded landscape:

1. Beware of absolute language (that something ALWAYS or NEVER works)

2. The use of fear (telling you something is dangerous or to STOP doing something)

3. A solution being a SECRET that only a particular person knows

4. Someone creating a problem (that doesn't exist) and selling you the solution

5. Avoid silver bullet solutions that sound too good to be true (chances are they are)

Stay knowledgeable out there.

To your good health,

Coach Stephen

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Thanks for reading.

P.S.

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