Jesse Connone, Co-Founder of the Back Pain Institute Shares Why Back Pain Occurs

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's Fountain of Youth Summit, which can be found at http://fountainofyouthworldsummit.com. In this excerpt, Jesse Connone the biggest mistake people with back pain make.

The Fountain of Youth World Summit with Jesse Connone, personal trainer and co-founder of the Healthy Back Institute.

Kevin: Lets start with you know how you started the healthy back pain institute? Let's talk about what you had to go through and why you are here today?

Jesse: Sure. I have spent 7 or 8 years working as a personal trainer as you know and been working as a personal trainer, working with clients one on one. Over the years I had noticed there is this reoccurring theme. So many of the people that I work with had injuries that we had to work around and the most common one was back pain, various forms of back and neck pain. And so you know in the 7 or 8 years that I did personal training I got very experienced working with people with these types of conditions like back pain and almost all of the time my clients got better relief from my fitness training than they did their treatments with their doctor.

Kevin: O.k.

Jesse: And so like I said I got really good at helping people identify you know the root cause of what was going on you know why was their body giving them trouble? Why was their pain? And so on. Finally it just kind of clicked and like oh this is it, this is what I really enjoy doing the most. This is what I am the best at and so I along with a friend created again what is called the healthy back institute and you can find us online at losethebackpain.com and as you mentioned our number one focus and mission is to help people with various forms of back pain. And so we have everything from you know highly active discussion forum on our website where people can communicate, ask questions. We have all kinds of people from all over the world helping each other; you know sharing their experiences and so on. We have articles, books, videos, audios. We even just recently started offering a one on one treatment package.

Kevin: Oh, Very cool!

Jesse: Yes so basically you know the focus is to help people you know with back pain because so many people that have back pain, sciatica, neck pain so on, the treatment that they or the treatments that they are getting usually don't work or if they do work it's usually temporary. And we can talk about you know why that is in a moment but the fact is most people who have back pain have it for years and years and years. And actually I can share with you an interesting statistic.

Kevin: Sure

Jesse: We did this survey recently of our customers and that's over 40,000 customers and in the survey we found that 65% of the people who responded to the survey had had back pain for more than a year.

Kevin: Wow

Jesse: and when you break it down you know we had under a year, for one to two years, 2 to 4 years, 4 to 6, 6 to 10. There was actually over 25% of these people who had back pain over 10 years. So it's like a massive problem. And for most people it's a reoccurring problem. It's not something that you get it once and it goes away forever. It typically comes back and we will talk about why it comes back to later on in this call but it just goes to show you and as any person with back pain will probably agree the treatments that are available typically just don't work like I said they don't deliver lasting relief. They may deliver the temporary relief, the pain may go away for a couple of weeks or a couple of months even but its going to come back and usually it comes back worse than it did before.

Kevin: Right! What are some of the mistakes that people make with back pain? What are some of the things that they assume is going to happen? Why don't we get into I know you have the list of mistakes that you have identified as things that happened to the general population who are in pain. What are some of those?

Jesse: Sure There are 7 key mistakes that we have identified you know again in working with 40,000 people one of the things that really has helped us is we just don't sell products you know to help people. We actually work with people personally so if you buy a product from us you may do the program on your own but you actually talk to us on the phone personally.

Kevin: Oh wow that's great . You have an intimate knowledge of what they have been doing.

Jesse: Right yeah, very much though. I see all kinds of people. I get their pictures of them standing in their underwear. So we can analyze their posture. And their muscle balances.

Kevin: Sure!

Jesse: And so we call basically personal support and so we work really closely with all these people. One of the things that I found was a set of 7 key mistakes that people make. We are not going to make a call through all of them in detail but I will go through some of the bigger ones that I think present a larger problem for people. And the first one is not dealing with the problem the first time, like I mentioned a few moments ago.

Most people, who have back pain, have it for longer period of time. And it comes and goes. And one of the reason that is the case because what happens is, you know somebody wakes up one morning and boom their back soar. Or they are outside shelving snow. And all of sudden they say, my back went out. I threw my back out. Or I picked up a box, whatever the case maybe, all of sudden they have this case of back pain. Typically what most people do is they rest a little bit. They might take up over the counter pain killers Tylenol, Advil things like that whatever. If it is bad enough, they will go their doctors. They'll get a prescription strength drug and usually within a couple of days or at most couple of weeks. Most initial cases of back pain will go away.

If you do this minor things to kind of adjust the symptoms like take rest and take medications. The problem is something that caused their back pain flair up to happen. And unless you take the time right then and there to figure out why, what's going on with your body. Why did this happen to me. Unless you take the time to do that then which 99% of people don't again they let the pain go away on its own, it going to come back later. And again like I said earlier again it's almost over it will come back again worst than the first case. Most people like usually two to four months for the pain comes back. So that mistake is usually again, not dealing with it you know the first case. Through the first incident and again like dealing with it what I mean by it is specifically finding out the exact cause of pain. And not just the cause as in offense of the condition somebody might have back pain and go to a doctor and diagnosed with a herniated disc. And so they think the cause of the pain is the herniated disc.

Kevin: O.k.

Jesse: That's the condition. But you have to go deeper than that, you have to go and say, and this hernia disk is causing the pain. Why do I have the hernia or disk? It doesn't happen for no reason. You know there is a reason and there is a cause there. And unlike most people are let to believe. Primarily by misinformation put up by doctors or just lack of information put up by doctors. You know the herniated disc, this just doesn't happen just out of the blue. Like most people are again let to believe. It's something that is building up over the time. It's just that you don't have a blow out or tire on your car driving down the highway, it's a relatively new tire or it's in good condition. This doesn't happen. You know when you wear down the tire. You are driving down the tire with not enough thread. You know your tires were worn down under unevenly because your steering is out of alignment and then you have a blowout. But just that the incidents happen that day. It doesn't mean that it's really building up for a long time.

Kevin: What's a fantastic analogy.

Jesse: So again going again back to the main point here is first mistake is not dealing with this the first time it happens. Kevin : I see pictures that my chiropractors has shown me about stage one, stage two, stage three maybe you can explain that when pain actually occurs.

Jesse: Sure! There is couple of reasons you can feel pain. As far as back pain in sciatica goes. One is muscular pain so you can damage muscle tissue, you know you can strain some muscles. You can have sore and achy muscles. Friends and a lot of people type and soar back muscles and that is because there body is out of whack. There body is out of balance and their body is kind of thrown their body off. And these certain muscles, you know in this case certain muscles of the lower back. They run up and down the spine. These muscles are constantly being overworked. So instead of being out to work and relax like other muscles, these muscles like have constant tension on them because their body is pulling them constantly where if the spine and pelvis were almost in the neutral position. You know there wouldn't be a constant tension. So there is this muscular aspect of back pain. Then there is nerve related pain where a disc could be putting pressure on the nerve. A bone or one of the vertebrae could be putting pressure on nerves. A narrowing of the spinal canal could be putting pressure on the nerve.

Kevin: Right!

Jesse: So you always have to keep than in mind the number one to focus on to is getting to the bottom of it and finding out what is that root cause. And so these physical dysfunctions, you know again you body being pulled out of whack and force to function this way. It is caused by the balances in muscles. Primarily they are several other minor things that contribute to. But the number one factor is muscle balances. And basically what that means is, if you have two opposing muscle groups. Let's say your front of your thighs and back of your thighs. Corte subs and Hamstrings, There are two opposing muscle groups; if those muscle groups are not "Balance" that doesn't mean balance in strengths. Like if you could do 50 pounds on leg extension and 30 pounds on the leg curl. That doesn't mean you are out of balance. But out of balance of same point of how much they are pulling on the joint of those muscles affect.