Lower Back Pain: Can You Touch Your Toes?

The 3rd assessment in the President's Challenge adult fitness test is the "sit and reach."

This assessment tests your hamstring flexibility and is a useful gauge to see how tight you really are. This one measurement will be extremely useful for anyone with lower back pain.

The reason being, many people with lower back issues have very tight hamstring and hip muscles. When these specific muscle groups are tight, they can inhibit hip movement and, as a result, your body must compensate for the lack of range of motion.

Unfortunately, your lower back often takes the brunt of the abuse.

To combat tight hamstrings you must first find out your baseline measurement by following these instructions.

After you know how flexible you are, you can get to work on correcting the problem areas. You'll find that dedicating just a few minutes a day to stretching will greatly improve not only your flexibility, but your posture as well.

The next thing you know, that lower back pain may just be a thing of the past…