This article is based on an expert interview with Ashley Mak, DPT, conducted by wikiHow Staff Editors. Ashley Mak is a Physical Therapist and the Owner of Ashley Mak Performance and Rehabilitation, his physical therapy business based in Hoboken, New Jersey. He is also the CEO of Hudson River Fitness and an Adjunct Professor at Kean University. With over seven years of physical therapy experience, Ashley specializes in both pain management and maximizing physical performance. He received his BA in Biology from Villanova University in 2010 and his Doctorate in Physical Therapy (DPT) from Thomas Jefferson University in 2012.
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The reason for your back pain might be more than just your muscles. In this video, Ashley Mak, PT, DPT, highlights the three most common reasons for back pain—muscle aches, nerve issues, and joint pain—and how to tell which one you may be experiencing.
Key Takeaways
- Muscle aches are a common type of back pain that can be caused by hunching forward a lot.
- You can also experience nerve pain if you irritate a disk in your back.
- Joint pain is another common type of back pain that’s caused by the compression of a joint.
Video Transcript
There are a couple different types of back pain that you can experience and it is based on your position as well as the tissues that are involved. For the most part, if you're hunched forward a lot, your back is going to start to ache because your muscles are just holding on for dear life and it can also irritate a disk, which results in some nerve pain, which nerve pain is kind of like those jolts, those pins and needles that you can feel when say if your arm falls asleep, that's more of a nerve issue. So you can have muscle aches, you can have nerve issues, you can also have joint pain too, which oftentimes if you were to lean back and you feel a pinch, that's really more so of a compression of a joint, and that can be associated with some back pain.
