Lower back pain
Lower back pain is discomfort, tension, or pain in the area between your ribcage and hips. It can feel like a dull ache, sharp stabbing sensation, stiffness, or muscle tightness. Some people experience constant pain, while others feel it only during certain movements or positions. You might notice it more when bending forward, twisting, standing up from sitting, or even just lying down.
Lower back pain doesn't discriminate. It affects office workers and manual laborers, young athletes and older adults, parents carrying children and travelers hauling luggage. Whether you're in your twenties or seventies, going through pregnancy, menopause, professionally dancing or managing any demanding career in Amsterdam, lower back pain can show up uninvited.
What Causes Lower Back Pain?
The causes are as varied as the people who experience it. Sitting for long hours at a desk weakens your core and compresses your spine. Standing for long hours, whether in retail, healthcare, or hospitality, fatigues your muscles and strains your lower back. Intense travel, whether for work or leisure, puts strain on your back from sitting in awkward positions and carrying bags. Intense physical work that entails repetitive fatigue or accidents.
Carers, whether professional or family members, often spend so much energy taking care of others that they neglect their own bodies. The physical demands of caregiving combined with the lack of self-care create the perfect conditions for lower back pain. New parents face a similar challenge: constant lifting, feeding in awkward positions, and severe lack of sleep leaves their bodies depleted and vulnerable to pain.
Stress and poor work-life balance create muscle tension that settles in your lower back. Life overload—juggling too many responsibilities without rest—manifests physically in this vulnerable area.
There are also medical causes: herniated discs, sciatica, arthritis, scoliosis, or muscle strains from injury. Some lower back pain has structural origins that require medical attention. This is why we always recommend visiting a doctor or physiotherapist first to understand what's happening in your body.
The Range of Motion
Here's something crucial that most people don't realize: whatever area in a joint is not mobilized will, over time, become arthritic. Let me explain what that means.
Arthritis isn't just something that happens to you as you age—it's often the result of years of limited movement. When you don't move a joint through its full range of motion, the cartilage in that area doesn't get the circulation and nourishment it needs. Think of it like a door hinge that's only opened halfway for years. Eventually, that unused range becomes stiff, degenerates, and loses function.
Your spine is made up of multiple joints—each vertebra articulates with the ones above and below it. When you spend years sitting hunched at a desk, you're only using a small portion of your spine's available movement. The areas you're not accessing—the extension (backward bending), the rotation, the lateral flexion—start to degenerate. The cartilage thins, the joints stiffen, and what began as occasional discomfort becomes chronic pain and limited mobility.
This is why range of motion is not a luxury—it's a necessity. If you want your spine to serve you well into your later years, you need to move it in all the directions it was designed to move. Regularly. Intelligently. With control.
Pilates is an excellent method for addressing range of motion while simultaneously keeping your bones healthy and robust. The apparatus—the reformer, chair, and cadillac—provides resistance through springs, creating the kind of weight-bearing and resistance training that stimulates bone density. This combination of full-range movement with light to moderate resistance is exactly what your skeletal system needs to stay strong and vital, protecting you from both joint degeneration and bone loss as you age.
Why Pilates Works (And Why It's Different)
Most exercise approaches focus on muscles. Pilates focuses on joints and movement. This is a critical distinction, and it's precisely why Pilates is so effective for lower back pain.
Joseph Pilates designed this method to be practiced and acted upon joints—not to isolate and pump up individual muscles. It's a movement practice that teaches your brain how to coordinate your entire body, strengthening you in totality rather than compartmentalizing muscles into separate "ab day" or "back day" workouts.
Think about it: your lower back doesn't exist in isolation. It's connected to your pelvis, which is connected to your hips and legs. It's supported by your abdominals, influenced by your ribcage and shoulders, and affected by how you breathe. When you only strengthen one area—say, doing endless crunches for your abs—you might build impressive muscles, but you miss the good movement rhythm that allows all these parts to work together efficiently.
This lack of coordination is often what causes lower back pain in the first place. Your spine doesn't know how to move fluidly through space. Your pelvis doesn't know how to stabilize while your legs move. Your ribcage doesn't know how to stay organized while you reach overhead. These disconnections create compensation patterns, and compensation creates pain.
Pilates, Posture, and the Lower Back
When we work with lower back pain at Pilates Practice Amsterdam, we're not just trying to "strengthen your core" (though that happens). We're teaching your entire body how to organize itself around your spine.
Posture isn't about standing up straight—it's about dynamic alignment. It's about your pelvis knowing how to find neutral, your spine knowing how to articulate vertebra by vertebra, your shoulders sitting in the right relationship to your ribcage, and all of these parts maintaining that relationship while you move.
On the reformer, the chair, and the other apparatus, you'll learn to move your spine in flexion (forward bending), extension (backward bending), rotation, and lateral flexion. You'll explore these movements with the support of springs, which provide feedback and assistance. You'll strengthen the deep stabilizers that support your spine while simultaneously mobilizing the areas that have become stiff and compressed.
This is how we address the range of motion problem. This is how we prevent future degeneration. And this is how we reduce pain—not by avoiding movement, but by restoring intelligent, coordinated, full-range movement.
When your joints move well, when your body knows how to organize itself efficiently, when your movement rhythm is fluid rather than compensatory, your lower back stops screaming for attention. It's supported. It's mobile. It's doing what it was designed to do.
A good part of our clients in Amsterdam Oud-West have reached out to the studio due to lower back complaints, and you can simply read our reviews to see how much Pilates helped them work through this. We work in close alignment with your doctor or physiotherapist. Pilates isn't a replacement for medical care; it's a complementary practice that helps you build lasting strength and resilience.
What We Offer
Lower back pain doesn't resolve with occasional effort. You need consistent practice, and we guide you through that process at our studio in Amsterdam Oud-West. We teach you movement that respects your contraindications—working within your body's current limitations while progressively expanding what's possible.
First, we help your back muscles come out of ongoing contraction, stress, and tension. Only then do we strengthen them. Trying to strengthen muscles that are already gripping and overworking makes the problem worse. We release, then we build.
You'll develop awareness of your body's patterns—understanding why certain movements trigger pain, how your posture contributes to the problem, and what you can do when pain flares up. We teach you how to move through your full range of motion safely, restore joint function, and integrate your entire body into coordinated, purposeful movement.
This is serious work for people ready to commit to their wellbeing. If you're looking for quick fixes, Pilates isn't for you. But if you're ready to invest in understanding your body, protect your joints from future degeneration, and move with ease for decades to come—we're here. Your lower back deserves better than temporary relief. Let's make that happen together.