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Lower Back Pain After 50 Making You Feel Like You’re 90?
If you’re over 50 and dealing with lower back pain, you may have been told that it’s simply part of getting older.
And while changes in the spine—such as arthritis, disc degeneration, and disc bulges—become more common with age, getting older doesn’t automatically mean you have to live with pain, stiffness, or declining strength.
Your Back Was Made to Move
When your back hurts, it’s natural to move less. You may walk less, avoid lifting, stop exercising, or become cautious about everyday activities. But avoiding movement can create a cycle:
Pain → Less Movement → Less Strength → Less Confidence → More Limitation → Pain
The goal isn’t to ignore pain or push through it.
The goal is to find the right movements and appropriate level of exercise for your body, then gradually build your strength, mobility, and confidence.
Strength Matters More as We Age
After 50, maintaining strength isn’t just about fitness. It’s about staying independent and continuing to do the things you love.
Strength helps you walk farther, climb stairs, carry groceries, get up from a chair, travel, garden, exercise, and keep doing the activities that make life enjoyable.
Your back doesn’t just need to be flexible.
It needs to be flexible, strong and resilient.
That’s why effective treatment and rehabilitation focuses on more than simply reducing pain. It helps you progressively restore mobility, movement control, strength, endurance, and confidence.
Want to See What That Process Looks Like?
We created the outline below to help explain our treatment and rehabilitation approach. All too often patients come to us explaining that they tried physical therapy, but it made them worse. This is like getting the cart before the horse. For more acute conditions, first compression, inflammation and pain need to be reduced. Then you can start working to restore flexibility and strength. That is why we follow these steps:
1. Reduction of pain, inflammation, and compression.To accomplish this we combine therapies like: non-surgical decompression, bioelectric therapy, chiropractic adjustments, non-invasive, laser and infrared therapy.
2. Rehabilitation to restore motion, correct alignment and restore strength.To accomplish this we use treatments like Trigenics, acoustic pressure wave, posture, corrective adjustments and traction, and the five phases of rehabilitation listed below. The rehabilitative exercises progress patients from pain reduction and protection all the way to restoration of strength, resilience, endurance, and optimization of performance. The outline below is an example of what a patient typically would experience. Of course, every patient is unique and their treatment and rehabilitation plan would be tailored, modified and progressed based on their individual findings and response.
Is back pain keeping you from doing the things you love?
We are here to help you find out what’s contributing to your symptoms and create a plan to help you move with greater strength and confidence. Give us a call or send us an email. Let us help you start feeling your age, not twice your age.
Thought for the Month
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.“
Albert Einstein
Joke of the Month
On a plumber truck:
“We repair what your husband fixed.”
Patient of the Month
“In previous years I had taken a piecemeal approach involving many of the same treatments but with little to show for it.”
“I had severe weakness combined with pain in my back that prevented me from doing the most basic tasks in my daily routine. It was low-grade chronic pain started in spring 2023, culminating in foot drop from a bulging disc in August 2025. At their worst my symptoms were paralyzing, given that any movement would cause pain in my core. I have tried massage, acupuncture, physical therapy, yoga, other chiropractic and nothing really gave me the results I was looking for. I’ve had no other surgeries except I ended up having a necessary spinal fusion in 2015 due to a traumatic injury. After roughly three to four weeks, I’ve began to regain my confidence in my body and don’t avoid specific movements out of fear of pain, I didn’t realize limiting the pain had become. Since starting I have seen massive improvements! I feel like I have a new lease on life! I am not saying no to friends’ invitations to go out due to fear I’ll be in pain, and I’ve noticed my humor has come back and I’ve started making plans again. I have gone skiing seven times since starting treatment. Not only am I more confident on the mountain, but I can put the skis on the ski rack, load and unload the car, and sit pain free on the ride too and from the resort! Their attention to my unique situation was clear. I could tell that they were investing a lot of time into crafting a treatment plan tailored to my and they were working together to accomplish this. The holistic approach was the key to my improvement. In previous years I had taken a piecemeal approach involving many of the same treatments but with little to show for it. They created all of the conditions necessary for my body to heal and have given me a home plan to stay healthy, pain free and strong.”
Team Member of the Month:
Dr. Don
Thank you for all your extra assistance with NG, for any uptick in floor support to your thorough notes and details on set ups have been so awesome! Almost as awesome as you! Thank you for keeping it light, bright, and breathing strong!