Lower back pain and hip extension

Hi, just wanting some advice please.
Since I was a teenager I've generally always been prone to back pain. I discovered when I was younger that leg raises and sit ups helped alleviate the pain.
Fast forward about 14 years and I determined I had severe anterior pelvic tilt. Working on this also greatly helped and stopped back pain for quite a long time.

However, probably about 2 years now I've had some degree of chronic lower back pain. I also get tightness feeling like I need to 'pop' my sacrum but never can do it. If I sleep on my stomach or lie on it at length I also have back pain.

I recently discovered that doing leg raises with my butt on a foam roller causes significant relief and also releases the tightness. I've been playing around with variations of sit ups on inclined benches and they all seem to help as well.

If I do standing hip extensions though, the pain is aggravated.

I've had difficulty in progressing with foundation pe1, and am wondering if there is an obvious correlation of an imbalance here? Does anyone have any advice or experience?

 

Hi David, what i can understand from your words is that you have discovered by yourself a lot of things...casually, and I repeat again casually.

I think that this word should be no longer in your vocabulary.

The problem seems to be aggravated in the years and seems also that you have never searched for a professional diagnosis.

Actually, this is not the place for personal diagnosis. no matter the experience of PT, an orthopedic, kinesiologist, asking suggestions via the web is the worse solution because your case must be evaluated face to face and it is something that I highly recommend to you. receiving a suggestion in a public forum can make the situation even worse than now.

Haha, yes I thought you would say something like that and I agree with you.  I guess I've been hesitant to go see a professional as when I have in the past, there's been a huge focus on addressing symptoms rather than the cause of the problems.  I'm actually seeing a friend tomorrow who's wife is a really good physio so I'll have a chat with them about it.

Ok, so I spoke to my physio friend today and the verdict is:  My quads are still extremely tight, and I'm hardly engaging my glutes at all when I should be using them dominantly.  When I've been doing the hollow body position or anything involving the abs, I've been completely failing to engage the lower abdominals.

She gave me some exercises and stretches to work on to fix the issue so I'll be doing them throughout the day to really try and reprogram my body.  I'm probably going to have to go back to 3x12 or 5x12 on the hollow body hold judging by how it feels now.