3 Things to Do Immediately After Hurting Your Back: A Physio's Guide to Acute Pain Relief

By Grant Frost · Physiotherapist • Last clinically reviewed: 28 February 2026

Key insights: 60-second read

• Acute back pain is incredibly frustrating, but you have more control than you think - these three strategies work regardless of whether you've injured a disc, joint, or nerve.
• Down-regulate your nervous system first - pain is a reflection of how threatened your nervous system feels. Deep breathing, heat, and sleep are powerful tools.
• Find your respectful movement window - complete rest is outdated. Gentle walking or mobility work, within pain limits, speeds recovery.
• Local + telehealth support available - personalised physio assessment in Port Macquarie or via video consult.

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0:00 Good day and welcome back to the channel. So today's video is for anybody who has just hurt their back. You're struggling, you're in pain, you're not sure what you need to do to help you get through this experience as quickly as possible. I want to talk to you about three really simple things you can focus on straight away that will hopefully get your pain under control as soon as possible and get you moving and back up to speed as quickly as you can. If you're a member of the channel, there'll be an extended cut of this video that will have a few extra things that you need to consider to help give you the best chance of getting through this as quickly as humanly possible. So let's get into it.

0:30 So before we get started, it's really important to acknowledge how frustrating and challenging acute back pain can be. One moment you're functioning really well, you're feeling good, going about your life, and then in an instant you can be completely incapacitated, and you just have to do your best to fight your way through that. So the concepts that I want to talk about in this video are for absolutely anyone in any circumstance surrounding acute back pain. It doesn't matter whether you've ultimately injured a disc or a joint or it's a nervy issue. These concepts are universal and based on what I find clinically they consistently work. There are absolutely things that you can do that will condense your acute phase and your rehab phase more than you would otherwise expect.

1:30 And so the first and potentially most important thing to get across that if you are in acute back pain is to understand what back pain actually means and what your back pain represents. Pain isn't a reflection of how bad your symptoms are. It is just a reflection of how heightened, threatened, irritated, annoyed, or on edge your nervous system feels at this moment. And this is really important because in order to get you through this acute phase where we want to get you out of this painful, irritated stage as quickly as possible, we need to lean toward things that calm your nervous system more than clicking our fingers and making whatever musculoskeletal dysfunction that's occurred go away. Obviously, we want to do that at the same time, but in those first few hours, in those first few days, we want to look at this through the lens of what your nervous system is doing.

2:30 So, if you've just hurt your back and things are quite sore at the moment, we do want to look for things that down-regulate your nervous system. That can be something as simple as 10 slow, deep, controlled breaths. And I'll leave a link in the description to a video that I put out that you can follow around deep breathing. For some people, it may look like a heat pack. It may look like hot showers, cold showers, a hot and cold contrast shower. It can be doing relaxation techniques. It can be a bunch of different things that you can do in the moment to bring that heightened threatened nervous system down a few gears and you will find in most instances that your pain will come down along with that. Now, obviously, if you have acutely bulged a disc or you've broken something or you've damaged something, you may find that your pain will not go away straight away until that starts to progress to a point where that allows that to happen. The amount of pain that you feel and how debilitating and how persistent that pain is may have more to do with what your nervous system is experiencing rather than just that on its own.

3:30 We need to prioritize sleep because sleep is when your body gets to work at regulating things behind the scenes. If we can get you to a much better state pain-wise through down-regulatory techniques or if you are taking some sort of pain relief, getting to the stage where you can sleep as best as you possibly can will set you up for a faster rehab on the other end. Just know that from a pain medication perspective, things like anti-inflammatories may have a pain relieving quality. But what we know about those things these days is that that pain relieving quality may come at the detriment of how quickly you heal because inflammation is normal. You need to enter into the inflamed, swollen, irritated stage to then exit out of at the healed stage. So, if you have a disc bulge or you've damaged something in your back, an anti-inflammatory may help from a pain perspective, but it may be somewhat detrimental to how quickly we can expedite your recovery at the same time. So, please use that information to make the best judgment call. If you can find other things that relieve your pain that aren't an anti-inflammatory, that would be ideal. But if nothing is working and an anti-inflammatory helps you sleep, where it balances out where the positives outweigh the negatives, then you can make a very adult respectful responsible choice with that information.

4:30 And then while you're working on those things, the next thing we want to talk about is trying to find a respectful level of movement. So the second thing you want to focus on if you've just hurt your back is trying to find some way to incorporate some form of movement into your day. Because you're in acute pain, we absolutely need to respect how you feel in any given moment. But something as simple as walking to whatever level that you feel is genuinely comfortable and tolerable is vital. The days of hurting your back, then putting your feet up and resting until it gets better are behind us, thankfully. The micro movements associated with something like walking are fantastic for your back health and function. Movement is also fantastic with pain regulation.

5:30 But while movement is obviously vital, how this looks for you based on your specific circumstances may be different. For some people, walking may not feel terrible. So, you may find that you can walk as normal. If that is you, then you would walk as far and as often as you felt comfortable based on your symptoms and what they were telling you. For a lot of other people who can barely get up off the couch, we want to find some version of movement that is respectful to your symptoms at a level that still feels like you're doing something. For example, if you do feel like you can walk, but your limit is 5 minutes, then make sure that you walk for 5 minutes as often as you feel you can. If you can comfortably tolerate more, do more. If you can tolerate less, do less. But just make an effort to do whatever level you can more consistently throughout the day as often as you feel your symptoms are comfortable and responsive to that.

6:30 And while walking is obviously the ideal for most people, if your back does not allow you to be standing or moving in any meaningful way to begin with, you may need to focus more on your down-regulatory things first to try and get that nervous system under control so that you can tolerate getting up and moving around a little bit more effectively. But at the same time, movement can be anything. If you're lying on your back or on your side, you may feel comfortable moving your hips or your legs around. You may feel comfortable gently rolling around as you feel is appropriate to you. But we need to make sure that we're doing something. We just need to find what your safe, respectful, comfortable movement window looks like. Then as your nervous system calms down a little bit more and you feel like more movement options are available to you, then you take up that slack and start doing what your body is telling you feels comfortable. Do not rest if you don't have to. If lying down helps relieve your symptoms then absolutely do that to the best of your ability while you're working on your nervous system down regulation. But then as soon as you feel you're able to do something please do something.

7:30 And then if we can pair this up with some mobility exercises to feed some slack into your affected area, then hopefully be able to speed through this process even faster again. So clinically as a physio, one of the most underrated ways that I've found to settle down acute back pain quickly is to focus on things that aren't actually your back and more specifically working on tissues above, below, or in front that may be tight or restricted to feed some slack back into the system from those areas. So, the next exercise that you can try is something that looks like a kneeling hip flexor stretch. The reason being is that your hip flexors obviously attach to the front of your thigh, but they also anchor into the front side of your lower back. By taking away some of those hidden handbrakes, we can also feed into your nervous system's perception of general threat. The more slack you can feed into something, the better you load it up, the safer and less heightened it may feel.

8:30 So, how this may look for you is if you feel comfortable kneeling on the ground, you can place a towel or a cushion underneath when it gets you into this position. Just know that if this is hard for your knee, you can definitely do this off a chair as well. But you can get some good results if you can tolerate getting down on the ground or if you can get down on the ground considering how your back feels. But how this looks, if you're up nice and tall, back stays straight. We're just pressing your hip forwards. We're trying to leave your back knee behind and we're looking for any sense of tightness through the front of your thigh, the front of your hip. If you do feel like your back gets a little bit uncomfortable, that may mean that you are arching backwards a little bit or you're tilting your pelvis a little bit. Try and make as much of the movement directed through the front of your hip as possible to target those areas. Take the tension off your back. Make sure that you are breathing while you're doing this.

9:30 Once you've found a nice version of this tightness, you can go forward. You can go out to the side a little bit. You can shift your hips from side to side a little bit more to find the best angle. But once you're here, the crucial part of this equation, squeeze everything. Tense your hips, squeeze your butt cheek, tense up all those muscles. Hold this tension for 5 to 10 seconds so that when you relax, it will give. And you should feel like you can go that little bit further into the stretch than you could before. Then what you can do is once you've done that, obviously do both sides, but then stand up and walk around. Not only should you feel a little bit lighter and a little bit looser, but you might find your back symptoms are feeling that little bit better straight away. If you can pair this up with that calm, relaxed breathing, some general movements, you are one step closer to getting this to go away as quickly as possible.

10:30 And then if you remember the channel, I just want to go through two extra exercises that you can do from a mobility perspective to feed some crucial slack into that back from the front and from above. So, at the end of the day, it's important to reassure you that if you've just hurt your back, there are absolutely basic simple things that you can do to help get you through this as quickly as possible. Please understand that your nervous system plays a very strong role in your pain perception. And it's not just based on tissue damage or tissue injury. It has everything to do with how threatened your nervous system feels. If you can find ways to down-regulate that consistently, you may be able to get yourself out of pain faster and then progress through your rehab much faster as well.

11:30 Like any ache, pain, injury, or dysfunction, the faster we can get you moving, the more we can feed into your body's ability to heal yourself quickly. What movement looks like for you today versus tomorrow versus how that looks for someone else will absolutely be different. But we need to pay attention to exactly what your body is telling you and try and figure out what is enough and what is too much. And then on top of that, if we can find things around your back, through the front, below, through the front of your hips or above that may be restricted, not only may some of these things actually be part of the reason why you hurt your back in the first place, but by feeding slack into the area, you can create a much nicer, safer, happier environment for whatever's gone wrong with your back to settle down as quickly as possible.

12:30 Pain medications can be helpful. Sleep is vital. There are so many things that you can do to try and get you through this as quickly as possible. You don't just have to rest and hope that things are going to get better quickly. You have control. You can influence how this process feels for you and how long this process goes for. So, if you have any questions, please let me know in the comments down below. If you could also leave a like on the video, subscribe to the channel, click the like button if you found this video was helpful. Please consider becoming a member if you want more depth to this video and other videos that I've already put out. If you are struggling with back pain and you need some professional help, please consider booking an online consultation with me and we can figure out what this looks like for you specifically in real time. But with that being said, hang in there. It is not easy. It may be a crap experience for the next few days, but you do have some control and influence over that as well. Good luck and hope to see you next time. Bye.

Frequently Asked Questions

One key insight

"Pain isn't a reflection of how bad your symptoms are. It's a reflection of how threatened your nervous system feels. Calm the nervous system first, and the pain often follows."

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