At a glance
What this guide can help you understand
A practical guide to assessment, exercise, pacing, and warning signs for people using physiotherapy to manage low back pain.
What should you bring to a consultation?
Share your main concern, when it started, what affects it, current medicines, and any reports or precautions you have been given.
See our clinical assessment approachWhen should you pause and seek medical advice?
Pause routine exercise and seek medical advice for sudden severe change, new neurological symptoms, breathing difficulty, chest pain, major injury, or feeling acutely unwell.
This guide is educational and does not replace diagnosis or urgent care.
Low back pain can come from irritated joints, muscles, discs, reduced conditioning, or several factors together. A physiotherapist does not treat an MRI report alone: the assessment connects your symptoms with movement, strength, nerve function, daily activities, and your goals.
What Happens in an Assessment?
Your physiotherapist will ask when the pain began, what makes it better or worse, whether it travels into the leg, and how it affects sleep, walking, lifting, and work. They may check spinal movement, hip movement, lower-limb strength, sensation, reflexes, balance, and functional tasks such as sitting-to-standing.
How Physiotherapy Helps
Treatment is usually active and progressive. It may include education about staying safely active, graded mobility exercises, trunk and hip strengthening, movement retraining, manual techniques when appropriate, and a home program matched to your current ability. The correct exercise depends on your examination; a painful exercise should not be continued simply because it is popular online.
Managing Activity Between Sessions
Short, regular walks and changing position frequently are often more useful than prolonged bed rest. Start with a tolerable amount, monitor how you feel later that day and the next morning, and increase gradually. Your physiotherapist can modify lifting, sleep, and work positions without asking you to avoid normal movement forever.
Seek urgent medical assessment for new bladder or bowel changes, numbness around the groin, rapidly worsening leg weakness, fever with severe back pain, major trauma, or unexplained weight loss. This guide is educational and does not replace an examination.
Textbook basis: Principles are synthesised from Kisner & Colby’s Therapeutic Exercise, O’Sullivan’s Physical Rehabilitation, and Goodman & Fuller’s Pathology for the Physical Therapist.
Clinical sources & further reading
These public resources provide general clinical guidance. They do not replace an assessment or an individual treatment plan.
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