Your Aching Back

by Jaz James

Hey Love,

Nobody tips you for your lower back.

They tip the hair, the heels, the walk you practiced in a mirror until it looked like you were born doing it. They tip the smile. But the part of you doing the actual labor, the part holding you upright in seven-inch heels on a floor that was poured to look good and not to be stood on, the part that stays arched and balanced and on for multiple hours straight, that part works for free. And it keeps the receipt.

You feel it on the drive home. You feel it the next afternoon when you bend down for the laundry and something in your hip says no. You feel it in the morning when the first ten steps to the bathroom are the steps of a woman forty years older than you are. You tell yourself it is just the job. It is the job. But the job being hard on your body is not the same as you having to hand the body over without a fight.

Here is what is actually happening, so you can stop guessing.

When you stand in heels, your weight tips forward onto the balls of your feet, and your lower back has to arch harder than normal just to keep you vertical. Do that one night and you are sore. Do it multiple nights a week for months and the muscles along your spine and the front of your hips get short and tight and angry, while the muscles that are supposed to be carrying you, your glutes and your hamstrings, quietly clock out. Your body picks the lazy way to stay upright because you gave it no other option. Your aching back and hips are not weakness. It's workload.

You cannot quit gravity and you are probably not quitting the heels. So, you need to manage it. Here’s some things you can do at home or at the club.

None of this is medical advice, it's what's worked for women on their feet all night. Your body is your own, so listen to it and check with someone who knows your back if anything feels wrong. Links to exercise demos are in bold.

Prevent your aching back before the shift

Ten minutes before you leave the house, get on the floor. Cat-cow first: on your hands and knees, round your back up toward the ceiling and drop your head, then reverse it, dropping your belly and lifting your gaze. Slow. Ten times each direction. It loosens the whole spine before you go ask it to work.

Then glute bridges. Lie on your back, knees up, feet flat, and push your hips toward the ceiling until your body makes a straight line from knee to shoulder. Squeeze at the top, hold a few seconds, lower down. Do twenty. This is the one that matters most, because it switches your glutes back on before the heels switch them off. Strong glutes mean your back is not the only thing holding you up all night.

Reset on the floor, not just in your head

Physical therapists will tell you the body was not built to hold one position for hours, and that you should change it up roughly every half hour. You cannot exactly drop into a stretch mid-stage. But you have a back room, and you have downtime in it.

Use some of it on a half-kneeling hip flexor stretch. Kneel on one knee with the other foot planted in front of you at a right angle, hands on your hips, and gently push your hips forward until you feel the pull in the front of the kneeling leg. That pull is the hip flexor you have been shortening all shift. Hold thirty seconds, switch sides. If kneeling on a dressing room floor is not happening, stand, grab one ankle behind you, and pull your heel toward you for the same front-of-thigh stretch, with a hand on the wall for balance.

The shoes come off before you do

The single kindest thing you can do for your back happens the second you are off the clock: get out of the heels. Carry flats in the bag, then put them on your feet, the moment the floor does not require them.

Then give the back of your legs some attention, because tight hamstrings pull straight down on a lower back that has had enough. Sit or lie down, straighten one leg, and reach toward the foot until you feel it stretch up the back of the thigh. Thirty seconds a side. Add a standing twist if you have a wall: feet planted, hips square, slowly rotate your shoulders one way and then the other. It unwinds the part of your spine that has been locked in an arch for hours.

Your day off is doing more than you think

Stretching once will not undo years, and one good night does not buy you out. The girls whose backs hold up are not the ones who found a magic move. They are the ones who did the boring thing on repeat. Hold each stretch about thirty seconds, run through them a couple of times, and aim for twice a day, shift or no shift.

On the days you are off your feet, add one more: the bird dog. On hands and knees, reach one arm straight forward and the opposite leg straight back at the same time, hold steady for a breath, and switch. Ten a side, slow and controlled. It teaches your core to brace your spine, which is the difference between a back that complains and a back that gives out.

And if the pain stops being an ache and turns into something that shoots down a leg, goes numb, or wakes you up, that is not a stretch problem. That is a see-somebody problem. A real one, who looks at your actual back. You spend money keeping the outside camera-ready. The frame underneath it is allowed to cost something too.

The body that pays your rent is the only one you get. There’s verse in the Bible that you were fearfully and wonderfully made, and people toss it around like a fridge magnet, but sit with it for a second. It does not say you were made to be used up and thrown back. It says you were put together on purpose, with care, by someone who thought you were worth the work. Stretch it, strengthen it, get it out of the shoes, and pay your body with rest.

It earned it.

*****

Jaz James is the director of Strip Church and founder of Lace Warriors, a strip club ministry that serves entertainers in West Texas and Northern Mexico.