Do an internet search on the causes of low back pain and you're bound to come up with endless reasons why it happens and what causes it.

Any search engine will come up with thousands of reasons from slipped discs to sciatica to fractured vertebrae or some other trauma which all claim to be the cause of your suffering.

Unfortunately, a large majority of the information on the internet doesn't actually give you any better understanding of the true causes of the back pain. It doesn't bring you any closer to finding a solution and resolving your problem by fixing the cause.

That's because most of the information deals with treating the source of the problem.

Cause vs. Source:

Cause- This is the fundamental reason that you have low back pain. In the case of mechanical low back pain, it's typically a repetitive movement or a prolonged posture. It causes tissues to become irritated, inflamed or damaged. This must be addressed for long term solutions and to let the injured tissues heal.

Source- This is the tissue that gets injured and gives off the pain signal. This doesn't mean that this is the cause of the pain, but it is the source of it. Fixing this won't necessarily fix the cause.

For example, a herniated disc is the injured tissue that may give off the pain signals (the source). But ask yourself, why did the disc herniate in the first place? It's the repeated motions of flexion and extension that made the disc herniate (the cause). By simply going after the herniated disc (the source) you miss out on fixing the repeated movements of flexion and extension (the cause).

Now that cause vs source has been defined, the next step is to clarify what I think are the 3 major causes of low back pain.

1. Lack of Knowledge

2. Lack of Motor Control

3. De-Conditioning

Lack of Knowledge: This just means that the low back pain sufferer doesn't know what's causing them the pain and may inadvertently be keeping themselves in agony. It's pretty tough to fix something if you don't know what's wrong.

Lack of Motor Control: This is where the low back pain sufferer has lost a certain level of control over their movement system. This includes using poor postures, the development of muscle imbalances, loss of mobility in certain joints, or the formation of habitual bad movement patterns (imprecise movements or movement compensations).

De-Conditioning: This is the final component of the three major causes of low back pain and really just means that either because of the low back pain or prior to it, the sufferer just wasn't fit. They didn't have the fitness level (endurance, strength or stamina) to be able to deal with all the forces that their body had to deal with on a daily basis.

So there you have it, the 3 major causes of low back pain.

Fix these causes and you'll fix the pain.