WaPo Article on Exercise and Back Pain

For the full text, go to:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2005/10/24/AR2005102402020.html

The Readers' Digest (tm) version is that exercising is good for your back,
except that doing back exercises seems to be bad for your back.

The one thing that seemed obvious to me that the article didn't address
(don't know whether the underlying study did) was the possibility that
people who were the most likely to do back exercises specifically were
also the ones most likely to be doing them *because* they have bad backs.
In other words, the bad backs were correlated but not caused by the
exercises.

I'm sure that some back exercises could in fact cause harm, but it just
seems weird to think that that's happening w/ a significant percentage of
the people who do them.

Thoughts?




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