Samsonite Lumbar Support Pillow for Office Chair, Lower Back Support for Car, Back Pillow Desk Chair Cushion with Memory Foam, Improved Posture Backrest

I started having pain around 2020 (lost my job thanks to COVID and spent a lot more time sitting on a shitty old couch, which probably contributed to my back problems). I don't really know the specifics of my injuries. Had an MRI but my doctor never even really discussed it with me. I've found doctors to be pretty useless when it comes to back pain. I just know I have a slipped disc (maybe multiple?) in my low back. I've been pretty pain free for the most part since the beginning because I learned pretty early on that I wouldn't have pain if I basically protected the curve in my low back at all times to keep the disc "tucked in," or whatever. I don't sleep or lie on my back if I can avoid it. When I sit I always sit with a lumber pillow if I have one. Usually one like this, but I have a few different ones, like this one I use in the car/movie theater. Sometimes I'll even have to combine them if the chair is one of those ones you really sink into. I also have this one. When I travel I bring all 3, two in my suitcase and one to sit on when I'm on the plane. I also have spent several grand on some La-Z-Boy furniture with the adjustable lumbar support. I always sit with the lumbar support on max, and that's WITH that first lumbar pillow I linked to. It's all about lumbar support for me. And I've found that reclining is more comfortable than sitting upright, maybe because when I'm sitting upright my entire upper body's weight is pushing down on my spine, idk. The fancy adjustable furniture is expensive, but it's been huge for me. But of course I can't just sit all day, you still have to get up every hour or so, walk on the treadmill for 10 minutes, whatever. I started off doing the big 3, read maybe the first 3rd of Back Mechanic. I think I did the big 3 for a few years. Maybe from like 2021 or 2022 to early 2025? It was enough for a while, but then my back was getting worse and I needed something more. So I found out on here about LBA and bought myself a cheap Roman chair on Amazon and started doing back extensions. I just took it slow and everything was fine, no injuries or anything. Saw improvement after a couple months maybe. Looking at my Amazon history, it looks like I bought the Roman chair in March 2025, so I've been doing the back extensions for a little over a year. But I've only recently (maybe the last 4-5 months) started doing more of the full LBA routine. But there are still exercises I skip because I didn't notice they were helping. The one time I did injure myself with LBA type stuff was when I cut out the Jefferson curls for a few months to see if I could get away without doing them. I also have knee and neck issues so I have a lot of exercises on my plate and I'm always looking to see which ones I can cut out. I wasn't sure the curls were helping so I cut them out for a while, but then my back got worse so I reintroduced them to my routine. The problem is my back and especially my hamstrings became more stiff since I wasn't doing the curls for a while (and because I also stopped stretching out on the Roman chair like I'd been doing before). So when I first reintroduced the Jefferson curls I was really straining to stretch to the floor like I'd done before and because of that I injured myself. Waited a few months to heal back up and then tried again after making sure I was properly stretched and warmed up first, and now I've been back to the Jefferson curls for several weeks and I'm feeling better for it. Never should've cut them out in the first place. I'm trying to slowly work a little more flexibility into my back and not be so religious about maintaining that curve in my low back all the time. I'm hoping that with enough strength then maybe it won't be so necessary. Maybe I'll be able to sleep on my back without problems in the future, idk. I'm not a doctor, but to me it's just obvious that my back went to shit because I led a sedentary lifestyle which caused it to be both weak and tight. I've learned to kind of embrace tightness, and it's helped for a while, but you can only gain back so much strength that way, and I feel like maybe with enough strength I can tolerate more flexibility too. But we'll see. But for now I'm pretty pain free 99% of the time and pretty capable beyond needing lumbar pillows and occasional walks on the treadmill. I'm able to go running about once a week (would do more if it weren't for my knees, but my knees are getting better too). The biggest thing about back pain that I've realized is that you have to kind of be a detective. I noticed my back pain in the mornings got worse one time because I started drinking cold brew coffee, for instance. Didn't make sense at first, but then I realized that when I was drinking hot coffee I was standing/walking around my kitchen for 10-15 minutes while I waited for my coffee to brew, before sitting down on the couch to read for an hour. My back is never more tight than it is first thing in the morning, so without that 10-15 minutes to warm up my back, I started having problems after sitting like that for an hour. Because when I drink cold brew I just grab it out of the fridge and poor it into a glass and then I'm on the couch reading. Another thing I noticed that made my pain worse was losing weight. Which didn't make sense at first. Everyone says losing weight is supposed to improve back pain. But I realized that my mattress was a little on the firmer side, and now that I weighed ~30 pounds less, my body had that much less weight with which to depress the memory foam of my bed. So instead of my mattress conforming to my body like it had before, now my body was conforming to the firm memory foam and giving me new pain. I bought a soft mattress topper for my bed and that fixed it. You can imagine why so many people never find relief with back pain, because how are you supposed to pick up on these weird, sometimes tiny triggers if you're always in pain? I think I got lucky by figuring out I needed to protect that curve in my back early on, and that gave me the freedom from pain that I needed to be able to tell when things got suddenly worse.