For people who suffer from some form of chronic pain, such as people with low back pain or arthritis, it's a condition that has a negative impact on the quality of everyday life. While exercise is certainly no panacea for pain, research has shown cardiovascular and strength training exercise to be effective in reducing some forms of pain.
Back pain is a widely shared affliction in our modern, sedentary society.
It's the most common cause of temporary disability for people under age 45, and a condition that as many as 80 percent of adults will experience at least once in their lifetime. The government's guidelines for treating back pain, issued in 1994 by the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, threw out the time honored prescription of bed rest and endorsed exercise as one of several effective treatments. Even a year later, most reported continued improvements, according to the study. In the later one, researchers surveyed former elite athletes. They found that, although maximal weight lifting and soccer playing had some degenerative effects on the lumbar spine, back pain was overall less common among the athletes than among those in the control group.