Abstract:
Low back pain has become one of the most influential musculoskeletal disorders of
modern society. Exercise has been shown to be very effective in the treatment of
chronic low back pain. The goal of the study was to test the effect of two exercise
intervention programmes (conservative or progressive-aggressive programmes) for 12
weeks on low back muscle strength as well as psychological factors in participants with
chronic low back pain. In total 32 participants were recruited for the study and
randomly assigned to two exercise groups. However, due to medical and work related
reasons a number of subjects dropped out. At the end there were 10 subjects in the
conservative exercise group and 11 in the progressive-aggressive group. Statistically
significant differences at the 5% level of significance were found at the post-test
measurements between the two groups. The results from the present study indicate that
both types of programmes have shown to be very effective in the treatment of chronic
low back pain, but that an aggressive-progressive exercise programme may be slightly
more effective than a more conservative exercises programme.
