Most people have a working mental image of muscles. Fascia is a different story. Think of it as a thin, three-dimensional web of connective tissue that wraps around and runs through every muscle, nerve, bone, and organ in your body. If you've ever peeled an orange and noticed the white membrane underneath the skin, that's a decent approximation of what fascia looks like in one small spot. Now imagine that material covering and connecting everything inside you, all the way from head to toe, in a continuous structure with no real beginning or end.

Your lower back pain almost never comes from one structure. When any one of these is overloaded or shortened, the others compensate, and the whole system starts pulling unevenly.