The plan was two nights in Portsmouth, the Spinnaker Tower, the Historic Dockyard, and a lot of walking. A proper girls’ weekend with an itinerary written in a Notes app and everything.
What actually happened was that I spent Saturday afternoon lying on a hotel bed googling “why does my lower back hurt after walking” while my friends went to the Hard Rock Cafe without me.
So this is not really a travel post. It is a post about what I learned when a city break quietly turned into a wake-up call.
The Plan Was Very Ambitious and I Was Very Unfit
Here is what we had scheduled for Saturday. Dockyard in the morning. Gunwharf Quays after lunch. Southsea seafront in the afternoon. Dinner in Old Portsmouth.
That is a lot of walking on hard surfaces, carrying a bag, in shoes I bought for how they looked. I had not walked that far in one go since roughly 2019.
By about two o’clock, something in my lower back had gone from “a bit achy” to “actively refusing.” I had to sit down on a wall like a Victorian lady having a moment.
The embarrassing bit is that I thought this was unique to me. It is not, at all. Low back pain probably affects around one third of the UK adult population each year, with lifetime prevalence estimated as high as 84%.
It is also not a minor issue that we should all just get on with. Research summarised for Arthritis Research UK notes that low back pain is the leading cause of disability in the UK, and has been for at least twenty years, affecting roughly one in six adults in England.
I had been treating mine like a personality quirk. Turns out it is the single biggest cause of disability in the country.
Sunday Morning: Looking Up a Chiropractor in Portsmouth
I want to be honest about how this went, because I did not do anything sensible on Saturday. I took paracetamol, complained a lot, and went to dinner anyway.
Sunday morning I woke up worse. And instead of driving home in that state, I did something I have never done on a weekend away: I looked for local help rather than waiting until I got back.
That is how I found the Ground Chiro team, a GCC-registered practice in Portsmouth. I did not have an appointment that morning, and I am not pretending I got a miracle cure before checkout. What I got was the realisation that I had been carrying this for over a year and had never once had it properly looked at.
I had rearranged my entire weekend around a body I had never bothered to get assessed. That is the actual story here.
What the Guidance Actually Says
When I got home I did the reading, because I wanted to know whether I was being dramatic.
The NICE guideline on low back pain and sciatica in over-16s recommends considering manual therapy, which includes spinal manipulation, mobilisation or soft tissue techniques such as massage, for managing low back pain with or without sciatica.
The important caveat, and I think this matters, is that NICE recommends it as part of a treatment package that also includes exercise, with or without psychological therapy. Not as a standalone fix. Not as a magic click that undoes a year of sitting badly.
That framing made it click for me. I had been looking for one thing that would sort it out. The guidance is describing something more boring and more realistic: a combination, over time, with movement as the backbone of it.
Back pain also is not spread evenly across the population, which is worth knowing. Analysis of English primary care records found persistent inequalities in consultation rates for low back pain between 2004 and 2019, with higher rates in more deprived areas. This is a public health issue, not just a personal failing about posture.
The Bits of Portsmouth I Did Actually Enjoy
I do not want to put anyone off the city, because it was genuinely lovely and none of this was Portsmouth’s fault.
Southsea seafront on Sunday, at a completely different pace, was the best part of the trip. We sat. We had coffee. We looked at the sea for a genuinely unreasonable amount of time and nobody complained about the schedule.
The Historic Dockyard is brilliant, but be realistic about it. It is enormous and you will be on your feet for hours. Build in sitting-down time rather than treating rest as a failure of ambition.
Gunwharf Quays is fine but it is essentially shopping, and if your back is already unhappy, wandering a retail complex is not the recovery you think it is.
What I Would Do Differently
Wear proper shoes. Genuinely, that is number one and I resent it.
Split the walking days. We did everything on Saturday and nothing on Friday, which is exactly the pattern that gets you.
Take the small bag. I carried a tote on one shoulder all day, which I now understand is a fantastic way to make an existing problem worse.
And the big one: do not save your health admin for when you get home. I have said “I will book something” about my back for over a year. It took a weekend away and a wall in Old Portsmouth to actually make me do it.
The Actual Takeaway
I went to Portsmouth for the sightseeing and came home with a GP appointment and a genuine intention to move more.
That is not the weekend I planned. But of the two versions, the one where I finally stopped ignoring something is probably worth more than a photo at the top of the Spinnaker Tower.
If you have been telling yourself your back is fine for longer than you would like to admit, consider this your nudge. You do not have to wait until you are sat on a wall in a strange city to take it seriously.
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