See also https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK539720/

McKenzie's ideas helped me greatly with back pain but did not help with my neck pain I got later. After some years I discovered I had trouble in my jaw which caused referred pain to my neck and shoulders. My dentist recommended a bite guard for my tooth grinding, at which point the pain quickly localized in my jaw and slowly got better -- maybe it hurts a bit one or two days a month now.

The simplified version of McKenzie is that you have back pain because you don't have enough flexibility to be comfortable in a neutral position and your muscles are pushing against each other, it's like the pain you'd have if you used one hand to squish the fingers on your other hand. Exercises that stretch backwards like

https://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/how-to-do-cobra-pose

really help, although my favorite is Lowen's "Bioenergetic arch" which is terribly obscure (can't find it online except for a comment about it that I wrote on Reddit years ago!) like most of Lowen's work

https://www.amazon.com/Bioenergetics-Revolutionary-Therapy-L...

and not "destined to become widely influential" which is too bad. You stand with your feet together and put your arms straight up and then stretch backward guided by the visualization that your whole body is bending along a circle. You can do it in a standing position whenever the pain reminds you you have a problem and not have to get down on the floor.

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Another "life hack" was that once I had tendinitis in my hands that was severe enough I thought I had to quit programming. I started doing plain ordinary push ups and the problem cleared up in two weeks and has stayed away ever since. Might not work for you but you can't lose trying it.

My wife was resentful the other day about having to lift a heavy treadmill up the stairs for a person who probably won't make a habit of it. I told her that my trainer at the gym told me that the treadmill was the most popular equipment at the gym but also the worst. She'd introduced me to TRX and kettlebells and I felt pretty stupid because I thought kettlebells were somethi