What is the difference between Curable and Low Back Pain Coach?

Curable works on the nervous-system side of chronic pain with education, writing, and brain-retraining; it contains no exercise program. Low Back Pain Coach is a loaded 45-degree back-extension progression, dosed by your logged next-morning pain. Different mechanisms, both evidence-aligned.

Can I use Curable and a strengthening app together?

Yes, and the combination is coherent: one addresses pain-system sensitivity, the other rebuilds load tolerance. Neither duplicates the other. Curable has a 14-day trial, and Low Back Pain Coach is free on the App Store and Google Play, so a week of running them side by side answers the fit question directly.

Which app should I try first for chronic lower back pain?

If fear and stress dominate and exercise has failed despite proper progression, start with the psychology approach. If your back has simply never been loaded in small measured steps, start with a progression. Cleared to exercise and unsure: the app is on the App Store and Google Play, and a session takes about ten minutes. General education, not medical advice.

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Curable vs. Low Back Pain Coach: Alarm or Engine?

Updated August 14, 2026 · 3 min read

I built Low Back Pain Coach. People comparing it with Curable are usually asking whether their problem is more in the alarm system or in the engine. This page maps that difference. Read it knowing I made one of the two apps.

This is general education for people already cleared to exercise. It is not medical advice, and it is not written for acute, severe, or unexplained back pain. If that describes yours, see a clinician first.

Two different theories of the same pain

Curable treats chronic pain as, in large part, a nervous-system habit: an alarm that learned to fire long after the tissue settled. Its tools are education, guided writing, meditations, and brain-retraining exercises, and its case rests on the pain-science literature this site also leans on. There is no exercise program in it; your back never lifts anything.

Low Back Pain Coach treats the same pain from the engine side: my back lost load tolerance and complained about ordinary life. Its tool is one loaded 45-degree back-extension progression, dosed by your logged next-morning pain against your own baseline. The lessons are short. The program is the loaded extension.

Neither theory is wrong. The research says both mechanisms are real and usually entangled, which is why the answer to "which app" is a question about your situation, not a verdict about the apps.

Pick Curable if

Your pain has already shrugged off graded exercise done properly for months; or fear is the loudest symptom, where even gentle movement feels dangerous out of proportion to any finding; or your flares track stress and mood far more than activity. Its subscription runs $7.99 to $15.99 a month billed annually, with a 14-day trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee on web and Play purchases. A million-plus people have used it, and its approach pairs cleanly with any exercise you do elsewhere.

Pick Low Back Pain Coach if

You have the common, cleared, stubborn kind of low back pain, your back objects to loading it, and nobody has ever progressed that loading in small, measured steps. The method is a loaded 45-degree back-extension progression paced by next-morning pain, one movement family, two or three days a week. If you do not have a bench yet, a floor on-ramp covers the early work until you have a 45-degree bench. It is on the App Store and Google Play.

Using both, or neither

The combination is coherent: Curable for the alarm, a loading program for the engine, since one does nothing the other does. And the notebook option remains real for self-directed people. The mechanisms matter, the apps are delivery.

Curable has a 14-day trial. Mine is free on the stores. Run Curable's first lessons and a couple of my sessions, notice which one you reopened without being reminded, and keep that one. Your own behavior in week one predicts your outcome better than any comparison page, including this one.

The app

I built Low Back Pain Coach to pace the same progression from your next-morning pain logs: holds, reps, and a recovery protocol when a flare needs rest. You can run the method from a notebook. The app is there so you still run it in week nine.