7 Simple Core Exercises That PREVENT Low Back Pain

7 Simple Core Exercises That PREVENT Low Back Pain

– Brad Heineck, physical therapist. – And we are the most famous physical therapists on the internet. – In our opinion, of course, Bob. – Today we’re gonna talk about seven simple core exercises that prevent low-back pain.

I practice many of these myself Brad, I don’t do all of ’em, but, I think you do a lot of ’em too, don’t you? – Oh yeah, right, but the concepts you know, there’s a lot of different exercises, these are real good ones and I think these are good ones for everyone to start out with.

But the concepts that we’re gonna mention are really important to understand so that you do things properly. – Sounds good, we’ll get to it in just a minute, but if you’re new to our channel, please take a second to subscribe to us.

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All right Brad, take it away. – Okay, so we’re talking about the three concepts, I kinda got people interested in that, I’m sure everyone’s just salivating to find out what they are. The first one is: maintain range of motion throughout your spine.

In other words, the spine has joints between each vertebrae, two joints, facet joints, all the way up and down your spine. – Let me grab one here. – We have to keep those moving and if they maintain motion, it’s gonna maintain health of the spine.

So we wanna have normal range of motion, that means you can bend over, touch there, you can bend backwards. – We don’t want ya doing that. – You can rotate. – We don’t want you bending over like that, without, like, as an exercise.

– Right, but… – We’ll show you a different way of doing it. – Right but you know, the whole idea is we need motion. – Yeah – And the next one is a neutral spine, now this is something we’re gonna get into and we’ll show you but there’s a certain position that particularly your lumbar spine needs to be in to maintain the discs and the facets in a good strong healthy position.

And a third thing is core strengthening. A lot of people have a idea that core strengthening means stomach or abdominals, which is true, but your core muscles are around your whole trunk area. So the core abdominal muscles, the extensor muscles in the back you got obliques and we need wanna work out all of ’em.

– Latissimus dorsi goes into that. – There you go. – Even the buttock, – Right. – goes up in the – Yup, you bet. – gluteus maximus goes up into that area. – So let’s go through the first one, this is one that, these first three are to maintain range of motion.

Now you can do this one in your bed. Working on the floor, carpet or floor probably works best for all these but you can do ’em on your bed you know if you have a hard time with the knees or you have an injury or your elderly and your not safe getting down to the floor, do ’em on your bed that’s fine.

Here we go, this one, Hook Line Rotation I call it. You bring your feet together, your knees together gently, you can have a pillow under your head to be more comfortable and you’re just gonna rotate– Oh thank you Bob, now I know he cares.

There we go. And we’re just gonna rotate back and forth. Notice my shoulders stay glued to the floor and my hips come off, one hip comes up here and that’s where you get the rotation element of the range of motion.

– You’re getting rotation of the spine. This is a great one that almost everybody can do, this is one that we have the elderly do. I have people that are in severe back pain. If it hurts going in one direction, don’t do that direction to start of with, just work it the other way.

So if it hurts going to the left like this Brad, don’t do it, just go to the right for a while. And you can even do a little bit of stretch on the end can’t ya? – Yup you can get over and really stretch if you wanna get a extra stretch over there – Bring your leg over, yup.

– Yup, there you go. – So kinda like a little dancing kick there isn’t it. – Yeah. – A little dancing dun tuh dun tuh. Okay next one Brad! – Okay can we move on Bob? All right, the next one is Double Knees to Chest.

Particularly if you’ve got stenosis, this is a good exercise for that. Bring your knees up here, you can grab here and stretch with your hand. – If it really bothers you to bring both up at the same, you could bring one up first and then bring the other one up to follow.

So you could go up, hold that one there and then bring the other one up. Like that, you know I’m just saying if some people are really tender. I have a patient right now, she has a hard time bringing ’em up like this.

She’s used, she is actually gonna use a belt that goes around under here. – Yup yup, a strap. – Uses that to help assist. – Yup that’s a great way to do it. – You bet, and then the last one. You wanna show the last one? – Extension line, yup.

So with extension you could flip over in your bed or you can do this on the floor. A lot of the times it works better on the floor ’cause it’s a little more of a solid surface. This is absolutely the one I do every morning and I also do at one in the afternoon, a set.

So you put your hands below your shoulders and you’re gonna work on starting to extend the back. Now this is kind of a passive motion in that I’m doing the work with my arms, the back’s just kinda coming along for a ride.

But I’m working as far as pain will allow me. – Right. – Or as my body will allow me, ’cause initially when you start this you may be pretty tight because you probably haven’t been doing this and this isn’t a motion that you normally find out throughout the day and all.

So I’m gonna go ahead and work on extension and eventually what I hope to do is get all the way up here. The key here is that you’re not lifting the pelvis up like this. The pelvis stays down on the mat or on the floor, on the bed, and the rest comes up like this and eventually you can work on getting more and more extension.

– Again all of you should be pain-free, that particular exercise you notice I did not do it because I have a condition called spondylolisthesis or if you got stenosis or if it’s painful you do not do that.

I never do that one it’s not good for my back. Most people is. – It’s good for probably 80% of the population – Right, yup. – But yeah we have our special people here don’t we. – I’m special, thanks Bob.

Okay now the next one we’re gonna talk about– – Keeping the spine in neutral. – All right and this really works best on a firm surface, it’s much harder on a soft bed. – Yeah I don’t know that you can do it on a bed very easily.

– So if you’re on the carpet or firmer surface, you take your hand and you put it right above your belt and you should be able to get your fingers there and then you can arch your back up, and then push it down and then go halfway in between just so you can slip your fingers under a little bit, tighten up your stomach muscles and your core muscles and maintain that.

That’s neutral position and then see if you can maintain that. I’m gonna put my fingers there so I can feel if my back is moving or not. Now some people just bringing a knee up to here, their back will arch more because they have weak core muscles but once you get good at this you’ll be able to keep your back in that neutral position.

You can do single knees to chest. – So Brad you’re trying to keep your back pressed up against your hand correct? – Right right we don’t want it to arch up higher. – Right if he’s not able to keep it, it’s probably too intense to start off with then and you may have to do a lower level activity.

– Right, but usually a single knee to chest – Usually you can start with single knee to chest, yeah, this is the starting point. This is the one that almost anybody can do. – Right, so if you do that like, I’m gonna go into bicycles next which is a good core exercise.

– Yeah that’s, this one’s, this one you got to have some core strength in order to be able to perform. – ‘Cause if you did this and my, if you can look at my pelvis here, if I arched way up like this.

That’s not neutral, we want to get that stomach back down where it belongs. You can also do double knees to chest and maintain that neutral position, like that. – But it’s, again, that’s a more advanced.

– Right, it is yup. You’ve gotta, if you’ve been doing sit-ups for a long time you may be able to do that. But you work into it, okay. – That’s what I’m doing Brad. – There you go. – So you wanna – throw me that pillow up there? – Oh sure.

– There you go. – I’m gonna get of the floor I think. – And this is appropriate that I’m doing this one ’cause it’s called the Superman. (laughing) So I put the pillow underneath here lengthwise like this, I can go ahead and use a towel here and basically what I’m gonna do is I can do double arms, I can start of with single arm even.

– Yup. – And you can go single arm and single leg right Brad? – Yup, and then we’re working these posterior or the rectus spinal muscle groups and if you do the alternate like that it really does a good job of covering hip muscles as we mentioned the gluteus maximus is part of this.

The lower back muscles all the way up into the upper traps and the shoulder muscles. – And I can do the two superman like this. – Yup, bring your, point your thumbs up Bob, some people will find that that’s easier on the shoulder joint.

– Sure and I really don’t like both like this Brad, I think that’s too much to be honest with you. I definitely like the alternative one where you alternate the arms and legs like this so. You hold for, what do you say Brad, 10 seconds? – That’d be a good hold yup, If you can’t hold that long, do as long as you can and build up to it.

10 repetitions is a good, 10 to 15 on all of these exercises is a good one. I think I should have mentioned that earlier but. – Yeah well we mentioned it now. – Yeah quadruped. – Ah quadruped, that’s the final one we’re going to show here.

– Yeah – So this is kind of advanced version of what I just did. – Right – So now again I’m gonna keep the spine in neutral, I don’t wanna be arched too much like this and I don’t wanna be too flat like this, I want it kinda right in the middle.

– There you go. – Then we go ahead and I’m gonna go opposite arm and opposite leg. You can start off with just one arm if you wanna. And you can start off with just one leg if you wanna. And then eventually work up to it, this is a, takes a little bit of a, you know, I make it look easy because I’m talented.

But it’s actually quite difficult to do. – Right Bob. No he brings up a good point but you’re really working core muscles on this more than you think to maintain that neutral spine, so yeah, and 10 of these is good and do ’em slow like this, don’t whip through ’em fast.

Take your time, be precise. – There’s the bird Brad, it’s over there, – There goes the pointer dog. – You have the pointer dog. – Yup – All right. – All right how am I lookin’? – I think, well we don’t wanna talk about that Bob.

– All right. Remember Brad and I can fix just about anything. – Except for. – Broken heart. – There you go Bob but we’re working on it. – Yeah we got time slotted for, I got it on my calender. – Good.

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