The Low Back Pain Solution (DO THIS FIRST!)

If you have ever had back pain or you are dealing with it right now, you know how debilitating it can be. In this video, I’m going to tell you the truth about back pain and what you really need to do to fix it permanently. All too often, you are told to rest in order to alleviate your symptoms. The

So, this video is all about back pain. More  importantly, the truth about back pain. Because look, whether or not you bent over to, let’s  say, tie a shoe and you got a stabbing pain in your back that makes it hard for you to stand up,  or maybe you even just woke up feeling that way and you really can’t move. You can’t bend forward  to brush your teeth because you don’t know if you get back up. Or you can’t put on a sock because  even when you just lift one left off the ground, it feels like you’re not going to be able to get  back up.

Guys, back pain is an extremely common thing that happens to all of us. Up to 90% of us  will have back pain at some point. But what you do about it is where the problems lie. Because  the truth of back pain is the advice that you’re being given is usually directly opposed to the  advice that you actually should be following. And that means instead of resting your way through  your back pain, you need to be working your way through back pain.

So what I did in this video is  I put together a series of exercises in a specific progression. So I’ll show you what you can start  doing right now, even when it’s hurting the most, and where you can get yourself to, to make sure  that this pain never comes back again. Now before I jump into the exercises, guys, as a responsible  physical therapist I’m going to tell you this: there’s a big difference between nerve related  discogenic type pain that goes down your legs and muscular pain. The good news is, that 80% to 90%  of the time it is muscular related pain. In which case everything I show you here is going to be  exactly what you need to do.

In the rare instance that it is a disc related issue, I will tell you  something more encouraging. 90% of those issues are not operated on. And all of those issues,  whether or not you’re going in for surgery and you come out or whether you never have it, but  you still need to treat a disc related injury, are still going to revolve around exercise. Rest  is never going to be the answer. Exercise is always going to be.

And one more helpful thing  that I want to make sure that I point out is if you’re right now in acute pain, meaning you could  hardly move and that’s why you’re on this video, I want you to do one thing for me: watch this  video. I did this before on this channel and it has helped millions of people to get rid  of back pain right away. It is, again, targeted at muscles specifically in your low  back, give it a try first, because it’s going to help you to get yourself ready to do everything  else here I’m going to show you now. All right, so the first exercise we’re all going to do here  is a simple bar hang. But I want to point out something very important here, and that though the  location of your pain might be your low back, the source is almost never the low back.

Because we  realize that the body is a kinetic chain, passing forces up and down through the good old low back,  or in this case, the poor old low back. We know that things like the hamstrings and the glutes are  going to feed into this area, and we know that the mid-thoracic area is going to feed down. So you’ve  got to be cognizant of what’s going on everywhere. But this exercise happens to help us to do a  couple things. Number one: you can see that my feet are in contact with the ground.

I’m trying to  just get a decompression of that area that right now feels like crap. Okay, and the good thing is  if my feet stay on the ground, I’m going to allow myself to relax. These muscles in the low back  are going to actually release and give you some temporary relief without any additional stresses  placed upon them in their most acute, painful stage right now. If it’s joint related, again,  you’re going to have the opportunity to decompress those joints just a little bit to provide you  with relief. All I’m looking for here is about 60 seconds of a hold, two or three times a day,  to start chasing some of that temporary relief to start building upon now in these next exercises.

And so remember I said that prolonged rest was the worst thing that you could do for back pain. The reason is that the long term cause of what’s going on here is almost always weakness. So if  you’re going to rest, you’re not progressing, and the enemy of progress is stagnation. And in  the case of back pain, the enemy of back pain is prolonged rest. We need to get moving and we’re  going to start right now early with this exercise.

It’s just a seated row. And there’s a few benefits  that make this really easy to do at this point in the game really early on when you still have your  problems. Number one: we’re sitting down. So we take away all those stressed that I talked about  when you’re in your standing position. Number two: we’re able to do this either at home with a band  or at the gym with a cable.

But we don’t load ourselves up that much here. It doesn’t matter  how much we’re using it’s the positioning that we’re benefiting from. Because you can see right  here at the bottom, we’re getting a good stretch of the lumbar paraspinals, right? Those muscles  right there that run up and down like cables. The ones that tend to get tight and painful when  we have low back pain.

But beyond that, what are we doing from the top down? You can see that we’re  actually getting good work here of the muscles of the lats in of the thoracic region that’s going to  help in two ways. If we can get better extension through our upper back, then that will allow our  low back to functional more normally. The spine is one connected unit. You got to start moving,  right?

Moving, not resting, moving to get these things to start moving the way they’re supposed  to move. This is the first exercise I want you to do. All right, so the next exercise is called the  reverse hyper. What’s happening here that’s a step up from where you just were is that now we got  to involve those glutes. Ultimately, your key to long term freedom from back pain ever happening  again is going to be strengthening the glutes, working that kinetic chain from the bottom up.

And you can see that all you have to do is support yourself on the edge of either a bed or a bench  and the key is getting above parallel. Right, because we want to make sure that the glutes are  driving hip extension, getting your hips up past parallel to the ground. And to insure that, we got  to lift them as high as we possibly can. Now how does this work the low back? Well, it’s feeding  into the low back, but it’s driving the movement from the glutes up here.

So we’re going to use  this first as a transition to the next exercise, which is actually going to start driving the same  thing, but from the top down. Realizing that the focus on the low back first is going to be a  little bit more intense. So for you to start, I want to make sure that you’re learning how to  drive through the glutes first and then into the low back. And so you’ve worked out reverse  hyper, and now you’re looking for that next exercise up in the progression. Right, and what  we do is we do another version of hyperextension, but this time we drive it from the top down.

Or at least it looks like we’re driving it from the top down. But always when we do any of these  extension movements, guys, we are still driving it from the glutes. You can see that I’m going to  contract here first and stabilize so I can support the low back and then I pull up and lift up with  the upper body. But what’s more important about this progression is we’re still off of our feet,  which allows us to do this at an earlier stage, only four steps in at this p