14 PT Exercises for Lower Back Pain

Begin by lying on your stomach. Place your elbows below your shoulders, the hands with the palms on the ground, and onto your toes. This will create a straight line from the shoulders to the heels. Hold this position for approximately 10 seconds. If you are able to maintain this posture and hold longer, you may do so. If you begin to lose posture by dipping down or rolling side-to-side, then you have performed this for too long. The key here is to maintain good posture for as long as you are able to. Take the amount of time you are able to hold the position and complete however many repetitions you need to add up to 60 seconds. This may be either four sets of 15 seconds, three sets of 20 seconds, or even six sets of 10 seconds. If this is too difficult for you, you can perform this exercise by placing your knees on the ground and arms in the same position, and again holding for an accumulated total of 60 seconds with good posture.

this exercise is the glute bridge so we're going to be strengthening the hamstring muscle the low back and the glutes so go ahead and lay down on the ground and first you're gonna make sure that your feet are about shoulder width apart and then we're gonna try to get that pelvic tilt so what that means is we're going to rotate our hips back so our low back is touching the ground once you do that you can double check that and put your fingertips just inside your hip bones and you can feel those deep core muscles activating once you have the pelvic tilt then you're going to squeeze your glutes and raise up towards the ceiling you're going to hold there for a couple seconds and then you're gonna come straight back down nice slow and controlled when you come back down come out of the pelvic tilts and then reset again so we're gonna be working on resetting on each reps that you do for the glute bridge remember squeezing those glutes and coming up to the ceiling as you get stronger and you're strengthening the pelvic tilt you're actually gonna hold it for each rep so remember rotate those hips backward till you have your low back into the ground squeeze those glutes and come up towards the ceiling you'll pause there and then slowly return down to the ground and maintain that pelvic tilt squeeze the glutes and then come back up towards the ceiling you should be feeling this in the glute region or the hip region you're gonna take the elastic band and tie it around your thigh make sure to double knot it'll be right above your knee and this is actually gonna help us to strengthen the glute meet us Allah the muscle on the outside portion of your hip you'll lay back down and again starting with that pelvic tilt rotating back so your low back is touching into the ground you're going to spread your knees apart and then squeeze your glute and raise up towards the ceiling making sure you're going nice flowing controlled and breathing throughout the entire range of motion you'll come back down and then try to hold that pelvic tilt squeeze those glutes push against that elastic band up towards the ceiling again nice slow and controlled [Music]

knee raises lying on your back knees bent feet flat on the ground rotate your pelvis and engage your abdominal muscles so that your lower back is flat on the ground slowly lift your knees towards your chest rotating at the hip and keeping your core tight slowly lower your legs back down and repeat breathe in on the way down and out on the way up squeezing your core muscles as you do so [Music]

[Applause] [Music] russian twist level one start one two three four five six seven eight nine ten relax [Music]

hi I'm going to show you how to do the bicycle grab onto the back of your legs roll it down slowly back is on the ground one knee comes up one leg extends if you need to modify you're going to lay your hands down by your sides you're just shifting from one leg to the other as you go like you're on a bicycle reach through the tips of your toes lengthen the core level two is going to go shoulder towards knee elbows out nice and wide I want you to really focus on rotating these are interor obliques these are the working muscles internal external oblique so you want shoulder crossing over to the kneecap and switch the higher the feet the easier the lower the legs the more challenging so the more parallel you become to the floor the harder it's going to become things to avoid you don't want to lace your fingertips pressing putting pressure on the neck open them out nice and wide exhale as you switch and inhale so you're always taking one full full breath on each rotation keep the elbows out nice and wide we want to avoid choking the neck you're going shoulder to knee as you rotate really focus on lifting into those shoulders coming up as high as you comfortably can the higher you lift the deeper the contraction exhale and inhale and that is how you perform the bicycle

the mckenzie extension press up is an excellent exercise to help improve the health of your low back begin by laying on your stomach and press your shoulders up off the ground as far as comfortable while leaving your low back and legs relaxed

meet to chest stretching lie on your back with your knees bent and your feet flat on the floor gently hug one knee to the chest toward the same shoulder holding behind the back or the front of the knee for about 20 seconds then gently pull uni toward the opposite shoulder for another 20 seconds repeat the same movements on the other side then pull both knees toward your chest gently for 20 seconds

today I'm going to go over two of the biggest causes of a posterior pelvic [Music] tilt what's going on everybody how you doing it's Blake Bowman here with gorillas and fitness and in today's video what I wanted to be showing you are two of the biggest causes of a posterior pelvic tilt which is a postural problem um you know regarding the pelvis to begin with if you don't know what a posterior pelvic tilt is um then I'll explain it to you really quick posterior means behind right so when your pelvis is posteriorly tilted that means that it's tilted back like this if this is the front of your pelvis and this is the back of your pelvis if you have a posterior pelvic tilt it's up like this more specifically if you want to get really technical here there's a bone on the front of your pelvis called the Asis and there's a bone in the back of your pelvis called the PSIs if the Asis comes up higher like this in relation to the PSIs then you have a posterior pelvic tilt typically what you'll experience when you have this too if you're somebody that has a posterior pelvic tilt is your lower back curvature that curve that inward curve that's supposed to be in your lumbar spine your lower back it's going to be gone and your pretty much your lower back is going to be just flat which is not good so this is a big problem it predisposes the discs in the lumbar spine to injury and it can predispose you to a lot of other different injuries too it's a misalignment of the spine in the pelvis and it's definitely something you want to fix the first way you can go about fixing anything is identify what's causing it first right I can show you exercises for this all day but if you're not you know addressing it at that cause level then you're really not going to see a lot of benefit from the exercises that I give you it's only if you address those causitive factors in conjunction with doing the exercises that you'll get the most benefit so this is something I might talk about a lot here on my YouTube channel in the future today I just want to get two of the biggest causes out of the way uh right off the bat here actually I just realized I kept saying two of the biggest causes I'm going to actually be going over three of the biggest causes all right so the first one is standing okay people stand wrong usually that have a posterior pelvic tilt and they'll literally be standing in a posterior pelvic tilt so people like uh waitresses waiters bartenders moms that have babies all of them tend to stand kind of weird this is something I've noticed a lot with my private coaching clients in line um and it's also something I just see in the in the general population basically if you're standing in a posterior pelvic tilt you're reinforcing that position all day long and that's why it's not going away for you right um and that might be one of the reasons why you have it in the first place so typically when you're standing in a posterior pelvic tilt you're going to have this kind of swayback thing going on where it will be tilted that front part will be higher than the back part but your pelvis will also kind of be swayed forward like this too okay so if you're standing at a desk or something or a bar you know it might be easy to do that some people kind of rest like this some people with like trays or they're holding a baby they'll kind of shoot their hips out like this to kind of balance the baby more these are all very very bad and you know one way that I want to teach you a really quick method to know if you're standing like that and how to fix it is to do what I call the toe test okay so I'm going to back up here see if you can see me I'll be a little bit blurry but you should be able to see it basically if you're standing in this posterior tilt position with the hips forward you're not going to be able to lift your toes off the ground like like this without pushing your hips back like that okay so this is a test that you can use to realize if you're standing like that right if you're standing like this and you can't lift your toes up then you know that you're standing in a posterior pelvic tilt with a forward sway of the pelvis so right when you lift your toes up wherever your hips shift back to that's where you want to be standing most of the time so that you can just lift the toes off the ground like this okay so long story short I don't know if you could see that back there guys I apologize about was blurry because I think I went out of uh Focus there but if you cannot lift your toes off the ground then you're probably standing in this posterior pelvic tilt forward shifted you know position okay and if you notice that that's happening wherever your pelvis needs to go naturally when you lift your toes up that's where it should be all the time so if you're somebody that's stands um at work um make sure that you're standing with your hips positioned where they would otherwise be if your toes were lifted off the ground all right so that's one of the biggest causes right there um another huge cause is improper sitting position okay um and I'll show you what that looks like right now all right so out of all three of these causes this is probably the biggest one the biggest contributor okay and the way that sitting can cause a posterior pelvic tilt is actually sitting just in the wrong way okay and what that would look like is this I know this is kind of hard to see people always comment that my black pants blend in with this I apologize for that but basically if you sit with your pelvis pushed forwards like this okay what's happening is your pelvis is actually tilting back can you see that your pelvis is tilting back and your lower back your lumbar spine is actually flexing which means that the curve in it instead of being curved like this okay can you see that it's curving like this okay so that inwards curve is reducing and your lower back is being pushed into the chair you're literally posteriorly tilting your pelvis when you sit like this okay so you cannot have your pelvis out in front of you when you're sitting if you sit like this for like8 hours a day your tissues are going to be adapting and this is why you have a posterior pelvic tilt so the ideal way to sit is to put your butt all the way back into this back rest okay and sit essentially with your pelvis directly underneath your rib cage like this okay my pelvis is in a neutral position right now as soon as you scoot your butt out in front of you like this and then you relax down this is the worst position you can be in if you have you know an existing disc injury already like a herniated disc or something like that you're just going to be making it worse by sitting in this position um so make sure you're not sitting like that push the butt into the back okay and then sit upright so that your rib cage is stacked directly vertically over the pelvis okay so the last big cause of um sway back posture with a posterior pelvic tilt and I keep I'm using these terms interchangeably I don't know if you noticed that typically somebody that has a poster pelvic tilt okay with the pelvis rotated backwards their hips are also going to be shifted forward it's very very common some it doesn't always you know uh you don't always see that but you know like the majority of the time if you have a posterior pelvic tilt you also have a forward shift of the pelvis but the last biggest cause of this is sleeping on the stomach okay um and the reason why this happens is when you're sleeping on your stomach most likely you're propping up your upper body whether that's your head or your face with your arms and your like a pillow most people like will hug aill pillow or something or at least have a pillow on their side of their face when they're sleeping on their stomach and what you know you're doing with your body when you're in this position is the pillow is pushing your upper body backwards and your hips are sinking into the bed okay so you're kind of putting yourself into that posterior um you know anterior which means frontal shift of the pelvis the hips are sinking into the bed and it makes it easier for the pelvis kind of Tuck underneath there like that so um you know don't sleep on your stomach that's the worst position to be sleeping in ideally for postural purposes you should be sleeping on your back you know sleeping on the side is okay um it's definitely not ideal but sleeping on the stomach is certainly the worst position to be sleeping in and you shouldn't be doing that really under any circumstances boom there you have it I hope you enjoyed this video If You did leave me a like down below leave me a comment let me know what you want to see in the future um don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel over here also if you want a little workout that I put together that actually addresses the muscle imbalances that cause an anterior or posterior pelvic tilt then get this workout right over here just click that it'll take you to a web page I'll ask you for your email soon as you enter that in I'll send you the workout that's it for today I really hope you enjoy this video and I'll see you next time

let's try a cat cow exercise cat cow is an amazing exercise that can help with back pain and strengthen muscles in your back don't forget to focus on keeping a neutral spine every time you exercise check out a neutral spine video start on your hands and knees breathe in and dip your back downwards by pressing your stomach towards the floor and look up this is cow position you should feel a great stretch in your back now for cat breathe out round your back upward and bring your head down to look towards your belly button repeat for one full repetition do eight to twelve repetitions for one set increase the number of sets as you get stronger once you're feeling confident with the back movements of cat-cow try something a little harder in the neutral position lift one arm at a time out in front of you holding each for three seconds try stretching one leg at a time out behind you while in neutral position you can even stretch an arm in an opposite leg at the same time to gain more strength and balance you

[Narrator] Child pose. Begin in a crawl position with hands palms down and knees on a mat. Next, slowly sit back, lowering your buttocks towards your heels until a stretch is felt along your back and/or buttocks. Crawl your fingers further out for a deeper stretch. Hold for 15 seconds. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. Slowly return to start position. Perform three repetitions twice a day for five days a week.

seated spinal twist helps to loosen and soften your back arms up twist towards the chair drop the arms down keep your shoulders parallel spine tall take a breath in and as you exhale come around remember to do both sides

hi this is Greg and John from spirit physical therapy and today we're going to go over another easy stretch you can do at the office sitting all day you get really tight hip flexors hip flexors attached from here in your back they go to the front of the thigh so we need a stretch to loosen them up a little bit what you're gonna do is to kick this leg back behind you get to a nice 9090 position you want to tuck your butt so tuck under so you protect your back so you're not over arching from there then you bring yourself forward I should feel stretch in the front of my hip try this out 30 second hold every hour let us know what you think

Support your neck by placing your hands interlocked behind your neck round your lower back slightly to focus the movement to the upper back and slowly Bend backwards for