Welcome to this fitness video on how to reduce
your back pain. My name is Dr. Emma Shapiro and i'm a physical therapist
that works for the Veterans Health Administration
and i'm so excited in this video to show you a couple simple tips
to help you reduce your back pain. Now, I want to
really quickly put a disclaimer in here is that if you have back pain
due to some sort of mechanical injury then please do not do these
exercises; this is for chronic or repetitive back pain.
If you have back pain due to a recent injury recent accident then please check
with your physician first before doing any of these
exercises. Okay so with that said let's begin a
couple simple exercises to help prevent and
reduce your back pain. Now the first one is massage. i'm a
fan of massage and you can actually do it yourself
without having to go anywhere and without having to purchase anything
more than a simple lacrosse ball or tennis ball. If you do have a foam
roller that is also a great thing to purchase
and a great thing to use as well to help just reduce your muscle pain
through massage and it can be used all over your
body but what we're going to do is we're
going to take our ball and we're going to place it about where
our pain is and then we're going to lay down and
we're going to lay down and then we're going to bend our knees
and we're going to lift our hips up a little bit and then do a
little rock trying to find that painful point. And
you may have to move the ball up or down to find that painful point and then you
can just rest there, you can go side to side, you can go up
and down, only you know where your painful
position is so use the ball and just move it
around. And it's a good habit to move it around
maybe a little bit higher or lower as well
to get the other areas that may be starting to be affected as well
by your pain. You're going to bring the ball to the other side of your spine
do the same thing. We do not place the ball
along the spine but beside it, on both the right side and the left side
so that we're getting the muscles which are along
the bone and not on the spine. Good! Okay, now that we've finished with
our massage and you'll find even just doing this
little bit a minute or so here and there will
really really help you but I also want to show you a simple
exercise and a couple simple stretches that will really help hopefully reduce
your low back pain. So in terms of the
exercise, my favorite exercise for this is
actually a hip strengthening exercise because our
hips are basically the cornerstone of our
body. If our hips are strong then our back won't have as much
shearing motion. So to strengthen your hips, you're going
to simply lay down, come on to your side, raise one leg
up and hold. Now if this is too easy you can
take a band and place a band around your knees
and that will provide extra tension. If you hold this for 30 seconds or a
minute, after a couple minutes you'll start to feel
that burn. This is strengthening your hip.
We'll also do it on the other side as well.
Now other exercises could include core strengthening, the stronger our core
is the stronger we will be as well in the
whole body which will prevent also less shearing in
the back and hopefully less pain. So a simple
exercise you can do is, keeping your back nice and neutral, we're going to simply
raise our knees up and we can either tap or if this is too
easy we're going to start elongating
our legs keeping our back neutral the whole time.
Now if this is too easy, we're going to incorporate
different arm motions. Now if this is even too easy, go into a hold.
All the time we want to keep our core and our back
neutral or straight. Now let's go into some stretches so for our low back pain.
We can take both of our knees, pull them in
and hold, feeling that stretch. We can also then bring our legs down
and we're going to rock to the side and then we're going to rock to the
other side. This is going to help stretch more of
your back muscles as well. Rocking to the side during any of these
stretches or exercises, if you feel significant pain
stop and discontinue and make sure then you talk to your physician about
that specific exercise. The last stretch we're going to do is actually
for our hip because hip tightness can be related to back pain, so we're
going to cross our legs, you can do this actually in sitting or
laying down, and then we're going to pull our knee
across our body and hold. Same thing on the other side.
Pulling across and holding.
That's it for these simple exercises to hopefully help reduce
your low back pain! Now you may not feel significant results right away.
Try to continue to do these exercises and stretches
and massages for a couple days or a couple weeks
to really see if it makes a difference in your pain.
Thank you so much!