- ♪ Bob and Brad, the two most famous ♪
physical therapists on the internet. ♪
- Hi folks. I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- Together, we are the most famous
physical therapists on the internet,
- In our opinion, of course, Bob.
- Brad, today, we're gonna give you 10 tips
on how to stop back pain
with a towel, a belt, a pillow, or a sheet.
- And what do they all have in common?
They're at home.
- Right. There's things you have at home, hopefully.
And these are little things.
It's kind of something you wanna pick one of these,
see if it works. If it doesn't work,
toss it aside, try one of the other ones.
- Right. Exactly.
- So let's start off with the first one, Brad.
Simple lumbar roll. Why don't you grab the one
that we got rolled up there already?
- Yep. So just take a towel and roll it up
like this, take some tape, you can tape it up
like so and you've got a nice lumbar roll.
- Why don't you show them, Brad?
- You're gonna put that right about
at your belt line and you're gonna lean into it.
And if it's too thick, it feels like a big bump
and it hurts, then you need to just take the towel
and make a smaller roll out of it.
Or on the other hand, if you want it bigger
it feels like, oh, needs a little more push on there,
then get a bigger towel and roll it up.
But it'll feel good if it's there.
That's the way you know it's the right size towel.
It's not like, oh, it hurts, but they said I should do it,
so I'm gonna keep it in there. That's not-
- No, it should feel good,
And you wanna do this definitely in your car.
And if you sit all day, I would try it in your office.
And eventually you could buy one
so that people won't talk about you.
- You can look up lumbar roll on the internet.
and there's a number of them. - Yeah, a million of them.
We like the Mackenzie ones, but, you know,
you don't need to do that.
- And by the way, Brad, if you're new
to our channel, please take a second to subscribe.
Our subscribe button's over here on the side.
We provide videos on how to stay
healthy, fit, pain free, and we upload every day.
- Say no more, Bob. - Number one, we're going to
number two. Lumbar roll at night.
So some people actually just take a sheet
and they roll it up and they put it
around their waist because there's
this little gap in here, Brad. - Right.
I'll show that when I lay down here. When you normally
lay on your side, if you lay on your side
there's a little bit of gap right here and
your back sags down in there.
- And then your spine goes along with that sag,
creating pain. - Right.
So if you actually have a roll around you,
and I've already messed up this roll, Brad.
- Oh, Bob. - But you get a roll
would go all the way around you
so that it will fill in that gap.
And then if you lay on your back,
it also gives you a little support there, too, so.
And they have things premade for this too, Brad, right?
- If this works out well with this
and you think boy, and you want to use it
every night, then you can purchase one.
This is called a McKenzie night roll.
And you can, you know, order that online.
And these are, you'll find they work better.
They got a nice little, oops, excuse me.
- This one is too small for you.
- This one's for a smaller person than me.
But the same thing is there, wrap up around here
and on your back and you tie a knot there.
Don't tie a big knot that you can't get off
in the morning, 'cause you'll be upset.
Now we're gonna go to, again, these are all
for different types of back problems.
Give me a couple pillows, Brad.
Two. - Couple means two, yep.
Let's say you're having more of a sciatic type pain.
Quite often, what we'll have people doing,
a lot of times, people with sciatica,
they're lacking the ability to go
backwards like this - Right.
- So quite often, if they cannot tolerate
laying flat on their stomach to start off with like this,
even that starts making their pain worse
or the leg pain worse going down the leg.
We'll actually put a couple pillows underneath
them and have them start laying like this.
- And a lot of times people that have that
leg pain and they can't lay flat, you do this
and all of a sudden it becomes comfortable.
- Right. And then eventually what you do is
you pull away one pillow and then
try laying for a while and then eventually
pull away the last pillow.
- And then you get that straightened out.
You get that range of motion back in your spine.
- So then now once you get to this point,
then you're gonna start doing some press-ups
for your low back pain.
And you're gonna go up just high enough
that you don't want to increase the pain
but you wanna go as far as it'll allow.
And let's say this still gives you trouble, Brad,
- Sure. and you're still getting pain
down the leg. This actually makes
the pain down the leg worse. You might take a folded towel
and put it underneath here, underneath your pelvis.
Just the one side. - Yep. And put that
right about at the belt line. There you go.
- So, and then try a press up, and amazingly
quite often that'll change it enough
that now I can do a press up and it actually
starts to take the pain out of my leg, which
is what you want, or it just makes my pain overall better.
- Right. - So, all right.
Another advanced step to doing press ups
would be to actually take a belt, Brad,
or a rolled sheet.
Should we take the belt on this one?
So you're gonna put the belt around you
and you could do this with a rolled sheet, too.
And you put your hands, you know
your hands underneath your shoulder here,
my hands underneath my shoulder here.
And I'm gonna go ahead and press up
and I'm gonna get a little over pressure
on the back here. - Sure.
I'm showing them to roll this sheet up, Bob, as you do that.
- You're like a cowboy with your lasso.
- Yeah. - So the thing about this
is you can try to move it up and down
a little bit further.
You might have to put your hands back
a little further then, and you can get a little
over pressure on different parts of the back.
- Usually if the press up feels good
and you do this, it can feel better.
And here's that sheet, you would just go over.
And that's how that works.
- Well, quite often what we'll do is maybe
after you've done press-ups for a week
then maybe we'll have you start doing them
with the sheet. - Right, it's kind of a, yeah.
- This is a step up move here.
- Yeah. Progression.
So again, you can move it up and down,
work on the different parts of the back,
always with pain free in mind though, Brad.
- Right? - Exactly.
- We're wanting to make pain better, not worse.
So we're not, you know, part of our model
of our channel isn't to make your pain worse.
All right. How about let's do the one, Brad,
with that big towel right there.
That big one here. - Ah, there we go.
- Yeah. You can roll up a big sheet
or a towel or maybe more like a beach towel.
- Sure. Something with more bulk.
- This works well in a number of different ways.
Sometimes people put it this way
and they just lean over their mid back
like this and stretch. - Sure.
- And there, my back just cracked a little bit.
- Ah, yes. - So gently did it,
but this is good for a mid back one,
a mid back problem.
And then sometimes people just put it this way
and it's just a great way to stretch
all the shoulders and put your yourself in good posture.
And it's good for your back.
- Right. Right.
- And this is a good one just to relax,
you put a couple pillows underneath your head
and just relax and everything and stretch out.
- When Bob's talking about these in particular,
it should feel like a real comfortable position,
like a good stretch. - Right.
All right. Exactly. The other one, Brad, again,
we're gonna go again, we're jumping all over here.
Sometimes mid back problems, sometimes low back.
This is more of a mid back problem, quite often.
- Sure. - What you're gonna do is
you're gonna take a belt and you're gonna
put your hands like this. I'm gonna go up more.
My mid back, that's where I'm having pain.
- Yeah. Let's turn to the back side.
Oh, we gotta get your shirt there.
So it's gonna go.
So the low back we call here and from here on up
we're calling the mid back, so.
- You actually can use this on the low back, too.
- Sure. You bet.
- You can go down lower. Again, this is
going to be a pain-free maneuver.
So I'm putting it like this, and then
I'm actually putting pressure on the belt
by bringing my fists up to my shoulders.
- So he pulling, you can see the white of his knuckles.
He's pulling and putting pressure
to support that part of the body.
- And while I'm doing that, I might do an extension
or I might even do a little flexion.
- Yep. - And it should feel good.
- Right. - If that doesn't feel good,
try a level above it and do the pressure
and pressure and lean forward or lean back.
- Usually, it's one direction will feel good,
and the other one won't, so go the direction
that feels good. - Feels good.
- Always looking for improvement in pain,
like, "Oh, that feels good."
- This is a great way to get a mobilization to
different levels of your back.
And it's really a helpful one.
Even with arthritis quite often, Brad,
this will work out quite well.
All right. Another one, you actually,
just for a matter of comfort, you can put
a towel over the back of a chair like this, Brad,
and you can do, again, this is more of a mid back one,
what we call, and this is little bit higher chair
than we normally would use for this,
isn't it? - Yeah.
This would probably not be the chair
that you would want, but the concept is there.
- And what you're going to do is
you're going to lean back like
this, and we call hallelujah stretches.
Hallelujah.
- I don't say that, Bob does.
- Brad doesn't like that joke.
All right. So you're just going to
lean over here like this, and quite often
that might cause your back to crack
as you stretch over it,
but this is a great one to do throughout the day
because what are we? Like this. Aren't we, Brad?
- When I'm at a computer working for a long time,
I do this one on a, you know, probably
I don't go more than 20 minutes
without doing this stretch.
And it definitely makes a difference
on my comfort level and my work productivity,
'cause I'm less painful. - Right.
Okay. Let's go to another one, Brad.
This is another sciatica one.
And if I can have two pillows here.
- Two. That rings a bell. - Yep.
So let's say the pain is going down this leg, Brad.
What you're gonna do is you're gonna lay on,
put your painful leg on the side up.
- Okay. So this is a painful leg.
The one that has numbness, tingling,
burning, pain, whatever.
- And you're just gonna put
two pillows underneath your feet.
- If you got one big thick pillow,
that might be okay, but we want to
get the feet elevated higher than the knees.
That puts a little rotation into the pelvis.
- And it brings the back up a little bit here.
You don't really have to understand why it works,
but if it does, you're going to be
smiling at us, because if you can find a position
to sleep in at night with your sciatica,
quite often, that's a big find.
And so give this a try.
So the pain's on the leg on the upper part,
and put it underneath the pillows
and see if it takes away your pain.
- Right.
- And then you can fall asleep.
- Sure. And then wake up happy.
- Now this is just a positioning one, Brad.
I can't say I've used this much.
Mulligan likes this one.
If you're having trouble and you're not able to
sit very well with back pain, he sometimes just
has you fold a pillow like this and it raises you
up on the chair a little bit, and also,
your sit bones are kind of off, and it just
it makes it easier for you to get in good posture.
- Yeah. Right.
- You know, they actually do sell even a cushion
like this too on OPTP. - Sure.
- So you can just fold up the pillow,
leave room for your butt in the back.
And it's just easier to sit up straight.
as opposed to without it.
It does make me want to kind of go
into that flex posture. - Right.
- So just fold the pillow, you know,
if you're having trouble on a plane,
of course, they got small pillows.
- Yeah. If you're on a plane and you're bringing
your big pillow in there, this is what I'm gonna say.
It'd be kind of funny. (laughs)
- You're gonna like that.
So they'll probably stop you.
All right.
Thanks for watching, folks.
- Have a good day.