(upbeat music)
- Welcome, my friends, to the Bob and Brad podcast
produced by Bob and Brad,
the two most famous physical therapists on the internet.
I am Bob.
I'm exactly one half of the Bob and Brad team
and today, I have my guest host.
- Mike Kenitz, physical therapist assistant.
- There he is in all of his glory.
And we're gonna interview Brian Bradley.
He's with the egoscue method.
And if you have back pain, neck pain
shoulder pain, knee pain, any one of those pains,
you're gonna wanna stick around
because we're gonna show you some exercises you could try.
- So what are some common causes of low back pain
and what are two exercises you would try
to give someone to help?
- Let me go to my trusty book here real quick
and then I wanna show you something.
I pulled up, for example, here's the air bench,
the one sitting against the wall.
- [Bob] Yeah.
- And as you can see,
no wonder they took my face out of these book.
Look at these two super models.
When you look at this, that's cat and dog
or cat cow if you come from yoga
and the air bench, well,
there's an easy way to screw up cat dog.
I mean, very simply, an easy way to do it.
When a person gets into a cat dog or cat cow position.
So this is static back.
Right?
This would be amazing.
I call this a silver bullet for back pain.
Your back hurts.
Get down on your back.
Spend 15 minutes there, slow down, breathe.
Well, how do you feel?
This is the air bench, which is the old wall sit
for skiing to train yourself.
That's 1 or 2 minutes, 110 degrees at your knees
with shoes on.
That's another quickie that can help readjust your pelvis.
But when we're talking about cat dog.
So this is the foot is here.
Here's that.
Here's this.
And you're rounded over like that.
And your head's down like that.
So your back is pushed upward into kyphosis.
Like rounding over like a mad cat like this
- [Bob] Right.
- That's cat.
The dog is
here,
look up,
and
okay, so there's the dog.
10 times each way.
Here's how to do it wrong
and increase your spondylolisthesis.
Increase this.
Let's see if you can see me back here.
Real quick.
I'll explain.
This bio charger is a PEMF machine
that emits pulse electromagnetic field
that we use for just overall health and wellness.
So it's not, um,
it is a Tesla coil,
but I know it looks like it's out of Back To The Future
but I can't move it.
(laughing)
Sorry guys, but here's cat dog.
So, 90 90, and then a person usually just goes,
okay you want me to do this, this, this, this.
We look at quality of movement.
They're really pushing into thoracic flexion
and then kind of just dropping out of it and looking up
instead of making a deliberate movement from here.
So let's go 1, 2, 3.
1, 2, 3.
I would rather have one exercise executed perfectly
than 10 exercises done kind of half-assed, right?
- Yep.
- We want the result.
So we go: start in this position looking up.
First movement is abdominal contraction.
Like you wanna go:
1,
2,
3, head goes down.
1,
notice how my t spine and neck have not even moved yet.
This moves first,
shoulder blades come together.
Head look up.
Pelvis moves.
Mid-back,
head.
Pelvis moves,
mid-back, head.
And when your listeners can get on the ground
and start doing that movement,
where it becomes a moveable pelvis first,
hello!
(Bob laughs)
You're actually engaging the pelvic
and lumbar spine movers and rotators.
Imagine what piriformis, obturator, gemellus,
everything else.
Imagine what they're doing
as that pelvis is moving over a fixed femur.
Imagine TFL.
Imagine glute medius minimus.
I mean all these different muscles are going, "Oh."
This is what true biomechanical hip joint movement
should be.
You wanna take somebody with a degenerative hip
and get 'em to move better,
get 'em to quit moving the femur
in a non-moveable acetabulum of the pelvis,
meaning: let's get 'em to move the acetabulum
and pelvis first.
Then, as they start to move, there will be that
congruent acetabular, femur head relationship.
'Cause again, in our opinion,
almost in every degenerative hip symptom I've seen,
and I've seen tens of thousands,
to put them in a frog position or the Thomas test position,
you're actually moving femur
on an immovable pelvis acetabulum.
You're increasing the breakdown!
But when you can teach a pelvic tilt done correctly
without pushing off the leg,
like in these cat dogs,
you're moving that femur head.
Sorry, you're moving the acetabulum
over top of this for the first time,
breaking cobwebs loose, you know,
getting things to move again.
The synovial fluid, which you guys call what?
- Oil?
- Yeah, it's the oil, right?!
Like I remember that from the video.
So you're re-oiling the scarecrow.
No, you're re-oiling the tin man.
Sorry, Wizard of Oz thing.
So ideally something like that.
Another one, Mike, would be, well what?
"Brian, I can't get on the floor
because I have OA in my knee."
Oh, okay.
"My knee's killing me."
All right, well, just sit in your chair,
come to the middle part of your chair.
Don't sit on the edge.
Don't sit way back.
Just relax here, and now,
just let your body sit in crappy posture.
And then if I said to come up out of that
and sit up straight, what do most people do?
They go right up.
They go right to the sternal lift.
- Yeah.
- In the DNS world,
you know the chiropractic DNS stuff,
they'd go, "That's a noxious movement,"
meaning your breathing is off.
For us, it's,
you're going here
because you're gonna throw a ball from up here
and wonder why your condyle is killing you.
Versus pelvic tilt back onto the tailbone,
feet straight, engage the frontal hip muscles
to roll you forward
up onto those two sit bones underneath you,
without popping the rib cage.
So notice how my hand never moves.
My hand's not moving north-south.
It's moving front to back as my pelvis is moving,
but if you see this,
that's that,
that's that noxious-
- Sure.
- So then we could tie that into,
"Oh, Brian. That's why..."
You know, I have a course out called East-West Breathing.
The east-west breathing is an amazing idea
because that would mean that I'm breathing
with my diaphragm and it's pressuring downwards.
So for those of you listening not in the medical world,
picture an umbrella.
And when that umbrella contracts
it just reverses the umbrella.
I know in general, guys, that's not really what happens
but let's just, for all shits and giggles here,
it goes down like this,
and it increases that intra-abdominal pressure.
People even start pooping better.
Let's be honest, if you're not pooping well,
you're not well!
And your breathing could be the cause of that.
Your pelvic tilt could be the initiator of that.
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