hi there I'm Coby Langford, British osteopath here in the UK based at soothe clinic.com
welcome to my channel if you are new do remember to subscribe
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time I put a new video up in this video I want to bring to your attention and
highlight three exercises that people commonly do at the gym which make my
eyes water when I see them. as an osteopath we see the other
side of exercises of gym bunny exercises - we treat the injuries. because
when you go to the gym the goal of a lot of these exercises is to strengthen and
tone the muscles right? so all the exercises are targeted at those muscles
but what a lot of people don't consider or understand or have any knowledge of
is what's underneath the muscles and with the exercises I'm going to teach
you and show you now, in particular, I'm talking about the spinal discs. this
little kind of donut sponges in between your vertebrae. now the number of disc
injuries I have seen caused by exercises at the gym I've actually lost count
normally in young men and women in their 20s and 30s
every single one of them has sat in my clinic room in tears saying "why did
nobody warn me that doing these exercises could cause me this injury?"
because disc injuries have been described by many people to me as worse
than childbirth. somebody left a comment on one of my videos recently saying that
a disc injury that she had was more painful than three child births put
together! I mean that is serious pain. people are put on morphine and it's a
really long hard haul back to recovery. but you know what in all of these cases
it's complete unnecessary to get these injuries
because if you understand the anatomy then you can protect yourself. so that is
my goal in this video, I want to give you the knowledge you need to be able to
protect yourself at the gym. so in this video I'm only going to address three
exercises to just steer clear of and avoid.
because there are always other ways to get the same effect without it having to
injure your discs
now before we get going and I show you these exercises I just want to give you
a little bit of knowledge to make sure that you fully understand why and how
these exercises are potentially going to damage your discs. I don't just want to
give you a fish I want to teach you how to fish! because I want you to be able to
apply this information to all your gym exercises. so if we just have a little
quick look at your spine here... your spine is made of lots of little (I know you
probably know this but I'm just going to make sure) ...lots of little bones it's not
one long bone. if your spine was one long bone you would be like a Tin Man
basically it'd be very difficult for you to move
these little discs that sit between are called discs
because they look like discs and more importantly they look like donuts
they have a bit of jelly in the middle. they're really
beautiful sponges they move out of the way. I mean they're incredible I love
discs! now discs are incredibly strong when they are centrally loaded so as I
said in in the introduction when your disc is centrally loaded (that means when
your spine is straight and all the discs all sat one on top of each other) they
can take the weight of a car, a mini without splitting when without injuring.
but the minute you take your body out of the midline the minute you bend your
spine in any direction, you are completely reducing the protection of
the discs. now there's two types of injuries we see: one is acute
where you break bones or snap ligaments or tendons and the other, which
is much more common and much more important is accumulative. accumulative
stress, accumulative weakening of the discs without you realizing. now when you
side bend you're putting weight down through one side of the disc only.
and doing the most dangerous action that we see is lifting and twisting
if you hold a weight and you twist that
is the most dangerous. if you hold a weight away from your body and raise
to any position where your spine is out of the midline your discs are at risk.
I'm going to show you these three exercises and hopefully you'll be able
to understand why they make my eyes water!
okay so the first exercise (and please don't hate me because I know every
single personal trainer you've ever consulted will have advised you to do
this exercise)... it's the good old sit-up otherwise known to osteopaths as the
good old disc damager! absolutely perfect conditions for damaging the discs. you're
bringing the body up to here, you've got your entire body weight
through one disc... L5 S1 is taking all the strain. it's completely out of its
midline so it's completely unprotected and you you're putting what we call
"micro strains" through the disc. every disc injury patient that I
see has bulged their disc either picking up a piece of paper, tying
their shoes up, or just reaching to pick up their child, and they'll say to me "how
how does tying my shoelaces cause my disc to bulge?" and the answer is it didn't.
it was the end of a very long road of many many years of tiny tiny strains
through the disc. every single time you do a sit-up you're straining the
disc - actually putting micro-tears into the disc, until the disc is eventually
weakened and weakened and weakened and ripe for splitting and bulging. so I'm
not just going to leave you hanging, I'm going to give you an option how to do a
sit-up without damaging your discs. or rather... how to have the same
effect on your abdominal muscles without damaging your discs. now what I'm going
to teach you has come from a man I've studied with, an incredible professor in
Canada called Professor Stuart McGill
who has studied this in-depth. now how stuart mcgill advises situps is in this
position. one leg straight one leg bent
one leg straight one leg bent
bring the hands up behind the ears contract the ABS as you would in a
sit-up, but I want you to pull up from (the sternum the sternum is the bone in
the middle of the chest ) and we're going
to pull the sternum up straight up towards the ceiling okay so we contract
the ABS and we pull and we hold. we hold hold hold
making sure you keep your neck as straight as possible none of us know
sterling the net okay try and keep your spine as straight as possible and you
hold and you release release four five contract for five three times now in
this position you can see my discs are completely protected they are completely
flat on the floor now it might look like this isn't going to have the same effect
as a normal set up but trust me your abs will kill when you do this they were
absolutely eight I used to teach this to Premiership footballers and then with
their strong ABS they have were in agony okay so both sides sternum to ceiling
could track the ABS neck and spine straight shoulders flat elbows flat nice
and relaxed the only muscles working in this are your abs don't contract the
front of the neck okay everything nice and relaxed you're
forcing those ABS to do all the work okay and relax now you can also
obviously do that for the obliques as well so again keeping the spine straight
as possible discs completely protected there we go so for the next exercise I'm
going to use the good old medicine ball now if you thought I didn't like the
sit-up I can't even tell you how much I hate this exercise I'm about to tell you
now it's the sit-up times 10 because here's a classic medicine ball exercise
that people teach you to do so first of all you bring yourself into this
position okay which is your classic sit-up position but now you've got your
feet off the floor as well so you've got even more pressure going through the
disc and then to top laughs we're gonna add the rotation
actually I'm gonna use that I can't even do it to myself I'm going to use the
baby ball okay because it's basically nothing there to top it all off the next
position we know that damages the discs the most
is out of the position out of the central position with rotation let alone
with weight through that rotation so we're going to put ourselves in the
weakest position possibly can and then we're going to go twist with weight and
we're going to go here twist with weight this I can't even tell you this exercise
shouldn't even be legal without a huge huge advice on on the potential damage
you're doing to your discs I don't even have and tell them getting quite irate
about this I don't even have a alternative to this idea this is just
from their spinal discs point of view one of the most damaging exercises you
could possibly do oh I'm not even going to do it my discs no no no they are
looked after and protected all right so please if you want to protect your discs
do not do that exercise
okay and the exercise I advise against is not a medicine ball exercise I was
asked my personal trainer I'm going to point my confused you know you they ask
you to step forward event and with this huge weight twist like this okay pull it
back and then forward twist twist both sides and what you've got here is in the
twisting position your disc is weakened and then you're adding an extended
weight onto that to your just you are micro damaging that disc now the one
thing about this is we always advise where we write you live to protect a
disk is spine straight weight close to the body place your body close to the
body spine straight use your legs use your
back muscles okay the minute you're doing this it's like it's the textbook
damaging position and movement for injuring at it and like I said you can't
tell when you're managing a dead because it happens over many years of of
micro strains through the disc eventually weakness so much that it's
split so when you go to the gym and you do something like this repeatedly you
don't realize that you're damaging your discs one week down to tie up your
shoelaces and you have raging 10 out of 10 pain down your leg and six weeks of
work and a weakened back for a very long time I really hope this has helped you
I really hope I've done more than just show you the exercise that we hope this
has ended you and how to adjust your exercises at the gym to protect your
discs are my friends go forth and train safe