Hi, and welcome to pelvic exercises. I'm Michelle Kenway, physiotherapist and exercise instructor
for women. Today I'd like to teach you how to do some great back strength exercises.
Now, the exercise I'm going to do is an exercise that's commonly performed in rehabilitation for
low back problems, and it's a great core exercise, and it's also a pelvic floor friendly exercise for
women. So I'd like to teach you today a couple of varieties of that particular exercise,
we're going to start using a mat based position. So what I'd like you to do at home is to go onto
the ground or go into the carpet in the living room or wherever you might be,
and I want you to come down onto your knees. Now remember, if you have pre-existing back pain,
you always be careful before you do any back exercises. And of course, if you're
returning to exercise if you haven't exercised before, or if you're returning from an injury,
you always get approval from your doctor before you start exercising. So let's look at our low
back exercise our low back strength exercise, we're going to start on our hands and knees.
So what I'd like you to do is come forward so that your hands are directly underneath your shoulders,
and that your knees are underneath your hips. You have the normal curve in your back and you might
need to check that side onto a mirror. If your back is arched up or too far slumped down. Again,
not good position for this type of an exercise, I want you to keep that normal curbing your back.
Now what we're going to start with is taking one leg out behind, so that leg coming out behind
your body. In that position, I just might add, if you are someone with sacroiliac joint pain, that
means you've got pain in one side of your back and you might have been diagnosed with that by your
physiotherapist or your chiropractor. Make sure that you don't start with the leg raise exercises,
just stick to the arm exercises until you have approval to do so with the leg exercises. Okay,
so in that nice position, elbows a soft, take your left leg out behind your body,
keeping your hips facing the ground and your shoulders back and down. Now with this exercise,
what you do is you slowly engage your tummy muscles just gently that means your lower
abdomen just pulling on a little bit as you do so, I want you to into raise your
legs slowly up and lower it down slightly just touching your toe to the ground and lift again,
lifting up keeping your hips to the ground and back down. Can you see that my back
leg isn't raising higher than my bottom. So always keep that heel lower than your bottom
or at bottom height don't go any higher because you'll risk hurting your back if
you do so. So you're lifting and lowering. Again, keeping the hips facing the ground,
keeping your chin tucked in and keeping your elbows soft. So we're just lifting and lowering
slowly. Let's do a couple more repetitions on that side. So we're just starting with the
beginners version lifting and lowering and relax and stretch back. Just giving you back a break.
Okay, let's make that exercise now a little bit more difficult. So coming up a little bit
more challenging if you're ready for it. So again, knees slightly apart hands underneath
your shoulders take you lifting out behind. This time, I want you to extend your right arm and
you will just be doing the arm exercise as I said before, if you have a side job problems. Alright,
so we're going to lift and lower the front arm and the leg at the same time. Remember you using
alternate arm to leg not the same side. So again to lift up slowly, nice and control,
and back down slowly so you're going for control, and stability with this exercise. Again,
keep your chin tucked in, keep your hips facing down. Slowly lifting and lowering,
and significant work through to 8 to 10 repetitions in a row. Keeping that exercise
nice and stable, lifting and lowering. Let's do a couple more just slow and steady, lift and lower.
See if you can keep your tummy muscles on gently. You'll feel your low back working gently and your
bottom working gently and down. And one more time lifting and lowering. And once again, take a break
and slide back. Just stretching out your back gently bottom down towards your heels. Alright,
and slowly come up. So that's your first couple of levels of exercise. So we've done one side at home
ideally what you would be then doing is repeating the exercise on the other side. But I'd like to
show you some more progressions on the exercise just to increase the challenge a little bit.
The first exercise I would like to show you a first way of increasing our challenge is using
a juror desk. Now juror desk or a wobble board is a great way of increasing or improving your
core control. So challenges are balanced a little bit and the muscles have your stabilizing muscles
have to work a little bit harder to control your trunk and control your back. So it's a nice way of
progressing this exercise. If you take the disc down, and you place it under your right knee,
so pop an end to the right knee, knee goes in the middle of the desk, take the left leg up behind.
And once again, you can start off at base level with that little lift and lower of the back leg,
and then you can progress the same exercise to lifting the arm in front,
and then to add to the challenge even further, you can then lift that front foot off the ground,
and it becomes quite a challenging core exercise. So that's really making me work
hard there in that exercise. So that's some ways you can actually use the disc. And obviously,
then you'd repeat that on the other side so that you're getting your low back strong,
and rehabilitating your back muscles in a pelvic floor friendly way.
The final exercise I'd like to show the final variation is with a fitball. Now you can use the
fitball for some great back control exercise, and what you need to do is put the fitballs but not
too knowledgeable. So a ball that you make sure you can reach the ground when you go over the top
of the ball. So I'm coming forward over the ball, and I'm making sure I can reach the ground with
my hands, and my legs at the same time the balls underneath my abdomen, and I can then once again
start with my leg raises up and down, and just working slowly, just nice and steady, and you can
feel that it makes you a little bit wobbly, and that's exactly what you're after. Because then you
have to challenge your system to make those little postural adjustments and challenge your muscles to
actually maintain that stability through your trunk. And once again, same exercise that we
started with, you can actually progress to lifting and lowering. And as I said earlier, if you're
someone with SIJ problems, this is a great way of you actually performing this exercise, because
you're not putting an equal weight bearing through your lower limbs, you're actually supporting your
lower limbs while you're doing the exercise, lifting and lowering. And then you can actually
start to change to the other side, lifting and lowering. And you might then start to actually
work into alternate and leg lifts. So that's some great varieties of that particular exercise. We've
talked about starting on the ground. And remember our key points we talked about positioning
yourself, for that your hands are underneath your shoulders, your knees are underneath your hips,
and you're keeping the inward curve in your back. We talked about making sure that back foot goes
to bottom height only. And we also talked about keeping your chin down and your abdominal muscles
on gently during the exercise. So I hope you've enjoyed that exercise. That's it for
me today for our back exercises. I look forward to exercising with you again soon. Bye for now.