(music)
- Hi folks.
I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
And we are the most famous
physical therapists on the internet.
- In our opinion, of course, Bob.
But I do today wanted to talk about
how you can develop sciatica from lifting
probably incorrectly, correct, or-
- Right.
- Well, when you got sciatica, in other words
pain down one leg, it's coming from the low back.
You really wanna minimize lifting all together.
But if you need to, you make sure you do it properly
and minimize that stress.
And I gotta really nice demo here.
And I think you agree with this.
It really demonstrates how much stress you put on your back.
- On the back, yeah.
- Simply by doing this. Okay
- Okay. So let's start off.
- All right.
So let's, let's take a look at this, Bob.
Why don't you stand up for me? - Okay.
- Okay, I want you to bend forward to pick up this
pencil right there, Bob, wrong or right?
- What?
- Wrong or right? Wrong.
Most people pick up like this, okay?
Now, if you look, this if this would be Bob's spine,
there's the spine going down and-
And go ahead and lift it up. And we lift it up.
Okay. Again, pick that up, and back.
Now, so now you understand the model.
You can have a seat, Bob.
So when you're bending forward like this
where does the stress come from?
And if you put a little weight here
you can see...
- Biomechanically, it's all occurring
here at the lower back.
- Right. L5, S1 takes the biggest brunt of the load.
- Okay. How much is that taking?
Well, they've done studies where they
they put in inserts in there that read for us.
We're not gonna get that complicated, scientific.
We're gonna use a nice demo
that's really gonna show it nicely.
- Okay. So before we go much further, Brad.
- Oh yeah.
- A lot of you are new to this channel.
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- Right there.
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And we upload every night.
- Exactly, yeah. As well as models.
Now we get a lot of students and other therapists.
I think this is a great way to demonstrate in front
of a group of people, which I've done many times or with
just with a patient one on one
on how much stress they're
putting on that back, damaging that disk.
- Sure.
- Have a seat, Bob.
I want you to face that way, Bob.
- Yeah?
So this is gonna represent this little
one by one, or one and a half,
two by two piece of wood is gonna represent the spine.
Remember when, when Bob bent forward to pick up the pencil.
Okay. There's a pencil,
we're gonna imagine Bob was here.
He leaned forward to pick it up
that we said all the stress is on L5.
Let's pretend this is the spine.
His hands represent the pelvis
and his wrist muscles represent his back muscles.
Picking up that, bending
over to pick up that pen right down there.
There you go. Okay. So here's his head.
He's bending over. He grabs it. Lifts it up.
Any strain on your, your back? - No, not too bad at all.
- Pretty easy, right?
- Yep. But Bob, just wait.
- There's more,
- You've got no arms to pick up that pencil.
- Right? - Right.
Okay. I want you to get a little further forward and
and rest like, there you go. Okay.
Now, if you have-
- I think Brad's gonna give us some arms.
- Yep. Now, obviously these aren't arms
but they're weight that represent the arm muscles
which would be connected to the shoulder.
If the head is here, the shoulder's around in here.
So these are only three pound weights.
Okay. Which your arms are much heavier than this.
- Right.
- Go ahead and see if you can pick that up
and all the way over. Now you gotta-
- Oh man.
It's already getting tough.
- A little bit harder, isn't it, Bob?
- Not a little bit harder, way harder.
- So this is all biomechanics.
This is leverage. And this is all right in that low back.
But wait, Bob, there's more.
- I was worried about that.
- You cannot see that pen, can you?
There's no head up here.
And with the head we have some weight on the head,
you know, 5 to 10 pounds, depending on how
how big of a person you- - How many brains you have.
- Exactly. So with you, Bob,
we're just gonna get a little one.
- No, I'm five pounders.
- This is only a three pounder I believe.
But the thing is-
- Looks like five to me.
- The thing is it's up on the end, which, you know
multiplies the leverage quite a bit.
Can you pick that up again, Bob?
You gotta get a little bit lower.
Bob. You just bumped your head on the floor.
You're gonna have a brain injury here.
- Yep.
- Now Bob, are you making this up?
- No, not at all.
Not at all.
That was very difficult.
- Now, I really want you to think about this because
this is-
- How much stress you're putting on your back.
- And all we did is add a small amount of weight
to represent the arms and the head.
But what about your chest?
- Right.
It's- it's double of at least double of everything.
And if you're one of those big, chesty people-
- It's amazing how much stress is on your back.
- Right.
- When you lift, especially when you lift incorrectly
like that, when you're going forward like that.
- Yep. Now that that's the thing is
look at this, Bob.
In the weight room, I see people
- Right
- All, everything. They really wanna get stronger.
They're trying to do the right thing
but they're over like this.
They're stressing their back already.
- Yeah.
- With just the weight of their arms
and their head and then add another 50 pounds
and they're going like this.
- Terrible, terrible on your back.
- Yeah. It's like, well, this person's 25 years old.
It's fine. He's gonna make it. But by the time he's 50,
he keeps doing that lift?
He's gonna be walking around like this.
- And beyond that, Brad, I don't know if you want me to go
off into a little bit of a different direction.
- Please do, Bob.
- When you round out your back
you're putting stress on the disc, on the back of the disc.
And that's what could start wearing it
out and eventually result in a herniated disc.
- Right.
- And when you do a deep squat
- So let's talk about squats.
Cause this all relates to it.
- So people think if they keep correct form
that they can squat all the way down.
And they're, they're still in not, in any trouble.
There's no way you can stop your back
from rounding out when you go all the way down.
- Exactly.
- There's just no way your, your
your back is gonna round out.
You are putting stress on the disc.
- Do do that again, Bob.
- And I hear people all the time that
that say that they- I don't even wanna stay down there.
- Go down again, Bob.
Yeah. People, they'll say that
we wanna get all the way down.
So you get full range of motion and strength
in the muscles throughout the full range of motion
which, there's some truth to that.
You know, we just talked about isometrics before, right.
But is it worth going
that far down to get a little more strength
in that range of motion
which is not very functional
and putting your back at that higher risk.
- And your knees at risk too.
- Exactly.
And so, I mean, how much is strengthening
gonna help if you can't do it.
- Right.
I mean, if you get injured and can't do it.
And believe me a herniated disc is
that's gonna stop you from lifting weights.
- Exactly. Exactly.
- All right, you wanted to show some proper lifting, Brad?
- Yep, exactly.
Okay. Now.
- What are you looking for, Brad?
- I'm looking for- I have, here it is, Bob.
- A basket.
- Okay.
- This is what I use in the clinic.
I've got a nice wire basket.
As a matter of fact, it's identical to this one
and I'll go to someone and say, can you lift this up?
And I'll go through my whole spiel about lifting.
First thing you do is stand up, shoulders back
chin tucked in, wide base.
And I say, think about this.
You're stronger if you got a wide base,
think about it at the, you know
watching someone play football up at the line.
- Right.
- Do they go up there and put their feet together
and put their hands on like this?
- Right.
- There's no strength. There's no balance.
- Right. They're wide as possible.
- Right? They're wide.
- They're wide. Good posture.
Get over the top. So if I'm gonna lift this
I'm not gonna bend over and lift it way out here.
I'm gonna get over the top
of the weight as much as possible.
Okay. So again, shoulders back, chin tucked in,
wide feet over the top of the weight, as much as possible.
And we're gonna lift.
And up to here-
- So look at that.
He's, it's like he's keeping his upper back in a cast.
- Exactly.
- And you're not breaking the cast.
- Sure. Should I show that with the pole too?
Yeah. Do that, Bob.
- All right.
- That's a nice, nice way to line.
- So you wanna line up the pole
so that it's hit his head back and butt, right?
He goes like that. He's wrong.
Or if he, if you bend wrong, Brad, look
you know what happens there, right?
Where's all the stress? Right here on the back
Right where the stick is touching.
Yeah. But if you spread it, if you put it
like this and he lifts correctly, now the stress is
on all the three areas and it's spreading it all.
- Exactly.
- It's a really nice way to instruct people how to lift.
- Right.
- Because if they don't do it right
then you just give 'em a little smack.
- Oh, Bob. It's a family show!
- I probably shouldn't say that.
- Now, one thing that I wanna mention
is I'll have people come in and do this,
and I'll go through the cans, get 'em lifting properly.
And I'll say, let's do 10 of these
with this is only two pounds, two to three pounds,
it's empty. And they'll do 10 of them.
And then I'll see 'em again in two days,
and almost all the time, unless they're active
or in a lifter, they'll come back and they say,
- My lets are sore.
- "My quadriceps. Your steps are just killing me.
I could hardly go up and down steps anymore."
And you know for sure
they've never lifted properly in their life.
- Right.
- First of all, you had to instruct them how
when you did it, the muscles are so weak and outta shape.
They didn't do it. So-
- You've spread the forces
to the muscles that are supposed to be taken and look how
how tired and weak they got.
- Right.
- I mean, how tired or sore they got.
- Exactly. They got, I mean these muscles,
and their butt muscles in here,
they're large muscles. They're made
for lifting. These back muscles,
they're small, they're postural muscles.
They're not made for it.
And we abuse them all the time.
- Variation of this, Brad. Sometimes if you can't get,
you know, you can put one leg
forward like this and go like this.
And, and sometimes we even have
people kind of go down almost to a kneel position
and then come up.
- Right.
- A lot of times I'll tell people
to make sure they know how much
they're lifting before they lift.
I mean, they might kick it.
You know, it's a box that they don't know how heavy it is.
- Sure.
- They should get a sense of what
so they're prepared, you know, and maybe
it's gonna be something that you shouldn't be lifting alone.
- Right.
- It's one of the big things with
lifting injuries is, don't be, don't have the big ego.
This is where you gotta say, "Hey, you know what?
Let's get lots of help here. We're moving a couch.
Let's get four people instead of two people." You know?
- Or hired out.
- Or hired out, that's more important.
- So all of this revolves around that back
that sciatica pain that you got down your leg
if these are done in a consistent manner
proper body mechanics, and you realize what's
really going on, that sciatica is not gonna start up,
start in the first place.
Or, you can minimize further injury.
- Exactly. All right. Well said, Brad.
- Thank you.
- Thanks for watching.