In this video, I'm going to show you how to make walking with back pain instantly better using
just a body length mirror. Now, this type of fix for walking with back pain is especially helpful
if you're dealing with a degenerative disc problem or herniated disc, sciatica problems,
lumbar spinal stenosis problems, back arthritis issues, back spasms,
and much more, let me show you how to set this up. Alright, so here's how you're going to set
this up, you're going to get a mirror, your body length mirror,
on the wall, somewhere in the hallway of your home would be really great,
at least somewhere where you can take about seven to 10 steps towards the mirror so that you can
think about how to fix your walk in form with this technique. And I'm going to show you next,
once you have your mirrors set up, make sure it's leaning on the wall correctly.
Or maybe it's even up on the wall, you can see yourself just fine just with my setup here of
how to lean this against the door in our hallway of the building. But what you're going to do next
is take one finger from each hand, just like this and put one finger on your nose, and one finger
on your belly button that represents your spine. I know it's not 100% exactly where your spine
ends, it starts but that's just a good way to figure out where your spine is.
Next, you're going to step over to a side, it doesn't matter if it's your right or your left
and try to align yourself on the edge of the mirror. Now I'm using a funny
camera angle here. So just bear with me, we'll kind of still get this just fine,
you'll understand this. And once you cut yourself in half here on the mirror vertically, your nose
should be on about where the where the edge of the mirror is, and so should your belly button.
Next, you're going to begin to walk towards the mirror
and know what part of your body sway side to side. Most people when they take their first step
their bodies shifts over towards the leg they're standing on you see on my body shifted off the
mirror here. Versus if I step on my other leg, my body shifts on my right leg. Let me just show you.
When I step on, when I step forward with my whole body seal, my body weight shifts that way when
they step and then when they step the other way my body wants to shift that way, it's my left.
So when I'm walking here, nobody wants to kind of sway.
That Sway is incredibly bad for your back muscles because your back muscles
right in here begin to stabilize way too much. And they begin to hurt your back because you're
compressing your spine so much. So what you've got to do is reduce the sway. It's real simple,
use the edge of the mirror again. So align yourself on the edge of the mirror, fingering
your nose, fingering your belly button. And it's not going to quite line up on the visual here.
But I can see that I'm cutting half on the mirror here. When I walk towards the mirror,
you're trying to suck in your abs a little bit not too hard that so hard that you can't breathe,
it's it should just be gentle because it gives you stability. Then as you're sucking your abs and
trying to keep your fingers aligned on the edge of the mirror your nose and your belly button.
Walk straighter, try to reduce the amount of sway that you do in your hips.
That's typically the number one place that people get a bunch of sway sometimes it's a little
higher, I've never really seen it up in the head too much. You do see it actually, when people kind
of do this lurch motion, they tip their upper body over and over. But it's less rare than then the
waist motion where they do this with a walk. So avoid slow dancing while you're walking.
Basically, you're trying to stay nice and straight through here. Now a pro tip here,
you're never going to be perfect. It's never going to be perfectly straight, you're always
going to have a little bit of a sway. The idea here is just to reduce the amount of sway that
you do from this much to just this much. That little bit amount of sway does wonders
for your back because if you'd like to go walking, and especially if you're trying
to walk to help your back pain, just think of your vertebrae in your spine.
When your vertebrae in your spine are moving side to side, you're bending and rotating
or twisting at the spine. If you're doing that over and over again, for miles or 1000s of steps.
You're hurting your back joints, your discs. That's how you're creating your arthritis, your
stenosis problem. And if you can reduce the amount of sway and bending that's happening your low back
then you can begin to allow the irritation to come down on pinched the nerves and stop hurting your
discs in your back. Now the abdominal contraction that I've mentioned, you have to kind of suck in
your abs a little bit to help you reduce the sway. That's super important because we're taking
advantage of a reflex in the body When you fire up your abs appropriately,
keyword appropriately, it should reduce how much you're using your back muscles.
And that's important here because if you're using your back muscles a lot, it could be compressing
those vertebrae down on each other, creating abnormal forces to your spine, discs and nerves.
And you're trying to take that pressure off by activating your abs, it's something called the
Reciprocal inhibition. So make sure when you got your nose and your belly button like that, that
you you're thinking about sucking your abs and you're doing it in a way that kind of does this
to your back, you see how my shoulders and chest subtly slouch. It's not an all-out big slouch.
It's a very subtle, minor slouch, it's also called the posterior pelvic tilt when you shift your hips
forward like that, and drawing your abs, just joining your abs a little bit like that should
help you to reduce the sway, but you're also trying to consciously think about not swing so
much with your body reduce that sway. If you could do this consistently on your walk, you should be
able to instantly reduce the amount of pain. And I'm not saying get rid of it 100% forever.
I'm just saying reduce it so that walking can now become a beneficial activity for you.
Maybe you can tolerate walking a bit longer, especially if you have a job or a lifestyle
where you're on your feet quite a bit. Or you're going on vacation, you're going to be sightseeing
and being on your feet walking quite a bit. This can make the world of a difference in
allowing you to get through the day easier without as much pain medication in avoiding
a doctor's visit for an injection, and in the long-term making your problem so bad that you
end up needing some unnecessary surgery for it. My name is Dr. David Middaugh and I'm a
specialist physical therapist at El Paso manual physical therapy. And this channel is dedicated
to helping people stay healthy, active and mobile, while avoiding unnecessary surgery,
injections and pain medications. We have a ton of videos on many different back problems we have all
linked down in the description below. And there's also a program that you need to know about that
gets to the root of a lot of these back problems. It's called the 28 Day Back Health And Wellness
Boost Program. It's designed at treating the root problems so that you can begin to get
long term relief for your back issue. Check it out in the description below as
well. Thanks so much friends for watching and I'll see you in the next video. Bye