Do you have lower back pain? Does it get worse when you're working all day or if you go for a
long drive? If you have lower back pain at first it often starts off just as a nuisance, something
that irritates you throughout the day. But as time goes on, when it becomes chronic, oftentimes
people stop exercising, stop going to the gym, they stop doing the activities that they love
and very quickly it can start to reduce the quality of your life and it can make you feel a
lot older. If that's you, if you're looking around for solutions for self-care for your lower back,
you've come to the right place. My name is Lucas. I'm a yoga teacher and in this video we'll take
a look first and foremost at some of the most common problems in your lower back. We'll look
at why doctors can very often help, but very rarely have a solution long-term to back pain.
And number three, we'll take a look at three weird poses that hopefully will give you some relief
right now. Quick disclaimer before we get started. If you just got hit by a car,
if you fell off the cliff skiing, if you have a major injury, please call a doctor.
I'm a yoga teacher. Everything that I'll be sharing here is for educational purposes based
on my experience, but please be smart. OK, let's take a look at the lower back.
So why is our lumbar region, our lower back, such a hot spot for pain? One of the first
reasons just has to do with geography, where it's located. Because our lumbar spine is at the base
of our spinal column, it takes the most weight, it takes the most load. And the second reason,
which a lot of people never really think about, is your lumbar spine is actually very, very mobile.
I know some of you are saying "I'm not mobile, I'm stiff!". Even if you're stiff, your lumbar
spine has a great deal of mobility compared with your thoracic spine upstream and your pelvic
girdle down below. So we've got a lot of range of motion, combined with a geographically low region,
and for that reason lumbar vertebrae 4 5 and sacral vertebrae 1 usually where those vertebrae
meet, that's very often where we have a problem. But not all of our problems are structural,
not all of our problems are related to discs. In fact, the number one problem with lower
back pain is actually muscular. What do I mean by that? Well let's take a look.
In between your rib cage and your pelvis there's a whole bunch of space here and this is filled in by
muscles among other things. On the back side here you have your quadratus lumborum muscles which
can get strained. Just like you could damage a hamstring, you can damage your QL muscles.
Your erector spinae muscles run up either side of the spine. Even your lats could potentially
get damaged when you were lifting, when you were carrying something and muscle strain,
just like you know from injuring a hamstring, can be very, very uncomfortable. But here's the good
news if you have a muscle strain as a source of your back pain. Your muscles are highly
vascularized, lots of blood flow, which means even though a strained muscle in your lower back
might feel just as painful as a herniated disc, it's going to heal a lot faster.
OK, the second most common thing that happens in the spine, which almost no one ever talks about,
is a ligament injury. What are ligaments? Well ligaments are bone-to-bone connective tissues
and your spine is covered in ligaments. This spine here of course has been stripped away so
you can see it visually, but in your body right now your spine is covered in ligaments on the
front and the back side. And just like you can sprain your ankle, you can sprain your spine.
Just like a sprained ankle is difficult to heal, a sprained spine is also difficult to heal.
OK, now the third most common injury is the one that everybody goes to straight away, which is a
disc injury. What happens is in your lower back L4, L5, S1, it's very common for people to have
intervertebral disc dehydration, or compression, or degradation over time, osteoarthritis,
wear and tear of those discs. This can happen from age, from overuse, from lifting heavy weights,
and this can potentially be a cause of pain. Now for some people it's more acute and potentially
you have some type of bulge, where the nucleus pulposus is starting to
push out through the annulus fibrosus these rings of your intervertebral disc. And it can go so far
as to become a full herniation, where that nucleus actually pushes out and will often impinge upon
a nerve. Now there are dozens of other conditions that can happen in your lower back as well,
including pinched nerves, including osteoarthritis, including osteoporosis,
spinal stenosis, facet joint syndrome, and so many others. OK, so what do we do with all of this
information? Well first and foremost, the more you know about your injury the better. It'll help
you to figure out your own path to healing. It'll help you take control over your health. But if you
don't know everything, or what's very common is you might have a combination of things going on,
the best approach is a three-pronged approach to healing. Whether you have a muscle strain,
whether you have a ligament strain, whether you have an intervertebral disc compression,
almost all of us need to move forward with strengthening practices, balancing practices, and
flexibility practices. The strengthening exercises are designed to stabilize and support your spine,
so you move in a way that distributes the weight equally. Our balancing practices are designed to
help us balance right, left, front, back, so we move in a way that's again, more equally
distributing the weight throughout our spine. And finally, our flexibility practices help
us to move like a functional human. Rather than just loading, loading, loading our lumbar region.
When you think about a happy back we like to think about a three-legged stool, with strength
flexibility and balance. OK, all that sounds like a lot of work, why don't we just go to the doctor?
Let's come back to these three common conditions and think about what does happen when you go to
the doctor. Let's imagine you have a strain in your quadratus lumborum muscle and you go to the
doctor. Well you could get some painkillers, some strong painkillers, and some muscle relaxants,
and that pain will go away pretty quickly. Perfect! Well not really. It doesn't really solve
the problem, that's just treating the symptoms. What if we have a ligament strain? Well if you
have a sprained ankle you could go put an air cast for six weeks and that would really help you
to heal. But guess what? There's no air cast for your spine. So you could go get some medication,
some pain killers, but again that's not going to help with healing, and there's no air cast
to wear on your spine, you really have to learn to move and heal at the same time. OK, well what
about if we have a herniation? Let's say it's not just a grade four herniation, where that nucleus
has come out, can't we just go to the doctor and get a surgery and have that disc removed and like
a fake disc put in? Or have a spinal fusion? Isn't there something they can do surgically? Sure yeah,
but back pain surgery is a major, life-changing surgery, and the results are really mixed. For
some people it can work, for some people it actually creates more problems. Very often
when there's a spinal fusion or a discectomy, the pain here in this one region might go away,
but the pain can often be transferred upstream or downstream as you lose mobility in that area.
Now in all cases you should work with your doctor. Everyone's individual, you've got to figure out
what works best for you. But regardless of whether you have surgery, or take pills, or do everything
naturally, you're still going to come back to the same thing. For a happy back you need strength,
you need flexibility, and you need balance. So why not focus on that specifically? OK,
now that we understand where the problems are, why they happen, how doctors can help
but probably can't fully solve the problem, let's look at three weird stretches. Now please
remember that there are no three magical stretches that will fix your back problem.
Just as there's no magical pill or surgery that'll probably fix your back problem either. But these
poses should be able to give you some temporary relief. In future videos we'll look at strength
and balancing practices which can also help you along your journey. Before we get into these
poses, please know that I'm assuming you have back pain, so we will be very, very mild and very
gentle in our approach, knowing full well that as the weeks and the months go by you'll probably
want to up the level of intensity and move on to some stronger poses. OK, let's take a look.
The first pose we'll look at is called a standing psoas lunge. You need a wall. I
have this weird mirrored wall, but you can use any wall in your house that you'd like
for this pose and the other two poses. I'd like you to work with one-minute holds and a five out
of ten intensity, so take a very, very gentle approach. The reason I'm using the wall for
this first pose is because I don't want you to tip over and I'd like you to have support.
Here's what we'll do: stand with your feet about as wide as your hips, but your hip pretty close
to the wall. Turn your your right foot, your front foot, out at about a 45 degree angle and
then step back into a deep lunge with your left leg. Now your front foot is turned out, you can
rest your knee or your hip into the wall or not. If you don't need the wall, that's okay as well.
What we'll be stretching here is our psoas muscle. This is a weird muscle because it originates at
your lower back, crosses your pelvis and then attaches here on the inside of your femur,
which means if this muscle is tight, it can put excess strain on your lower back. I'll
start my clock and then I'll show you what we'll do to get a better stretch.
Left arm up, up, up, up, up, ear and arm in one line, I'll reach up if I can, I'll touch the wall
and hold here. I'd like to feel a big long stretch, but particularly down there in that weird
psoas muscle, which should help to relieve pressure on my lower back.
Good. Now do the same thing on the other side. Let's take a look at our second posture.
This next pose is called a zombie crawl and our goal is to create a little bit of axial extension,
meaning decompressing our spine ever so slightly. Here's how you do it: lie down on your belly,
your feet are about as wide as your hips, really important your toes are tucked under, extend your
arms out in front of you. Now the next step is really important. Start off by lifting your
knees up off the ground, by kicking back through your heels. Now lift your elbows off the ground,
stretch your fingertips as far forward as you can, kick back through your heels as far as you can,
put your nose down on the ground, hit a timer for one minute and stretch out your spine.
And then release down, put your forehead on your forearms, and take a break. That's the zombie
crawl. One more pose. For the next one you'll need a chair. This final pose we'll do is called an
L-fold. We'll make our body into an L shape as we fold forward. Here's the situation:
if you have lower back pain, very often this motion is what triggers the pain. At the same
time you need to open up the muscles along the back side of your body, so that you can move more
freely. But let's see if we can do it keeping our spine in a relatively neutral position. To
do this next posture you need a chair like I have, or a countertop, or a kitchen table will work just
fine as well. Let's start off with our feet about as wide as our hips, bend your knees as much as
you need to, hinge at your hips, keep your spine long and neutral, place your hand on that chair,
on the countertop or the table top that you might have. Drop your head, so your ears are between
your arms, hit a timer for one minute and let's hold here, breathing in and out through your nose.
Good. Bend your knees more slowly, roll your way all the way up to a standing position. So
that's the L-fold position. So we covered the standing psoas lunge, we did the zombie crawl,
and then finally we finished up with this L-fold.
If you'd like a pose chart, you can find it down in the description down below.
If you'd like more science-based yoga videos, please remember to subscribe.
If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments down below. My full teaching schedule
is always at yogabody.com. Thanks so much for joining me and I hope you found that helpful.