♪ Bob and Brad ♪
♪ The two most famous physical therapist on the internet ♪
- Hi, I'm Sara Meeks, a physical therapist,
and I'm here in this video to demonstrate to you
some of the isometric abdominal stabilization exercises
that I do.
Okay, so the abdominal muscles are arranged in layers.
There are several of them,
and I wanna contract the muscle isometrically,
which means I'm not going to be moving
any part of my body except the muscle contraction itself.
So they are are arranged in layers,
and we have one that comes from the pubic bone
all the way up to the sternum.
We have oblique muscles that go across the body to the left
and also to the right.
And then underneath all of that
we have a transversus abdominous,
which is one of our most strong stabilization muscles.
So when we do this exercise,
the first one I do is I place my hand just over my navel.
And then I take my other hand
and I place it in my back right in the lumbar area,
the lower back, where we have an arch,
because I don't wanna move my back when I do the exercise.
So I take a breath in,
and for the first exercise,
I'm gonna take the breath in.
As I breathe out
I'm going to pull my belly button away from my hand.
So my hand is now out in front of the belly button
and not touching it, and then I relax,
and then I'll take another breath in,
and pull the belly button in.
Hold and relax.
This is one of the first exercises
I give people for the abdominals.
Usually I have them lying on their back.
That's the position of least compression,
and also, of course, the contraction of the abdominals
would be gravity assisted.
So that would be the easiest one.
For the oblique muscles,
then I'm going to work from the lower rib on the right
and move toward the left hip,
and then I'm going to go to the lower rib on the left
and go toward the right hip.
So, I take a breath in,
and I imagine that I can pull those two pieces together,
those two ends at the rib
and over then to the opposite hip, and then relax.
So I take a breath in, and pull toward
bringing these parts together.
And then I do the other side where I take a breath in,
and then I pull the right ribs towards the,
excuse me, the left rib toward the right hip.
And then I relax.
Take another breath in.
So now I've gotten the muscle that runs straight up.
I've got my oblique muscles.
And then, so I have six points of support here,
the pubic bone, the sternum up here
just in between the ribs,
and then I have the lower ribs.
And then I have,
it's called the anterior superior iliac spine,
or the ASIS, or as is bones,
and I call them the headlights of the pelvis.
So take a breath in,
and imagine all of those moving together,
tighten, hold, and release,
again, without moving my lower back.
I'm not doing any tilting of the pelvis.
So I take a breath in, and tighten,
hold and relax.
And interestingly enough,
when I do all of this I can also feel
that my pelvic floor is contracting
to add to the stabilization.
So when you do arm exercises
it's important to have stabilization of the lower body,
so that you can do those exercises more site specifically.
And those are the abdominal exercises that I begin with.
So that's a demonstration
of isometric stabilization exercises,
and thank you for watching.
(chill music)