- ♪ Bob and Brad, the two most famous ♪
♪ physical therapists on the internet ♪
(clapping)
- Hi folks, I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- We are the most famous physical therapists
on the internet.
- In our opinion of course, Bob.
- Today we're gonna show you three ways
you can do spinal decompression.
It's simple, it's easy, it's do it yourself.
- There you go.
- Even an idiot could do it.
- Why, Bob, why?
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- Wow, isn't that cool a mattress, any size.
- You've been taking commercial lessons.
- Yeah, apparently I have.
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- There you go.
- Alright Brad, so what we're trying to do here
is we're trying to lengthen the spine.
One, this is gonna help with your posture,
but two let's say, let's bring the spine up here Brad.
So, we got a spine right here,
and this is where your head would be
and this is your pelvis.
It's actually facing this way right now.
- Sure, yeah like this.
- But, if you look, and we're gonna have Liz
go a bit closer here, oh, Brad's gonna grab his pen.
If you look a little closer here,
between each of the vertebrae, there's a hole there,
and out of the hole, that's where
the spinal nerve roots come.
- [Brad] Right, so they're called foramen,
and you can see every level has one.
You got these up and down your whole spine.
So, if we decompress or pull them apart
it allows them more room.
If they're getting pinched. - Right so
- [Bob] And, and conversely if you kind of
have poor posture, if you start getting arthritis
or you have a herniated disc, that can put pressure
on that nerve, so the hole gets smaller.
But this way, see with a little decompression,
a little lengthening of the spine we can actually
give a little gaping there.
And you might stretch the capsule here,
which will actually maybe leave it stay that way.
I mean, you're gonna feel better after you stretch out.
- Right, this is the type of thing
when you do it, it should feel good
and when you're done it should continue to feel good.
Um, it's pretty, I mean we're pulling pretty hard here.
You're not, your spine. - Probably won't get that much
doesn't pull a half inch apart.
This is, you know happens at a small level.
- We're just trying to demonstrate.
So anyway, we're gonna show you three different ways.
Let's start off with the first one.
The first one you actually can grab, like,
the top of a door, or you can grab the top of a cabinet.
- [Brad] And this happens to be just about
the right height for me.
I can grab here, hold, and I just
- Let it go down and let the pressure.
Now make sure it's something sturdy.
- Yeah, if you get, if the cabinets falling on top
of you, obviously it's - You want to maybe give a
little pressure first to make sure it's not
gonna suddenly give way.
If you have a pull-up bar you can also just kind of
lean back. - Right, I'm not gonna hang
all my body weight on here.
I'm starting here, I'm just going down until I feel
that stretch.
And right now it feels really good
and I still got a fair amount of weight
in my feet are stable.
And I got a nice stretch going there.
- You wanna show Brad, how you do it with a door
and a belt?
- [Brad] Sure.
- And again this needs to be probably a commercial door
because you could definitely pull one of those hollow core
doors right off your.
- Right?
You just need something solid to put a belt around.
Obviously would not do it on a cabinet.
- Especially our crooked door cabinets.
- [Brad] Right but over the top of a sturdy strong door
you would go like this, um.
- You're gonna take it over here then Brad?
- Yeah, you know if you had an I bolted into a stud
or something on a joist you could do it that way.
And I'm not gonna hang, I'm just gonna hold here
and use those for some hand holds with the belt.
And I'm just gonna drop down. - And you see.
He even, can even just kind of push his butt back
a little bit here.
Alright, no prison jokes here, okay?
But he's lengthening his spine here.
And he's putting a little bit of arch in his back,
and that all will help put that spine in the right position
and give it a little bit of stretch.
- And you go at different angles, like here I can feel
it stretches at a different angle
and actually feels better for me here than
when I'm underneath it.
So you you'll have to experiment with that.
- Yeah you may want to look around the house.
Is there somewhere you can grab on to a ledge?
You know that'll let you do that stretch?
I'll show you one where you don't need any of that,
you can just do it on the floor.
This was invented by Bryan Mulligan, one of his exercises.
So you're gonna kneel down on your knees
and you're gonna actually put your knees wider
than your shoulders, because you wanna be able
to sit back a little bit.
So I'm gonna put my hands out here,
and I'm gonna go ahead and lower my butt down
and push it back while I'm holding my hands here.
Is my back fairly straight, Brad or not?
- [Brad] Well, you've got a little arch here,
it's fairly straight.
I mean, are you trying to arch this part of your back?
- [Bob] I'm trying but there's no arch left there.
- [Brad] So you can feel a stretch?
- Yeah, I can feel the stretch all the way through.
Just a real simple one to do - Yeah, that analogy
of the cloth you're wearing is stretched out.
And it's the same thing with your muscles
and your spine.
It all stretches just like his shirt is stretching.
- And again, all these should feel good.
We're not, this is not, a no pain no gain.
This is ones that should be, no pain that's good.
- Right, so the arch should feel better
like you get that decompression, it feels good.
- And we've shown this one many times,
but this is always one of our favorites too.
And this is one, too, where you need to have a good
solid chair, in order to perform this.
And it's not like you gotta hold yourself up completely,
all you gotta do is get your arms straight.
They're gonna be straight like this on the whole,
look straight ahead. - Lock those elbows.
- Lock the elbows, and I'm just gonna lean forward like this
and I'm gonna get up onto my toes.
And this, you know, I'm not putting my full weight
on my arms, but a lot.
- Yeah.
- And this is just to give a little stretch.
What's nice about this one is you can do it throughout
the day, you can do it every hour if you want
just to give yourself some quick relief.
- So, the thing about this one is that you have
to learn how to relax your muscles.
- Yeah, let everything fall.
- Yeah, you'll go out there and if you got really tight
stomach muscles you won't get that decompression
or the traction, and after you do this a couple times
you'll learn to relax.
And like right now, I gotta relax and
there we go, it feels good.
The other one that I have done with some people at home,
we don't have a kitchen counter,
a corner, but in the corner,
and this is where you don't have to worry about it
being strong enough.
If the counter top goes here, and you have a counter here,
and a counter here.
- [Bob] Oh, that's a good one, Brad
- Then it'd be like this.
You go right into the corner of the kitchen counter top
here, and then you can do that.
It usually works best to face away from it.
You can do it this way,
and you do whatever feels best, but that's
a good solid way to do it. - Yeah, I can see that
that would probably actually work out pretty good,
you probably could just.
- Well, that still wouldn't work as well as a corner.
- Yeah a corner works a little
nicer - Yeah, it's puts you in the
right, get right into there - Yeah, so there you
go all kinds of things at home - We're doing
things on the fly here Brad, boy.
- I just thought of that one, I don't know why
I didn't think of it before.
- Yeah, I don't know either, I can't
- They're gonna memory thing, they're gonna do a video
on memory coming up too so it all fits together.
- If we remember to do it.
Alright, thanks for watching folks.