Hi I'm Coby, I'm a UK Osteopath at Soothe Clinic.Com. in this video I'm going to
start the very very big and long job of addressing spinal disc injury management
and what you can do to help get yourself back to 100% recovery. the good news is
that with all forms of disc injury, be it a prolapse or a herniation or a bulge
(which is the same thing) or a simple annular strain or tear, exercise
prescription plays a very large part in ensuring 100% recovery. the only thing is
that the the exercises and the entire management program is very different for
a prolapse than it is for a disc bulge than it is for a strain or tear. in this
video I would like to address disc herniations
(disc bulges) so that is where the disc tears and the the jelly
inside moves through that tear without breaching the surface of the disc and the
disc bulges. it may or may not hit a nerve so you may or may not get pain in
the legs or in the arms. I'm just going to be looking now at the bulges doesn't
matter if they hit a nerve or not but you do need to know which direction your
disc has bulged I'm just going to give you one a couple of very simple
exercises just to get you started and to get the ball rolling there is absolutely
masses more that you can do which I will try to address in my future videos
and also you really need to be under the care of a manual therapist
so the goal with the rehabilitation of a disc bulge or herniation is to get that
disc completely back in position and off any nerve or structure that it might be
hitting this can happen very quickly and within two weeks you should be able to
get that bulge back in position. The problem that happens is people do the incorrect
exercises or they don't do any exercises at all or they continue lifting or not
taking the correct advice not taking a break from heavy building work or heavy
lifting work so what I'm going to give you now is just one quick exercise
depending on which direction your disc is bulging will determine which exercise
you should do so if your disc has moved forwards then you need to be doing a
forward bend movement that will encourage the disc to move back into the
central position if you do any back bends that a disk will be bulged out and
it will actually aggravate the disc so that's why it's so important that you
get a scan and you know exactly which direction your disc has moved so a very
very simple exercise if your disc has moved forward and you want to push it
back into the central position is just what we call the child posture so you
just want to come forward like this and then just ease yourself forward into this
child posture here collapsing your chest onto your thighs. you can rest here you can
also maybe put I don't have one here but you can place a cushion under your
forehead and just rest there for as long as you like you will find your low
back muscles will likely be in quite a lot of spasm and this will also help to
stretch out those muscles and so will release that pain that you're
experiencing from that spasm so to come out of this you need to carry all
the weight through your arms so your back muscles don't have to do any work at all
because they are higher risk of spasm if you have an active disc bulge so just
gently walking your hands towards you, all your body weight through the
hands ease yourself up hands onto the knees and just walk yourself up
your legs to a sitting position the goal being to keep your back muscles
completely relaxed and not having to do any work. a
second way to achieve this position and get immediate actually immediate pain
relief often if you can get the disk off the nerve is to lie on your back and do
some simple knee hugs obviously you'll be moving a lot slower than I'm moving I
realize I'm moving a lot faster then you will be moving so just lying on your
back in this position and just drawing the knees towards the chest there we go
you can also just draw the head up, although that may place quite a lot of
strain through the nerves so best if you just relax and just draw the knees and
you can quite literally stay here as long as you like. to come out of
this position you would need to roll onto your side nice and slowly place
your weight down through your hands and gently walk yourself up into a sitting
position again obviously if you do have a disc bulge you are presumably avoiding
sitting as much as possible so if your disc has moved backwards and is bulging
backwards whether or not it's hitting a nerve, you need to take your spine into a
back bend so that it pushes the disc forward and back into the central
position so the best way to do this is doing a position we call the 'Cobra'
so again moving nice and gently nice and slowly just bring yourself forward into
the all fours position bring yourself down into a lying position moving nice
and slowly with complete control bring your hands underneath your shoulders as
your head faces the floor now you need to completely relax your feet, your
calfs, your thighs and your hips and pelvis just completely relax your back
the one point about this is you will as I said before have I'm going to come up
so I can speak to you properly you will most likely have quite a lot of spasm in
the surrounding muscles in your low back so when you do this
it is possible that you may set off a slight spasm unfortunately you've got a got
to do this position this is the only way the exercise position that will push
that disc west into position so what you can maybe do is just some gentle massage
on those muscles before you do this exercise just to bring that tension
levels down just enough so that you can minimize the chance of spasm or at least
reduce the amount of spasm that you get so coming back to this exercise bring
your hands under the shoulders push all your weight down through the hands relax
the back relax relax relax and just push up and hold there you can hold this for
a count of 10 and then release and you want to do that basically about five or
six times at least every two hours to come out of that we are going to push
down through the hands remember all your weight goes through the hands and arms
do all the work your arms push you back your arms walk you back try not to go
into a forward bend you've got to try and get yourself back
into a sitting position without putting too much flexion through your spine
obviously another way that you can come out of this position would be just to
lie roll onto your side as such draw your knees up and then push yourself up
relaxing your back muscles pushing yourself up into a sitting position so
that's just two very simple first aid exercises that you can do immediately
today to start moving that disc back into position and start getting rid of
that a leg pain that you might be experiencing obviously the complete
rehabilitation of your disc requires a much broader spectrum management
plan and a lot more exercises but those are the basic standard exercises that
you need to understand because one of the inhibitory factors in disc
recovery is people doing the wrong exercises so doing the complete opposite
so instead of encouraging that disc back into position people are actually re-bulging it.
so that's why even though this looks very simple it's a crucial key to your
100% recovery and correction and healing of your disc bulge