Low Back Pain Crash Course || WBWL EP 85

This is a live training I did recently in my Facebook group.

Here's a link if you'd like to join: https://flexwithdoctorjay.online/group

In this training, I go into excruciating detail everything you need to do to eliminate your low back pain by your own power.

That means completely un-reliant on medication, chiropractic care, massage, or acupuncture.

If you want to empower yourself to fix your own low back pain, turn up the volume and listen in on this Low Back Crash Course I made for you... Free.

Again join the group if you're interested in more live trainings like this where you an join live and ask me questions about your specific pain issues.

Dr. Jay

Transcript

0:04

Hello everyone, Dr. Jay here, and I'm very excited to present to you guys my low back pain crash course. I already know that a lot of you guys have been requesting Low back pain relief. You guys have seen my exercises. You guys have seen some of my posts, but you really want to get into the nitty gritty details of learning more about your lower back, all the surrounding musculature, how to actually get that area stronger and more mobile so you can stop having low back pain. So low back pain is something that affects. nine out of 10 people in the world. And that's pretty crazy because many people in the world actually have low back pain. But the thing is that most low back pain will resolve itself. So if you tweak your back, usually things will resolve itself. But for some reason, about 50 percent of people that have low back pain, they'll actually fall into a sense of chronic low back pain, where after the tissues have healed or after the injury has happened, is that the person continues to have low back pain. So what we're gonna dive into today, and why you should stick around, is you're going to learn every little detail in terms of pain. How to get rid of your low back pain. We're going to discuss the anatomy around specific structures that you want to focus on from a low back pain perspective. And then we're going to dive into breaking down individual muscle groups and what exercises that you can do. in order to reduce your low back pain immediately. And then after that we'll also go into some final words of how to, once you've gotten some low back pain relief from some of the exercises, how to make this more sustainable so that the low back pain doesn't come back. So we're going to go through our low back pain crash course, and we're first going to break down the anatomy. So you're going to stick around for maybe. Let's say 5 to 10 minutes. We're going to discuss the anatomy. I know that you don't necessarily have to be a physical therapist and learn every little detail, but especially if you do have chronic low back pain, I think this is good, vital information that you do want to know. So let's start off with the lumbar spine, and that is another word for the lower back. The lumbar spine is composed of five vertebrae, and these are essentially the largest vertebrae, the largest essentially the largest aspects of the spine. Okay. The five vertebrae also encompasses the disc in between. So if you've ever been diagnosed with a a disc bulge, a disc herniation let me know in the comments if you've ever been diagnosed with that. And then in between you also have outsides. If you look at my thumbs here essentially if my head is basically the vertebrae between where my ears are, where there's a hole are called the foramen. And in between the foramen, what comes out of the foramen or the holes are the nerves that come out and they branch down into your hips down all the way down into your feet. So L1 to L5, which is essentially your lumbar nerves, they basically connect together in order to produce sensation in your legs. or also motor function of your legs. So usually if you have like this carnation, it can come with some sort of sensory deficit, like numbness, tingling, paresthesia, or neuropathy inside of your legs. And then you also have then is your oops, sorry, this was supposed to say lumbar plexus, my apologies. So with regards to the lumbar plexus, these nerves come together in order to produce also motor sensation. So if your sensory system starts to become out of whack or becomes dysfunctional, we'll start to call that neuropathy or even sciatica. Sciatica is down behind the leg versus in the front, the lateral aspects of your legs. That's a little bit different. And then you also have then is your your motor nerves. So some nerves are based on motor. So people that if your sensory system starts to become dysfunctional, some people happens where their low back pain becomes so bad or there's their nervous system becomes so dysfunctional that it comes with weakness as well. Okay, the weakness in your legs. is a product usually of something that's happening up above. So if you have weakness in your legs, that's oftentimes not just correlated with something going on with the legs. If you have any low back tightness, or if you have a history of neuropathy or sciatica that oftentimes coincides with some sort of Motor or what we call neurogenic weakness. Okay. So I definitely appreciate some comments coming in. Thank you for that. And so what we also have is we can't discredit the thoracic spine. So I'm telling you all these things because these are areas you do need to focus on if you do have chronical back pain. The thoracic spine is 12 segments and the thoracic spine goes from the base of your neck. Down to your lower ribcage and then after the lower ribcage is your lumbar spine. So why do you want to pay attention to thoracic spine is you also encompasses the ribcage. The ribcage basically houses all your main vital organs and they also have your paraspinals, your diaphragm, and a lot of those things, which I'm going to just I'm gonna talk about the core later on. So with regards to the thoracic spine. It has a lot of attachment to it, like your diaphragm, your esophagus, and a lot of things. If your thoracic spine is not working well or it's not moving well, and your thoracic spine is stiff, a lot of things can happen. One is your diaphragm becomes dysfunctional, so therefore you're breathing less, and that creates less oxygen in your body, which then causes a lot more low back tension. Basically, a lot of tension in muscle. tension in our body stems from the fact that our body is deoxygenated, meaning it's lacking oxygen. So if we get our thoracic spine to move better, that indirectly gets movement at the lower back as well. And also we are breathing better. So therefore we feel less tension in our lower back. The thoracic spine also encompasses our main organs. So if our thoracic spine is stiff that ends up also coming with gut motility issues. So if you have Crohn's disease or peptic ulcers or you have any sort of other acid reflux or anything like that let's say you have those digestive issues and it's also, A company with some sort of low back pain that also is another telltale sign that I may want to give that client some sort of thoracic spine exercises as well. The next thing I want to talk about is your hip musculature, and there's quite a bit. So we have our hip musculature basically we have our hips or pelvis. We have a lot of muscles that attach into our pelvis. And I basically broke this down into what you might be dealing with. So if you have poor hip and pelvic stability that probably means that your glutes and other muscles around your hips are under trained. And therefore, if that happens, that's basically like analogous to trying to build your house on sand. We know that if you build your house on rock, it's a lot more stable versus if you try to build your house on sand, it's a lot more unstable. So basically the sand would be you not training your glutes or your pelvic muscles enough versus somebody that trains their glutes, their hip flexors the muscles around their pelvis all the time. It's like building your house on sand and essentially the house. It's basically your lower back. Okay. So that wasn't very clear. Basically it's house equals low back glutes and surrounding pelvic muscles equals your sorry, equals the foundation, the house stands upon. All right. That's just something that's very important that you need to understand is that poor glute strength, poor hip flexor strength, poor muscles around your hips generally leads to low back pain. The next thing here is also hip rotation. So we also have hip external and internal rotation. I can stand and actually show you how this kind of looks, but essentially poor hip rotation is also correlated with bad, low back pain specifically hip internal rotation as well. So I've seen a lot of my clients improve their hip internal rotation, strength and mobility, and their low back pain goes away immediately. So how that kind of looks. And if you look at my camera, That basically, if my leg here, let me make sure my camera's not following me. And if I basically bring this up, let me do this one more time. So if I basically show you my legs here if I bring my leg into hip flexion, if I turn my foot in towards my groin line and my knee points out, this is called hip external rotation. Versus if I bring my knee pointed in towards my groin and my foot deviates out. That is called internal rotation. So many people, especially like men that have poor hip internal rotation generally have a lot of low back pain. So if you notice that you have like poor hip internal rotation, you're generally compensating by using your lower back more to lift things. Or when you walk your lower back has to rotate a lot more in order to for you to walk. So I've seen this before where people have really poor hip internal rotation and therefore they're compensating a lot with their lower back. And this isn't always the case because I've actually seen a lot of women that I've treated hundreds of them that have ridiculous amounts of hip internal rotation. But when I see that, when I see that they have over amounts of hip internal rotation. I consider that more of a hyper mobility issue and therefore they may need to work more on hip stability versus strictly just working on hip mobility. Do you guys understand that? Okay. The last pieces I want to go through for hip musculature is hip flexor and glute strength. Hip flexors actually attach to the transverse processes of all five lumbar vertebrae. So I know that probably some of you guys have been told to stretch your hip flexors, get rid of your hip flexors, try to massage your hip flexors. I've seen products that promote it's called the hip hook where it massages your hip flexor out. I think that all of those things They're just gimmicks. To be honest, I don't think that they're going to help you longterm in any way possible. While it might give you some relief, I have seen so many people comment on like the hip hook or like these things that like massage your hip flexor out. And while these people might be saying that, Oh my gosh, you got me so much relief. I guarantee that those people will continue to have persistent low back pain because they don't care about actually learning. proper strength and mobility principles that will give you long term pain relief, especially for your lower back. So hip flexor strength and mobility is critical while also glute strength is also critical. And I already touched upon that at the top here, which is hip and pelvic stability. But if you want to work on these things it's really going to give you dramatic relief. I actually down below, I'm going to scroll down, but I'm actually going to show you. A few different ideas that you guys can implement. And if you're excited to learn like you're learning a lot from just what I'm talking about, but if you really want to learn what specific exercises you can do, comment the word exercise down below. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to potentially demonstrate some exercises that can help you to either improve hip rotation, hip stability, glute strength, core strength, etc. Okay, the last and final piece in terms of this and anatomy lesson, and I think I'm going a little overboard with the anatomy lesson is a core musculature. Now, core musculature. The main things that you may want to look at is your diaphragm, your rectus abdominis, your obliques, your lumbar paraspinals. And I think it's, I think it's down below. Oh, it's actually got caught up on the bottom here, which is the pelvic floor. Now, let me describe this to you on what these specifically mean. You're looking here at basically trying to create a piston or trying to create some sort of pressure system that stabilizes the lower back. And basically, if you have a leakage in any of these pressure systems, Then it renders the lower back more prone to injury, tension, and injury. Sorry, I said injury. Sorry, injury, tension, and instability. If you've ever been down a route where like you pick something up and all of a sudden you feel like a pop in your back, it's generally because there was a leakage. And one of the energy systems that I'm talking about right now. So who here has tweaked something like picking up their kid, picking up something or getting out of a car comment the word tweak. If you've ever tweaked something in your lower back. And it like set you off for like days and you didn't know what to do about it. All you could do is just put a heat pack on it, some CBD, some oil, some ointments or some pain medication, but you weren't actually applying these things here. And the reason why is because again, And if I spray a hose at you right now, like I spray like a water hose and the water's coming out of the faucet and I'm spraying it, it's very similar to if I got a knife and anywhere in the hose, I just jab some holes into the knife. Oh, sorry. I jab some holes into the hose. If I jab some holes into the hose, what's going to happen to the water coming out? That's going to become less. And it's the same thing goes that you want to have good energy and strength. in your lower back or in your glutes, but sometimes we lack strength or sometimes we feel like our back is very prone to injury because we poked a lot of holes in the hose. And that's what I'm talking about here. Look at my camera now. I'm going to see if my camera can stay at my belly here, my camera. Hold on. So I'm going to do this. And what I'm going to do is show you that your diaphragm attaches at the top. So think of that's the top half of the piston or the balloon that I'm creating. The diaphragm is the rooftop and then your obliques, which attaches to the sides of your ribs. That's like the right and left side of the piston or the balloon. And then you have your lumbar paraspinals in the back, which are basically the muscles that line your spine. A lot of people might have some tightness there and then from down below, which is basically what keeps all our organs in and also like prevents like, urinary leakage and all that. That's our pelvic floor. So we have our diaphragm from up above your pelvic floor from down below. We have our obliques and then we have a pair of spinals and all those muscles. together, if all of them are strong and functioning at the same time, then that's what's results in a good amount of stability for your lower back. And therefore you start to feel more confident doing anything that you want. Okay. Does this all make sense to you guys? So I'm going to now show you different things that are potentially that you're able to do. Okay. So in terms of treating the thoracic spine, the thing here is that you need to understand just the basics. So how do you get your thoracic spine moving, which then also gets your diaphragm and many other areas moving. So what you do is essentially you need to think about if I cross my arms here, going into extension is to arch my back and lift my chest up towards the ceiling. If I round my back, That is considered thoracic flexion, where I'm actually rounding my back. And then you have thoracic rotation to the right, rotating my torso to the left as well. And he also has side bending to the left. And side bending to the right. And those are your basic motions to promote for better thoracic mobility. And I teach my clients many variations and many ways to do this. So I can't do this just in this one live stream. So I wanted to give you the basics, at least of what are the six things. absolute motions that your thoracic spine can do. Okay. Going into this here, you'll have foam rolling, you have a lot of band movements and there's strength and mobility. Okay. Paying attention to your breathing. Okay. So you have your diaphragm, but then you also have your obliques, which I'm going to talk about the core down below. But the basics behind breathing here is you want to breathe in a way where you're breathing life and air Into this pressure system right here. So a good balance here or good exercise is put your hand on your chest, put one hand smack down your belly. If I close my eyes, I want to imagine that my ribcage is expanding 360 degrees. And I want to imagine my belly button pushing out forward in front of my knees as if I was sitting. So I'm going to breathe here. I'm going to breathe. Okay. So when I do that, I want to try to keep the top hand silent and I want to make sure the hand down below is expanding 360 degrees and that the belly is breathing out. But this is actually, believe it or not, even though I'm breathing in a seated position right now, it's actually better for your diaphragm to expand and to get better low back relief if you actually do this in a lower seat or in a squat position. So how do you do that is if I were to stand, what I can do is I can hold on to a chair or some sort of stable object, and I'm going to use the chair as leverage so that I can balance in a squat position. So why did my stance? I'm going to bend down and sit in a squat stance like this, unless of course you have some sort of knee pain. You might need to modify this, but from this position, my lats get stretched out. My rib cage gets in a better length tension curve. And when I take deep breaths from this position, I actually can get a deeper breath into my rib cage, my lower back, and this will dramatically help improve my upper back and my lower back mobility. So I'm just going to demonstrate from the squat position. I'm going to breathe in through my nose out through my mouth. In through the nose, out through the mouth. And I can feel that the air is expanding. The air is actually getting into the areas that I want it versus if I sit from this position and I breathe in this position, I can feel breath going into my chest, which is not where I want the air to go. Okay. So hopefully you guys understand that breathing. Let me tell you the benefits of breathing. Breathing is free. Breathing, you could do that right now. And one of my favorite quotes that I say with my clients is we oftentimes do enough breathing to live, but we don't do enough breathing to actually feel alive. You get what I mean by that? So we do just enough breathing just to stay like living, like we're like just so that you don't die, right? We breathe enough like at our desk, but we're so focused on a work that we're not actively getting in enough breath. We're not actively engaging our diaphragm. So in order to actually feel alive, as in to improve your energy levels, your gut motility, your upper back mobility. Your low back mobility to stimulate your pelvic floor because when you breathe with your diaphragm, that actually stimulates the pelvic floor from down below. So if you want to feel more energy, less pain, you need to start doing some active conscious breathing. And then once you do that, you'll start to feel better. So did I hit on breathing enough? And if I did on him on breathing enough, comment the word breath, and let me know that you're going to commit yourself to breathing like this. at least 1 to 2 times a day for 8 to 12 repetitions. Okay. If you do that, I'm not saying it's going to be the golden ticket for you to be completely pain free, but it's going to help you. Okay. Let me get a little sip of water, but if you have any questions, drop them into the comments really quick. And then I'm going to continue. Okay. So let's go into now strengthening the muscles below below our lower back. So some of the main ones that we talk about are like glute max. It is the largest muscle in that attaches into your pelvis and the glute max what we can do is like hip thrusters which is basically like using a bench and inhibited thrusting your hips off of the bench. We also have weighted bridges. Unless you're like. Maybe over the age of 70, 80, maybe you just start off with body weight bridges, but I think most people can actually tolerate some sort of weighted bridge where they put a weight on their hips. Deadlifts, one of my favorite exercises and then step ups as well. So basically you finding a stair or a bench and then stepping up onto that bench. Okay. Glute mead, which is basically the muscles on the sides of your hips. What I like to do is side planks. I also any sort of motion, which is hip abduction and hip abduction is basically. Kicking your leg out to the side like this, make sure about the camera. Okay. So any motion where you're going hips out to the side or deadlifts are basically, let me just show you what deadlifts looks like, which is this. Deadlift is basically pushing the hips back, hinging forward, and then lifting away up and down. And then also fire hydrant. If you don't know what that line looks like, a standing fire hydrant is where I bend forward and put my hands on my hips. I bend one leg and then I bring the knee out to the side. So basically this is called a fire hydrant. Cause it's named after a dog like peeing on a fire hydrant. I believe that's why. I believe that's why they specifically called it a fire hydrant. Okay hip flexors. So standing marches, basically standing while marching. Okay. Either doing that with a weight or doing that with the band. You also have hip hurdles. Hip hurdles is basically where I am usually going to sit on the floor, but I'll just show you here, but a hip flexor hurdle is where all the legs are straight. So basically both legs are straight and I'm lifting my leg. over a cone or over a book, okay? And that's what's called a hip flexor hurdle. And a reverse lunge knee thrust is basically, I lunge backwards. So I'm going to lunge, I'm going to take a step backwards, lunge, and I'm going to thrust the knee forward. Reverse lunge, Bring the knee forward. And then triple extension is one of my favorite exercises, especially for my athletes and runners. But a reverse lunge or a triple extension is basically where I'm in this position. This leg is in triple flexion, which is hip flexion, knee flexion, and ankle dorsiflexion. And I'm going to thrust. I'm going to thrust my leg up and I'm going to squeeze my glutes, straighten the knee that's on the floor, and then get up onto my toe. And that's called triple extension, which is one of my favorite exercises that I continue to do even for myself. Okay. So that's just like a really quick library of different hip exercises. I do personally or that I also give to my clients. All right. Now core strengthening. So rectus abdominis, basically muscle stimulating the front of your body, which is like planks. You can also do pikes. Pikes are like downward dogs. If you do yoga obliques, I do like side plank, hip raises. Basically when I'm on the floor, what I would do. It's basically while I'm on the floor, a side plank hip raise is basically this basically lifting my hips off the floor and then coming back down or even the legs are straight and I'm lifting my torso off the floor, coming back down. That is what we call it an oblique hip raise. And then for basically the the single arm farmer carries, I basically take a weight and I could do single arm like a weight like this. And then basically the weight that's pulling me down to the left. I'm going to use my right obliques to pull it back up so I can either just walk forward. I can just walk. I can also march. Okay. And I have a weight that's pulling me this way the entire time. And I can also do lunges. I can do lunges in this position. Or I can just simply walk across the room. So when I have a weight on one side of my body it's called offset, but specifically a single arm pharmacary is where I have a heavy weight in one side of my. on one arm and I'm walking straight across without losing balance or without falling over. Okay. Now going into this, I also have lastly, the lumbar paraspinals. So that's basically like you're either you're doing some sort of Superman movement where basically you're lying down and you're raising your arms and you're raising your legs off of the floor. Bird dogs is basically alternating arms and alternating legs. So basically if right arm goes up, then the left leg goes backwards. And you're in a quadruped position, like a dog, basically, like a on hands and knees position and other exercises in order to strengthen the lumbar paraspinals as well. So I know this is a lot. I know that this is a lot of information, but like I said, this is called a low back pain crash course for a reason, just because we're trying to fit a good amount of information. Into one sitting. Okay. So in terms of what else in terms of treatment, these are general principles that you have to abide by, which is making movement more of a habit rather than as an option. Okay. Movement to me is essential for everything that you do. And so if we, for example, treat like brushing our teeth as some sort of habit. Why isn't movement a habit as well? But little do we know that work from home sitting at a desk, all of these things generally affect us in a negative way where we're not moving. So therefore there are just a lot more people in the world that are dealing with chronic pain. Usually technology goes the opposite way. It's like people should be living longer and feeling better, especially as the younger generations go. But because we're so more sedentary and so many people are on their phones and a lot more jobs are just sitting at their desk is that it's creating a lot more of these chronic pain issues. Okay. So managing stress and emotion is huge as well. It's that think of yourself as an eight ounce cup, but if you overflow the cup, That's the same thing goes if you over stress yourself the cup over fills and therefore your low back pain hurts. So the point of strength training and mobility is to try to improve the capacity of your cup. Essentially you're trying to become like an eight ounce glass and trying to transform into a 12 or 16 ounce glass. And so if you do that, you can handle more stress. You can do more things without your low back hurting you. Like you can take out the garbage. You could pick up the kids. You could play with the kids. You can go to work, right? You could do more things if you have greater capacity and how do you get greater capacity is via strength training and by doing mobility on a consistent. Also lastly, what I'll say here is like addressing fear mongering, nutrition and sleep. So nutrition and sleep are going to help. Like those are your main recovery tools. And actually teach my clients like what exact nutrition to get sleep. We also have trainings on that, on creating different sleep rituals, how to get to bed on time, how to create better sleep habits. Temperature of the room. We teach a lot of high level stuff there. But fear bongering is huge, especially when it comes to low back pain, because you'll hear these things all the time, don't run I should replace this one. It's don't lift anything. Okay. Don't do anything that hurts. And this is a bad narrative. to share with people. I've heard this from doctors and from other people all the time. It's if it don't, if it doesn't, if it hurts, don't do it. And it's quite frankly, the most Putrid, horrible advice, in my opinion, because that type of language that was given to you or somebody else actually perpetuates more fear and more pain in the long run. And so I actually teach my clients how to. get past this mindset issue and how to get past their chronic low back pain by empowering them to lift. So instead of saying, don't lift anything, I actually asked the person how much can we lift? What are going to be the right lifting variations that are going to be the right exercises for you? Some people that say don't run because you're going to trash your knees or trash your lower back. I actually say what is the correct amount of dosage? That's going to allow you to run and actually feel better because believe it or not, running is actually very healthy. for your lower back. It's just that you need to find the right type of running stance, the right type of running shoes. There's a specific way to run, especially for people with low back pain. And so these are things like again, fear mongering is huge. And getting past fear mongering will really allow you to have a better mindset around strengthening your body and not having fears around that. Okay. So that's it. What I got for this low back crash course here. Okay, so I'm going to take a deep breath because that was a lot of chatting for me. But if you have any specific questions at all for me drop them into the comments. But like I said, I really wanted to just give this to you because I think my neck pain crash course was like amazing. And I think a lot, I got a lot of great I got a lot of great feedback from my neck pain crash course that I just did last week. So the low back pain crash course is probably like the first or second most wanted training. And so I wanted to give this to you and hopefully this should be super, super helpful. But on a side note, guys I've helped well over 1200 people remotely across the world from the U S Canada, UK we've helped well over 1200 people with a very high success rate in getting rid of their chronic pain for good helping them to get leaner, get stronger, lose weight, have more energy, get back to the activities that they love, get back to, the mom or dad that they once were. And so if you are, You know, just to let you know, like we are always here for you. We put out a lot of live trainings, but if you're interested in potentially like working with us directly, and you want direct one to one coaching and some high level, like video trainings and exercises that are specific to your condition and your goals if you're interested in that. Comment the word right now, low back comment, the word low back, what we'll do is we'll potentially have a conversation with you. We'll help you specifically with your low back issues and the spots are limited. So we're only accepting about three more clients for the month of August. But if you're interested in getting rid of your low back pain once and for all, and to get your legs, your back and everything stronger comment the word low back, happy to have a conversation with you and see if potentially we're a good fit to help you. All right. See you in the next one. Take care.