14 Day Back Pain Reset Program

Is your back pain slowing you down? Well, this 14 day reset is designed to help you get better fast without pushing through the pain. That's right. We're going to walk you through a step by step procedure on first calming the pain down, regaining range of motion and then strengthening to get you back into the game. And like this video, please subscribe. That's right. Now, we want to get into some red flags. In other words, if you have some symptoms, that's pretty severe back pain and particularly pain going down and not just pain, but numbness, tingling, burning. That's a strong indication you have sciatica or a pinched nerve. Now, Mike, what should they look for where they should actually see the doctor and avoid this video? If you are weak, can't get up, can't stand up very long. Just having lots of pain and it's not getting better, especially early on, then you should definitely consult a medical professional instead of doing this video. Now we're going to go through all the phases. Roughly, it's going to span two weeks. If any of these phases may take longer, some of them may be quicker. A lot of it depends upon what your back issue is. So just stick with the phase longer if you need to. Or if you want to fast forward because you're doing better, you certainly can. We all have different back issues. We all come from different ages. And our motion before this could all be different as well. Yeah. So behave. If you got back problems, avoid things that irritate it, that you know if you're going to go out and maybe this time you're up here, shovel some snow, you know, maybe you can get someone else to do it for you. So the first area is going to be days one through three. So this is just about calming down your pain and pain management. So first off, we're going to use things like heat and ice. You can use a cold gel pack. You can use a heating pack like this. You can use a plug in pack. You can do hot tubs on or whatever you have available. Different people react differently to heat and cold. And Brad is... Are we going to give an example? You can if you want. I got an idea. Like, hold on, there's a couple of things. This is what I personally have had great success with in the clinic, as well as at home on my own back. Cold pack, if it's really tender, just happened. I'm saying try cold first. But you might be one of those people that like heat. I like heat when I hurt my back. Really? Yeah. So it's an individual thing. But this device here, you can use some pillows if you don't have a leg wedge. But leg wedges, I'm telling you, I've had more success not with like at myself and in the clinic. I always have one of these available. People are very happy with it. I'd say 95% of the time. But at home, you don't have that. Simply get some pillows. Take it off your head, put it under. You got another one? I do have another one right here. It's going to need at least two, unless you get really thick pillows. Sometimes three. You're not going to get the right height. But if you get relief with that, you'll appreciate it. And you got the cold pack. Your legs are slightly elevated. And you're going to lie like that for 15 to 20 minutes to let things settle down. And then when you get up, do it carefully. Do it slowly. Tighten your core up so your back is supported with your muscles. And don't get up like this. Up nice and tall. And take your time with things so you keep it calmed down. Now, if you're still having a lot of pain and you happen to have a TENS unit, they're relatively inexpensive nowadays. There's tons of brands. They all work fine. This one's just called iReliev. We've worked with them before. They have lots of models. You could just get whatever works for your price range. I've personally used them when I've had a lot of pain, even in my hip area. They work well. But they're not going to fix the problem. It's just more temporary pain relief. But not necessary. Just wanted to mention it. It's pretty common. Now, what we want to do to see what is causing your pain, oftentimes, people feel better flexing forward or they feel better extending. So a simple way to test this is to lay down. You can go on the floor. Lie down. Yeah, L-I-E, I believe. Or L-Y. I don't know. I'm confused. So lie down. Have your legs straight for about 15, 30 seconds. See how your back feels. Then bend your knees to your chest and see how your back feels. If your back feels better, bringing your knees up, you feel better in a flexion pattern. If you feel better with your legs straight, you feel better in an extension pattern. So that's just a way you can test things out to see what motion is bothering you. If it feels good to bring your knees to your chest, you can just simply stretch it out. Bring one knee up to the chest and hold it for about 30 seconds. Do the other. If you are not having that much pain and it's calming down, you could certainly do both at the same time and stretch this way. However, if this bothers you and makes you feel worse, but you felt like being straight feels better, you could certainly work on going into extension as long as it feels good. So to do this, you lie on your stomach and then work on just going up on your elbows. See how this feels. If this feels good and you have the motion, you can try pressing up into doing a press up. Sometimes this feels good if you have a herniated disc, depending upon the severity of it. But these are just called press ups. It's an exercise you can try. So if extension feels better, do this. If flexion feels better, then do this. And that's all we want you to do for this phase. Good. I do want to mention that in either phase, if you are having some pain down the leg, the pain down the leg is important to monitor. If the pain down the leg, say it goes down to your calf and you do some knees to chest and the pain actually gets better and the leg pain or numbness, tingling goes away, that's a really good sign. If on the other hand, you pull up like that, your back feels a little better, but the leg pain and symptoms get worse or go down to the foot, that's a red flag. That means stop. So the pain or the sciatic symptoms govern what's gonna happen. Same thing if they're on your stomach. I've had a lot of people with sciatica, especially younger people below the age of 40, they respond well to lying on their stomach and sometimes not getting a press up right away, just lying like this and the leg immediately feels better. Sometimes I'll just have them lie for 15 to 30 seconds and then gently try the press ups and see how it goes. You may not get into press ups till the second or third day, so those are all considerations. All right, now we are on phase two, so days roughly four through seven. If phase one, you are still in a lot of pain, do not go to this phase yet, you are not ready. So again, pain management, we wanna use heat and ice as options. Also, any anti-inflammatory medications you may be approved to use could be beneficial as well. Ibuprofen, that kind of thing. Yeah, however, we wanna start working on restoring your mobility a little bit, so we're gonna go through three different stretches you can try and then a couple of exercises. So the first stretch we're gonna do, we're gonna use a doorway. Now, if you're having one-sided back pain, say it's left or right, you're gonna use that side to stretch out. So for filming purposes, I'm gonna say it's my right side. We're gonna go use a doorframe here. You can use a pull-up bar, whatever you have available to you, and then you're just gonna reach up as high as you can and just bend your knees. This is gonna help stretch out and open up the vertebrae, which can allow some decompression of your spine, which can cause or cause relief. Well, I guess it causes relief. Create relief, that's what I'm looking for. Do you have anything to add to this, Bradley? Yeah, so, well, Bradley, huh, getting formal. Yeah. Yeah, so when they do this, it should feel good or should they, if it's starting to hurt, hang harder or? Don't hang harder, take pressure off. Maybe it's not right for you. It's adding too much pain. Just be gentle with it. Notice my feet are touching the ground. I'm not just hanging all the way off, especially in this early phase. We're just trying to stretch, decompress the vertebrae to get some relief in that. Again, your right arm hanging and it's the right side of the back that hurts. Yep, so if it was your left side, then we would go to the left side and do it there. Instead, it should feel good. If it's causing more pain, then obviously back off and don't do it right now. Did you say the time, 15 to 30 seconds? Hold it for roughly 30 seconds. You can do each side. If 30 seconds is too much, you can start with 15 or you can go longer as long as it's feeling good. Okay, great. Next, we're gonna work on restoring some rotation. What are you doing there? I gotta come through the door. Well, don't knock over the door. All right. Do you wanna go on the mat and show this? I'll move the door, I guess. Sure, we're going to go into trunk rotation. Yeah, except for I gotta move this out of the way. Now, this is a nice one you can do in bed and you could actually do it before you get out of bed, depending on the results of it, how it feels. On the carpeted floor, it does work well, but knees up like this, feet together, knees together, but not tight. You're not squeezing it together, just gently. And this is a relaxed stretch. You just breathe, relax, and allow. Oops. Hopefully you don't have a big display table there and you run into it. There we go. All right, now we're free. Yeah, so you're gonna rotate to each side in a pain-free range. There you go. Now, if you find, and this may happen, one side feels good, you can go all the way, and the other way, maybe get a little bit, and it's like, oh, that hurts. Well, don't push and force through the pain. Just bump into the pain a little bit and then go back the pain-free way. And then do that up to 10 times, and with any luck, it'll get a little loosened up, and each time you'll go a little bit further to that painful side. If it doesn't, don't worry about it. That will come. Just work the pain-free range as tolerated. 10 times is as much as I typically recommend. Now, next we're going to do is a child's pose. So if the testing earlier you felt better with your knees bent like this and your back feels good or even needs the chest, then do this other stretch. If that made it feel worse, then don't do this stretch. It's probably just gonna bother you. So you're gonna go on the ground for this. You're going to sit on your heels, so my knees are wide apart, and then I'm gonna sit my butt to my heels, and I'm gonna lean forward and feel a good stretch in my low back. If my left side is bothering me, let's say, then I will reach over to the right more and we'll get a little more of a stretch on that side. If you're not feeling much of a difference between either side, you can just go straight. Again, hold it for 30 seconds, and relax, and do that two times. So on this one, especially if you're on the floor, you know, point your toes so you can get a little lower. You may even wanna take your shoes off. It might be more comfortable. Yeah, I normally don't do this stretch in my shoes at home, but just stretch it out that way. If you really struggle to get on your hands and knees right now, you can certainly sit in a chair. I'll just sit on the mat table here. It's gonna be a lot taller than a chair, but just feet apart, and then just bend forward, and this should feel good to bend forward like this. It's kind of a similar concept, and again, you can go to one side or the other. This is just a lot further down than a standard chair or stool. Yeah, so we're just doing this. Yes, I feel good. You don't have to do a little happy dance like Brad did. Well, you know, you might, but on the other hand, if you do this and you get some sharp pain, particularly going down your leg, stop, red flag, you're not going to continue it. Now for strengthening, we're just gonna try a couple basic exercises. The first one is called a pelvic tilt. So all we're gonna do is make sure your low back is touching the mat or the ground, whatever you are laying on. So right now, my pelvis is tilted forward, or anterior, we call this. We wanna do a posterior tilt. So basically, you wanna have a flat back. If you're really struggling to understand this, just take your hands, put them in the small of your back here and push against them. You can also do a little towel rolled up there, something small, and just try to press into it. Try to get those cues on how to tilt your pelvis, and that's where you can begin. So are you just doing one direction, doing downward movement into the hands? Yes, so I'm just pressing down. You can hold for three seconds or five seconds and then relax. We're starting with that. If that feels good, you can progress to doing a bridge. So again, you're gonna hold this tilt position. My core is engaged, my glutes are engaged, and I'm going to lift my butt up towards the ceiling and then back down. Some people that are very painful or tight may just get this far off the mat and that's all they can do. That is fine. You wanna make sure it feels good. So as long as it feels good, you can start doing some general back extension strengthening. And I believe, what, 10 repetitions would be good for this stuff? Yeah, we'll just start with 10 repetitions. You can do it every other day. If it starts to feel really good, you can expand to do more sets, two to three sets with it. Just take your time. Hand placement's a little easier with your hands on the floor or mat versus here. So just let your pain be your guide for this one. Good, nice work. And now, the last thing for this phase is to try to do some walking. Just five to 10 minutes daily is a good option. Walking is very good for your back. Dr. Stuart McGill recommends it for most people. Right, right, and a good tip on walking is try and walk on level surfaces, not up and down hills, not where you're hiking through the woods on uneven surfaces. Level and flat is the best for any back that's recovering. Okay, we are on phase three, so days roughly eight to 10. We're gonna work on building some stability and strength in your back. Now, again, make sure everything from the previous phase you can do without creating pain or making it worse before starting this phase. So it may not be days eight to 10. Just take it easy and slow. So first, with the stretches, you're just gonna do what you did from the previous section. Find which ones worked well for you and stick with those. For exercises, we're going to progress them a little bit. So again, bridges, like we just showed. Want you to keep doing some bridges, but we're gonna give you two more things to work on. The first one is a core exercise, so it's called dead bugs. So Mike had mentioned doing back strengthening exercises, and so this is actually not the literal back, it's the front, but these are core exercises, and the core muscles are the back muscles, side muscles, and the abdominal muscles. It's important that we incorporate all of them, and this is gonna do the abdominal muscles. Yeah, so a dead bug, I guess, lays like this typically when they die, if they're not squished, and what you're gonna do is move the opposite arm and leg. Notice my back, my low back, is keeping flat against the mat. I am keeping that tilt like we talked about earlier, and I'm just alternating side to side. This is working on my core muscles, meaning my abdominal muscles, many of the layers to it, also my hip flexors and my low back. I'm going slow and controlled, and this should feel good. If this is causing any increase in pain, then do not do this exercise. You're not ready for it. If it seems way too challenging to do this initially, you could just start with one limb, move it down, move it back up, and start that way. Just make sure you have that posterior tilt and your low back is supported well. Yeah, you'll feel your stomach muscles are staying tight throughout the whole movement to stabilize that low back. Once you do that exercise, the next one we wanna do are clamshells. Now, clamshells, I normally do in a side-lying position like this. You can have a pillow if you want. You can do this on the floor or a bed, and you're gonna bend both knees. My feet are overlapped like this, and I'm just going to rotate up and then back down. Notice I'm not rotating with my whole body and looking towards the ceiling. My sight is staying this way. My trunk is staying that way. I'm really focusing on the glute muscles here, and we're just gonna strengthen those up. If this becomes way too easy, you could certainly grab a loop band and put it around both legs and do it that way. Can I have a loop band? No, I wanna do it because I wanna jump in there a little bit. Camera time? Yeah, and I thought it'd be smoother. So yeah, this definitely makes a notable difference. Whoa, I like that. So again, 10 to 15 reps? Yep, we'll do 10 to 15 reps. Just start working on the core and the glutes a little bit because the glutes connect right to the back. So if your glutes aren't firing properly or they're too weak, they can cause a lot of back problems. Yeah, excellent call. So we're gonna add those two exercises in this phase, and again, keep walking. Maybe progress the distance from before or time, depending upon how you're tracking it, and just keep moving. Hopefully things are getting better, and we're gonna get on to the next phase, which are a little more advanced, I would say. And the final phase for our days 11 to 14, roughly. Again, you wanna make sure you can do everything in the previous phases before progressing here. If you are an older person, and maybe you don't do these exercises, you don't have to start now. This is for someone that is more functional and can easily do these things. Yeah, usually a little younger person, or a senior that's pretty active and still is out and does some gardening or some chores that requires bending and squatting, then this would be a good thing to attempt cautiously. So the first one is just a general whole body exercise of squatting. Now we're just gonna do squats to a chair, and then come back up. If you have trouble getting up without using your hands, maybe you're older, you can certainly use your hands for these. If you are younger and just get back to strengthening, just try to touch the seat and then come back up. Notice my legs are still engaged. I'm not relaxing and sitting down. And we're just gonna do 10 to 15 repetitions of this, and make sure your back is feeling good and you have good posture. Yeah, I use a stick at home a lot with my exercises because it helps my balance, and it gives me something to hang on to, so that might be an option. Another thing with the stick, to make sure your body posture and mechanics are good, we simply hold it here by touching my head, my back, and my butt. And I don't allow this to happen, round. I keep it straight, and then I'll squat like that. Just one of those nice little things to do. No one likes a stick up their butt. Oh, Mike, it's a family show. I knew it, I think I'll whop you with that. The next one is a core strengthening exercise. There's a lot of balance involved with this. If you do not have good balance, I would modify this, and we'll show how to modify it. But this is called the bird dog. So you're going to get on all fours, and you're gonna put the opposite arm and leg, kind of like the dead bug, forward, to a neutral position and not going way up high. Am I neutral? I can't even see my back. Your knee's flexed. Oh. There you go. There we go. You don't have to be perfect, but that's the goal. And then you're gonna alternate and go the opposite side. And notice I'm not just moving back and forth really fast. I'm taking my time, going slow and controlled. I'm trying to keep my pelvis nice, neutral position. I'm not swaying too much to one side. If you try doing this and you start tipping over, just start with one arm again, and then do 10 repetitions, the other arm, and then you can work to doing the legs and start that way. And then again, make sure to do the opposite arm and leg, because if you do the same side, it is very challenging and I'm cheating right now. So I would do- I just wanted to mention while you're doing this, tight stomach muscles. Yes. Throughout the whole thing with your back in neutral or straight position. And that, you can't see it, but his abdominals are tight. I'm not arching too much either, just keeping a nice position. So you can do five on each side, 10 on each side, whatever you can tolerate. But it's a good core strengthening exercise from Stuart McGill. Yeah, he really promotes that one. And the last one is as well, it's called a side plank. So most people know the plank is a side plank, you're just doing it sideways. For beginners, you can start on your knee like this, bent, and on your elbow, you can progress to going on your feet. My feet are stacked. If you can't keep this without tipping over, you can certainly stagger your feet. And then if you're really advanced, you can just go to straight arm and on here. This is hard on a squishy pad, a lot easier on the floor. This is pretty advanced, you're not doing less unless you're kind of athletic. So most of these, whatever version you need to do, just hold it for time, 15, 30 seconds, 45 seconds, minute, whatever you can tolerate, just slowly progress it. But you're really gonna build up all the core muscles to help stabilize your spine more. There you go. Now walking, again, keep walking. You can do 15 to 20 minutes of walking a day. You can spread it out. If you can do more, as long as it's feeling good. And make sure to have proper mechanics when lifting. If you're picking anything up off the floor, don't have nice good posture. Don't just bend over the wrong way. Put more stress on your back. Be aware of your back. Make sure to be cautious with it because you're still kind of early on, especially if you're only two weeks out, you can re-injure it. So take your time with all these things and make sure everything's feeling good before you progress. And we mentioned Stuart McGill, so there's another video you can click on. It's Stop Sciatica with Stuart McGill's Modified Walking Program. And this is really nice because he gets into, he gets specifically how to. You, it's you and Bob, it's you and Bob. Oh I know, but I'm telling how Stuart explains it through us. See information from there to us, and it's this. Got you, he's speaking through you. Yeah, so anyway, Stuart McGill, how he, there's some specific core things and pelvic tilting that you do to help your back walk pain-free, especially when you're in that, getting out of that painful phase and you're in that transition to the non-painful strengthening. So that was a long explanation about that extra video. Yes it was, but. Whatever, you know. Thanks for watching. Yeah, be careful. ♪ Two most famous physical therapists on the internet ♪