Low Back Stabilizing Exercises

If you're having lower back discomfort or pain across the top of the hips or the pelvis, whether it's on one side or both sides, it's very likely that the muscles in the area are not able to help support your spine in the way that they need to. Some of this can be due to restriction of the joint function itself, and some of it is going to be related to just conditioning over time. If you have to spend a lot of time throughout your day seated, or if you spend a lot of time with a loaded spine for whatever reason, the muscles of your lower back need to work in tandem with the other muscles in the area. And so if we're not getting help from those other muscles, your lower back can bear the brunt of that. So I'm going to show you a quick, easy exercise that we can do to help engage those stability muscles and help improve the sharing of the load between your lower back and some of the other muscles that should be helping out.

So we're going to lay down here on the table, but you can do this one on the floor. Ideally not on a mattress because it just has a little bit too much cushion or padding in there, so something with a little bit of feedback for your body here. We're going to lay on our back with our knees bent, and our spine here is going to have a little bit of space, a little bit of an arch in the lower back. That's going to be a key thing we're going to want to focus on during this exercise.

The first movement here is to flatten your spine and push it into the table here. That's going to cause some rotation of your hips, but what I want you to focus mostly on is your belly button working down towards the floor and feeling your spine press into the floor From here, once the spine is pressed into the floor, we are going to engage and squeeze our glutes, and lift up off the floor about an inch. That's all we need to get that good contraction going. Then we're going to allow that to slowly release out, maintaining the pressure into the floor with my low spine, and then relaxing that pressure from there. That's one full rep. Let's take it through it together here. Belly button towards the floor. Get a little bit of that rock in the pelvis. Now we're going to squeeze those glute muscles, lift about an inch, then relax the glutes, return down, and relax the lower spine.

So this is one that you can do daily or regularly to not only help alleviate some symptoms that you are feeling currently, but also help build and work towards your body feeling better stabilized throughout the day and thus having less pain in that lower back.

Be Well

Dr. Daniel