Check out these powerful, and surprisingly uncommon, ways to quickly make your back feel better. It’s not just short term relief, we have a long term strategy for your back too!
Watch this next video to get an idea or scroll further down this page to see in-depth tutorials with some advanced modifications, as well as some bonus exercises for you to try right now.
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Marionette Tailbone Squeeze
This is an advanced exercise based on some unique models of understanding of the fascia. The intention is to decompress and decoapt the lower part of your spine (especially l5 and s1 but all the way from l4 to s2).
This is a very active exercise, not easy to do but with benefits that extends to mobilization of the Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) to prevent degeneration, de-compression of the sciatic nerve, “pushing” the discs into alignment and strengthening of an extreme range.
Main points:
4-7-8 Toe Touch with Neural Cheat
No, you can’t hack the nervous system (top neuroscientists will admit most of the nervous system is still a mystery) but you can trick it alright.
By working with the nervous system (rather this muscle or that muscle), you can bypass muscle tension. How? Well… muscles are like sponge and what decides if they are “tight” is simply, neural impulse. You can work with a muscle but if you don’t please your nervous system, it will keep driving that impulse which will keep it tight. This is how short term instant flexibility gains are made.
Once you are a little bit free to move, you can build control, strength and stability into the new range and over time develop it permanently (mobility as oppose to flexibility). It’s kind of like being in a relationship with your nervous system and build trust, you want it to gradually trust you in vulnerable ranges of motion and you want to use that trust well.
I like to do this twice.
Hip Hip Hooray
This is a gentle way to move the hip, primarily through passive range, while aiming to create dissociation from the back. In simple terms, this gives us the opportunity to get full hip movement, while trying to limit compensation from the lower back.
Generally speaking, all the hip movements presented, will have you wanting to round your back and tilt your pelvis posterior, once you hit an end range. The primary goal here is to keep the back locked in an arched position (and anterior pelvic tilt) and explore the end range further.
other things that are worth doing
VerteBrace 1.0
Most people are led to believe the spine is made out of 3 segments (the Lumbar, Thoracic and Cervical spines), 4 segments if you include the Sacrum. In real life, it’s closer to 33 segments (i.e. 33 vertebrates that makes up the spine).
This exercise very much helps create that desired “liquid steel” and it’s all about motor control, reducing hinge points (stressing out parts of your spine that moves because other parts don’t move well) and learning to feel, coordinate and control the different segments of your spine.
Spirit Level Bridge
This is a great platform for hip extension and by shifting into unilateral (one-sided) position, we can focus on deficits of strength / stability between the left and right side. It’s a great platform to work on those deficits in a safe but powerful settings.
This exercise is all about motor learning and your gluteus – hamstrings firing appropriately. If you can’t do it, keep working on it and let your body learn how to do it. The goal is to be able to do this well for a number of times without fighting (learn how to do it effortlessly).
Crampets
This is a great platform to improve hip extension by learning how to function better when your hamstrings are short.
We all require good hip extension, when you walk / run (the leg that’s behind is in extension) as well as when you deadlifts / hip-thrust and the list goes on. When you can’t demonstrate sufficient hip extension, you will extend at your lower back instead. This is a good compensation mechanism to have but we don’t want it to be our only option (as it stresses the lower back).
It's all starting with knowledge and mindset
People will often tell you to avoid spinal flexion, or spinal hyper extension (just like they would tell you to avoid collapsing your knees in during a squat). There’s a grain of truth in that, after all these are vulnerable positions – and if you load them often, there will be consequences.
However, nothing is black and white. Dig a little deeper and you will find that you can’t avoid vulnerable positions but you can damn right prepare for them. One day, want it or not, you will move / land / be forced into those weak positions and if you haven’t taken time to get some control, strength and stability in those position, then you’re in trouble.
When it comes to the spine, we call it Liquid Steel. Ideally, your aim is to be able to control all parts of your spine / each vertebra (move like liquid, including positions that are vulnerable) and at the same time, stabilize and produce enough strength and control (i.e. make it as strong as “steel”).
So if you are one of those people who are terrified of moving into spinal flexion / hyper extension. Stop!
I’m not suggesting you go with weights and start loading those weak spots with force and sets / reps like a mad person, I’m suggesting you start getting control in positions of weakness. We call that: “mobility” – that’s all 🙂
Did you know that over a third of the population, without back pain, have herniated discs? That’s right.
Two people can have herniated discs, one feels back pain, the other one is doing CrossFit and smashing personal bests. How can that be? It’s just a question of whether the disc, touches the nerve.
When the disc touches and compress the sciatic nerve (also called “sciatica”), we also often feel it running down our legs.
It should be said, pain is undesirable (for the obvious reasons but also because it changes movement). However, the presence of pain or lack of pain is ultimately just another piece of information in a much bigger puzzle.
The other thing is that our body regenerates and degenerates all the time depending on your function (your function depicts your anatomy, not the other way around). Without getting too deep into stem-cells theory right now (which I am happy to blab about on another post), we start as bodies of very organised tissues and we slowly disorganize over our lifetime until we die (I know… it’s so bleak!!).
Unless we intervene. Human nature, you tend to assume that if there’s no pain, you can basically do anything. But why would you assume you’ve got mobility in hip abduction, if you’ve never actively done work on it (let alone tested it…)? Same about hip flexion, hip extension, thoracic rotation, ankle dorsiflexion and so on… which brings us to the next point.
The body works in kinetic chains to accomplish the movement tasks we throw on it (regardless if it’s everyday movement or something a bit more demanding like a 100kg squat). If you haven’t got enough mobility in the hips, your back will have to compensate. The same is true for any other part of your body. This is why we say that pain is often a symptom… part of something bigger. Resolving pain alone (which can sometime take 20 seconds) is great, but it’s far from “job done”.
When you make every part of your body work nice, guess what happens?
This is a massive subject but my point is this:
Don’t let pain direct your work in the long-term. If you want a body that works better, pain is but a small piece of the puzzle. To really improve, avoid thinking fitness is just about how strong / lean you are… start thinking in terms of mobility, range of motion, motor control and explore – make shit work nice!
We spend way too much time in postures that are energy efficient, like sitting. As discussed before, forward flexion of the spine is not a great position to spend a lot of time in – yes to develop control in.. no to relax into.
So sitting is not great for you.. at least when you do it for a long time – everyone knows that and it’s one of the major causes of low back pain.
It’s also a thing of necessity:
Here’s the thing you don’t hear about very often:
When people talk about “neutral spine and pelvis” – they neglect to mention there is no actual definition of it. It’s somewhere between curved and not curved, between posterior pelvic tilt and anterior pelvic tilt… There is no defined position.
The same goes with posture… somewhere between flexion and extension, where major points along your body align with each other. But here’s the thing: Posture is not static, it’s dynamic.
You can say for a fact someone has a bad posture – especially if they are static and trying to stand tall all the time or if they have pain in the lower back or upper back. Good posture is relative to movement. The terms we should be using to define good posture are more in the lines of:
I’m all in for finding a good seat with good ergonomics. I’m really against spending a lot of time in a seat, no matter how good you think it is. Use it or lose it.
On a secondary note.. Please please please invest in a good mattress that’s not too soft. If you’re lying in bed and it sinks too much in the middle – you are spending 7-9 hours of your day in a terrible position, without being able to do anything about it… so look into investing in a good (and solid) mattress, not too soft.
How many of you have seen people stretch in rotation, like this:
Yes, you are releasing tension from the lower back and it may feel nice if you have built-up tension and therefore low back pain. You are also rotating the lower back and relaxing into it. I know a lot of people are given this by their physios / manual therapist but it can still be bad for you:
I’m not trying to give a bad name to physios and other manual therapists. Some of them are absolutely brilliant – but there are so many trends and directions in the health industry and sometimes not everything sits right. Consider that a fair warning but a common practice we see a lot.
Run checks and get advice from professionals. If it’s chronic, make sure you check it with a medical professional – only they can run blood work and tell you if it’s cancer. I can’t do it for you. Equally, don’t just on the first surgery option being offered as if you can avoid it (which many people can), you’ll be better off. There is more than one way to treat problems and more than one way to define them.
As you do your checks, try things and explore – remember this one core principle: “never blame it on one thing”.
I hear it all the time:
My point is simple. Don’t blame it on the one link you feel it in (the one thing that’s probably doing its job… and compensating for non-working parts at the same time) as a chain is always made of multiple links.
The best thing you can do is to stop worrying about “stretching” what’s tight and look at range of motion and stability of different links around the body (i.e. “make shit work nice”). Make it a lifelong mission, you can still gain muscle and lose fat but it doesn’t mean mobility have to take a back-sit or that you have to stop being curious about what is better movement, how do you stack up and how to progress.
