Glenn Dawson explains why men over 25 get lower back pain: a tilted pelvis from tight hip flexors and weak glutes shifts load onto the spine. He walks through three stretches (hip-flexor lunge, figure-4, frog stretch) and a self-assessment test, then notes that stretching alone won't fix it—you need to strengthen your glutes and core.
Lower back pain causes in men. In this video, I'm going to go over the causes of lower back pain in men, why it's happening, how it's happening, and then we're going to go over a couple of different stretches on how to fix it and give you instant relief right now. Let's dive in. Glenn Dawson here with Reset U Fitness. What we're going to go over today is how the lower back pain happens and how to fix it. So if you are a male over the age of 25, you've probably experienced some sort of lower back pain. If you haven't, say you're 25, give it a couple of years. This is because lower back pain isn't actually caused from your back. Did you know that overwhelming majority of people— you can see the stat here— have a slipped disc right now? They're just not showing symptoms of it. Your spine is not supposed to be a load-bearing portion of your body. So if you think about this portion of the broomstick, as my hip, and then this is my spine. If my hips are out of alignment even slightly, think of that as a foundation for a skyscraper tilted forward. Now this structure has all of this pressure here on the bottom part. Same thing happens with you. Gravity is pulling down. If you have even a slight amount of pressure and your hips are out of alignment, it's going to cause a lot of pressure here on your lower back. On top of that, you have these large muscles, your glutes, your hamstrings. They're supposed to hold and create stability for your hips as you move. When those hips are out of alignment, those muscles aren't firing the way they should. These little baby muscles called your lower erectors alongside of your spine are supposed to do all the work, but they're weaker than your biceps. So imagine you've got these big muscles here that are supposed to carry the load and they're very strong. That, like, imagine how much you can squat versus how much you can bicep curl. And they're supposed to carry the load, but you have these weaker muscles carrying the load. Well, then it makes no sense for these muscles to hold on very long. They're, they're going to drop the weight. They're not very strong. So the first thing that you want to do is assess what your working environment is. If you sit at a desk all day, you're most likely sitting in a spot where your hips are pushed backwards or tilted down and forward, and you have really, really, really tight hip flexors. Or let's say you have a job where you're twisting and moving a lot and those hips are consistently out of alignment because of the muscular imbalances. Whatever it is, we have an assessment for you. All you have to do is look below. There's a link where you can get your own free broomstick squat test and figure out exactly what the cause of your lower back pain is. If you want to skip that test, here's 3 stretches that most people should do to get rid of the lower back pain and balance out your hips. So the first movement we're going to do is a simple hip flexor lunge stretch. This is for somebody who sits at a desk all day typing, or, you know, whatever you would do at a desk. Maybe your job is underwater basket weaving and you're at your desk doing that. The first thing we're going to do is we have to loosen up the hips. So if you're tight here in the front of your hips, it's going to tilt your pelvis down and forward. It's called an anterior pelvic tilt. It's going to create pressure on your lower back. What we want to do is get into a 90-degree angle with both legs. Squeeze this back glute. Turn on your abs. If you don't know how to turn on your abs, act like you're taking a poop. Now they're turned on. Arms above your head. And you're going to lean forward into this stretch, keeping your spine straight. Do not lean back like this, like you're in some yoga class. You have lower back pain and that's going to put strain on your lower back. We don't want to do that. Keep everything tight in alignment, lean forward, and you should feel a nice stretch here. Now, after about 30 seconds, I want you to rotate over the front leg just like so. Hold it for another— now move on to our second exercise. The next one we have to do is the glute slash hip capsule. So if you have sciatic pain I mean, there's a lot of different ways you can have lower back pain, but if you're dealing with that sciatic pain, it's usually from an impingement in a nerve around your hip capsule and your glute. So what we're going to do, the first movement is just bring your knee to your chest. Now, if you can do this pain-free and it doesn't create a stretch for you, then I want you to move to the next portion, which would be twist it here for a figure 4 or a cross-legged glute stretch. Reach through. And hold. And you want to hold this for 90 full seconds until you feel this hip open and then less tension on the knee. And once you've done that, we've got one more exercise for you. Last but not least, we have to open up the hip flexors and the groin and then train our spine to stay straight and neutral. So this exercise does all three. It's pretty awesome. It's called a frog stretch. Make a triangle with your legs in the floor. Then you're going to go onto your elbows like so. Make sure that your knees are heavily padded. If they are not padded, there's no fat on this part of your knees. It's going to hurt. It's going to cause pain. If your body has pain, it's not going to stretch. You're going to lock up because of the tightness. You're not going to release. So if you're like me and you have a very thin mat, there's probably some pain like I have right now, and I'm faking it, not telling you that there's pain, I'm actually not going to get anything out of this exercise. The only thing I get out of it is teaching you how to do it correctly. That's it. I get no stretch. I should take those pillows behind me and put them under my knees. Don't do as I do, do as I say. Pad your knees. Next, from here, I'll I want you to rock back and forth. So you're placing your hips in between your knees. Now you may notice one groin is tighter than the other. That's okay. Just try to keep your spine straight and your hips straight. As I do this, I'm keeping my collarbone up. That way my spine doesn't round like this. If at the end of your range of motion, you're tucking your hips, that's not good. Only go back as far as you can with a straight spine. That's it. So as far as you can go back with a straight spine. If you can't get that far because you're, you're just way too wide open right now, go up to your palms, bring your knees in and just start from here. Nice and easy. Keeping your spine straight. Now, if you do those 3 moves, it should balance out your hips, release the stiff, tight dominant muscular imbalances and create mobility so that your spine doesn't have to do the work. But it's not a permanent fix. It's just going to get rid of the pain response. It's not going to stabilize or create strong muscles around the hips so that you don't have to worry about the pain coming back. So make sure you're doing some sort of exercise to strengthen the glutes, hamstrings, and muscles around the pelvis and core. And if you haven't already done so, the only thing that I can possibly imagine that would help you more than this video is subscribing so that you can see the next one where we actually teach you how to do what I just said and strengthen the muscles around your core and your glutes so that the pain doesn't come back. So subscribe so you don't miss out on our next video. See ya.
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