The EASIEST Way To Fix Low Back Pain (FOR GOOD!) Ft. Dr. Stuart McGill

Back pain is by no means an easy fix and the overwhelming amount of poor solutions out there that just worsen the problem. Oftentimes, trying to cure your back pain with lower back stretches, strengthening exercises, Pilates, AB workouts, or just lying in bed until it subsides will often do more harm than good. While these methods may provide some form of relief in the short term, the pain soon returns and often worse than before. Now, while the true fix to back pain is highly individual, one of the easiest ways that we can potentially fix our low back pain or at least least provide some relief or prevent low back pain from developing in the future is by paying attention to the position of our spine throughout the day. For instance, lets take a look at the results of the following research paper that analyzed the stress placed on the discs of the lower back in various positions, with standing upright being used as a reference. As you can see in the following graph, simply bending forward into a slouch posture increased the relative load on the spine by almost 50%. Similarly, sitting in a slouch posture increased the relative load on the spine by about 50% as well. The study also analyzed lifting a 20 kg object with poor form and the results were even worse. When subjects lifted a 20kg object by bending over at their backs, the load on the spine increased by almost 150kg when compared to lifting the right way by bending at the knees and hips and keeping the back neutral. The researchers also stated that this spinal load would be increased significantly more had the subjects not been of a slim build and instead much heavier, which just helps illustrate the importance of proper spinal hygiene throughout the day as this gradual wear and tear of the disc adds up and can over time contribute to disc bulges and low back pain. World renowned back pain Expert Professor Stuart McGill explains this quite well with a very simple analogy.

The joints of your spine are not ball and socket joints, but some people treat them as if they are ball and socket joints and they end up back pained and sometimes quite disabled. Here is a ball and socket joint, the hip joint. You see the ball and the socket which is designed to create power, which requires the joint to bear very high loads through a big range of motion. The spinal joints are not meant to create power. They are what we call an adaptable fabric. They are made up of collagen fibers crisscrossing back and forth making up a fabric. Here is an example of a fabric and I'm just going to work it back and forth with motion and you will see that we create delaminations and a separation of the fibers. That's exactly what happens with lifting repeatedly with poor form, rounding the back every time you lift up your child or on and off the toilet, first collapsing and then collapsing your spine and then lifting. All of these things over time add to the delamination. So lifting with poor form throughout the day and allowing cumulative poor posture to allow delamination in the collagen, results in this. Here is a spinal disc where the collagen has been delaminated. You can see that red line at the back of my finger. Now I'm going to apply apply poor posture to this model. I'm going to flex the spine, bending forward and add load. I've pressurized the nucleus, which you now see in red seeping out through the delamination, and that will press on a nerve root and cause back pain or leg pain. Now I'm going to practice good posture. I'm going to stack the spine tall and I'm going to apply the same squeeze. And you see the disc bulges around it, but there's no pressure driving the nuclear bulge into a nerve root. It's gone.

Meaning that if you're currently suffering from chronic back pain, or you experience acute episodes of back pain, or you just simply like to minimize the risk of developing low back pain in the future, then moving in the most spine conserving way, particularly when lifting and training, is the key. And we can implement this in three easy steps. The first step here is just to define the various movements that cause low back pain for you throughout the day. If certain postures or movements such as sitting for prolonged periods, tying your shoes, or performing a specific exercise in the gym, induces pain, then identify these and avoid or modify them to make them pain free. By eliminating these painful movements, you'll be able to reduce the cumulative load placed on your spine and can slowly teach your spine how to move pain free again. The next step is to now modify your posture throughout the day to further minimize the stress placed on your spine. And most of this has to do with just increasing your awareness.

Consider walking around all day with a pound of butter in your hand. Your bicep muscle is hard and active and in a short amount of time it will be screaming. The only way to get relief is to put the butter down. Well, people unknowingly do this to their backs. Imagine instead of holding a pound of butter, I walk around with rounded shoulders and a poking chin. If I feel the back muscles, they're rock hard and they will eventually be screaming just like my biceps holding the butter. But If I continue to palpate and feel my low back muscles and I align my ears over my shoulders, my shoulders over my hips, the muscles suddenly went quiet. So no muscle relaxant will allow your muscle to relax and give you relief. If you continue with poor posture, all you have to do is stack your mass in an alignment. Little tricks might be to hold your hands behind you. Jazz knees loosen, hover in a stack, shut down the muscle and your muscular back ache will melt away.

To illustrate this, here is a simple self assessment created by Professor Stuart McGill that you can do when standing to find the optimal posture for you and your spine. Stand in a relaxed upright posture and feel your lower back muscles with your hand. Lean back slightly until these muscles shut off and feel soft and relaxed. Now slowly lean forward until you identify the point at which they become active and hard again. It may take a few passes to detect this muscle switch point, but it's worth it. The objective is to discover the position that allows you to maintain an upright standing posture without engaging your lower back muscles. And you'll also notice that rounding your shoulders, sticking your head forward, or crossing your arms in front of your body will all cause unwanted muscle tension in the low back. This simple drill demonstrates how important proper standing posture is to relax your back muscles. And the same applies to sitting. Be aware of your posture throughout the day and modify it to minimize the stress that's placed on your spine. The third step is to now modify how exactly you bend over to perform tasks such as tying your shoes, picking up an object, or even performing a lift at the gym. To do so, you need to unlearn many of the bad habits that you've likely developed over the years that involve rounding at the back. Instead, implement what's called a hip hinge. That will be your basic tool for anything to do with lifting or bending over. And to help learn this, here is a helpful move that's recommended and used by Professor Stuart McGill called the shortstop squat.

The shortstop squat starts with shaping the hands with the thumb and the fingers into a V. They are placed on the front of the thigh and the kneecap will go into the crotch that you form in your hand. Slide your hands down your thighs by moving your pelvis back. Notice I didn't round my spine. It was entirely performed with hip motion. And then I grab my knees hard. One common fault is some people are shrugged up. We give the cue to anti shrug and drift their shoulders down. Now tune their spine curvature to make it sweet as we say there. We show them a camel and there we show them a cat so they learn to find their sweet spot posture and then they anti shrug away, which stiffens. That sounds like an odd word, but it's the right word. Into that sweet spot posture. And then the instruction is don't lift with the back. Simply pull the hips through.

Essentially, every time you sit, stand or reach for something low, you're performing a variation of this movement, whether it be picking something up off the ground or simply bending down to pat your dog. So practicing this proper technique ensures that you're able to complete any of these tasks without placing added strain on your spine. You'll know when you get this right because your pain will go away. And the same applies to lifts in the gym as well. Too many times people will place a great deal of stress on their backs and seriously hurt themselves when they don't apply this simple hip hinge movement pattern properly, especially with moves like the deadlift. Before lifting the weight, stabilize your back by applying the abdominal brace and and twisting the bar to engage the lats. Then don't lift with your back. Instead, focus your attention on simply pulling the hips forward and dragging the weight up the thighs, just like we did with the shortstop squat. But now with added load, McGill has successfully returned many champion powerlifters back to record form following serious back injuries by applying these simple yet critical concepts. So as a summary, regardless of what caused your back pain, part of your road to recovery and prevention will always be practicing spinal hygiene. By properly implementing what we went through in today's video into your daily routine, while making an effort to simply move more and avoiding any static positions for too long, you'll successfully be able to minimize the stress that's placed on your lower back and the pain that you may be experiencing. And for an all in one step by step program that shows you exactly how to train and eat to transform your body in the most efficient manner possible without overlooking key aspects of your program like prehab and exercise execution. And simply head on over to builtwithscience.com and take our analysis quiz to determine which of our approaches will be best for you and your specific body. Also, big thank you to Professor Stuart McGill for his help in this video. He actually created a book that's called the Back Mechanic. And it takes the things that you learn in this video one step further by guiding you to a solution that's matched to the specific type of back pain that you're experiencing. I've read it and I would highly recommend it. And I'll leave a link to his books in the description box down below for you guys to check out. Anyways, that is it for today guys. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed this one. Don't forget to show your support for the video by giving the video a like leaving a comment down below and subscribing to the channel. Turning on notifications for the channel as well as this all really does help me out and it's much appreciated. Thank you so much guys. See you next time.