Natalie Jill shows a three-step warmup to ease lower-back pain: foam-roll your quads, stretch your hip flexors, and activate your glutes with bridges. Quad-dominance and anterior pelvic tilt, common in women, pull your lower back into strain. She does this before every workout.
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Hi, guys. Natalie, Jill. Ready to be happy, healthy and fit? Today we are talking about lower back pain. I get a lot of questions about how to deal with lower back pain. Now, I want to preface this with I am not a doctor, so I don't want what I'm going to share to replace any of your medical advice, as I don't know what your specific situation is. But I want to share my story that I had some ongoing lower back pain, which was really getting in the way of my workouts. I could not do any of the intense stuff I wanted to do. I couldn't do any of my normal routines because of this chronic lower back pain I was experiencing a few years ago. Now, mine was caused mostly from arthritis in my lower back and some disc issues. And I always thought that that was the reason my back was hurting. What I came to learn was it's not so much the actual injury or the arthritis causing the pain. It's all of those muscle imbalances and all of those underdeveloped small muscles around it that are not strong that are making you feel the pain. So if you've heard about having a strong core to help with lower back pain, that's what that's about. If you can develop that midsection, if you can strengthen all those muscles in that area, all those small and larger muscles in that area and get your body working functionally, you're going to feel less painful. So especially with women, we tend to have this anterior pelvic tilt. So what happens is we have this C curve in our lower back here. So some women might say, I have a pooch in my stomach. And they're clearly not overweight. What's happening is they've got the C curve here, so their stomach is sticking out and their back is arched and they are hyperextending. So they've got their rear end sticking out and they're pulling on their hamstrings here. And they're always thinking, I have a pooch or my hamstrings feel tight. And. And you go to constantly stretch your hamstrings, which is the worst thing you can do because think of a rubber band being pulled tight. You don't want to stretch it further. It's going to make it snap. So that's the wrong thing to do. So women tend to have this curve, and a lot of it happens from wearing high heels over time. So what I learned is if you can make it so you're not overusing your quads, we can start to develop our hamstrings more and we can work to activate our glutes. We're going to get rid of that anterior pelvic tilt. We're going to start to flatten out our back. Squeeze your glutes and you can even feel that. And we're going to take that lower back pressure away. So if you just stand there, if you even do this with me, stand there, put your shoulders back, squeeze your glutes. If you have lower back pain, you'll feel a relief from that. Might not look so attractive doing this, but you'll feel that relief here. So when you do that and practice that, that's going to help with lower back pain. Now, what you also can do is before any workout, and I personally do this religiously before every single workout, and if I don't, I will start feeling that lower back pain again. There's three warmup moves that I do before any workout that helps to avoid lower back pain, and it helps you to not be quad dominant and to use the right muscles. So I'm going to show you what those are. The first one is foam rolling. And what you want to do is you want to use the foam roller to roll out those quads. That's the only thing I recommend rolling prior to your workout when dealing with lower back pain. You're going to roll out those quads, and you want to think of it as what stretching would do. It's going to almost turn off that muscle. It's going to make it. So we're not using that muscle predominantly when we're working out. So we're going to roll out those quads and you're going to really start spend some time focusing on those spots, getting out any knots, rolling that whole quad. The second thing you're going to do this is what I do is I do a hip flexor stretch, but I do it as a dynamic stretch. So I'm moving as I'm doing it. It's not a static stretch. I'm not holding still. I'm going to be moving while I'm doing this, and I put that back leg up to really stretch that hip flexor. So I'm turning off that quad, I'm stretching out that hip flexor and and I'm getting ready for my workout. Then the final thing I do is I'm going to activate my glutes because I want those glutes to fire. I want to use my glutes and my hamstrings, not my quads, during the workout because I want to get rid of that pull and I want to get rid of that lower back pain. So I now do glute bridges, and you can do them double leg or you can do them single leg, but you want to really concentrate on activating that glute. So if you try these things, especially if you have lower back pain, you'll notice a relief just from doing these things. So it's very therapeutic too. All of my programs, especially the 12 week Super Shred, the Shredded AB program, and my new Rev4 DVD, all of that addresses lower back pain. So all the exercises in those programs are going to help you combat lower back pain. Thanks for checking out my channel. Make sure you subscribe below. Subscribe to my channel, check out my other workouts and other tips and let me know if you have any questions. Bye.
