In this video, I’m going to show you how to make walking with back pain instantly better using just a body length mirror. Now, this type of fix for walking with back pain is especially helpful if you’re dealing with a degenerative disc problem or herniated disc, sciatica problems, lumbar spinal stenosis problems, back arthritis issues, back spasms, and much more, let me show you how to set this up.

Alright, so here’s how you’re going to set this up, you’re going to get a mirror, your body length mirror, on the wall, somewhere in the hallway of your home would be really great, at least somewhere where you can take about seven to 10 steps towards the mirror so that you can think about how to fix your walk in form with this technique. And I’m going to show you next, once you have your mirrors set up, make sure it’s leaning on the wall correctly.

Or maybe it’s even up on the wall, you can see yourself just fine just with my setup here of how to lean this against the door in our hallway of the building. But what you’re going to do next is take one finger from each hand, just like this and put one finger on your nose, and one finger on your belly button that represents your spine. I know it’s not 100% exactly where your spine ends, it starts but that’s just a good way to figure out where your spine is.

Next, you’re going to step over to a side, it doesn’t matter if it’s your right or your left and try to align yourself on the edge of the mirror. Now I’m using a funny camera angle here. So just bear with me, we’ll kind of still get this just fine, you’ll understand this. And once you cut yourself in half here on the mirror vertically, your nose should be on about where the where the edge of the mirror is, and so should your belly button.

Next, you’re going to begin to walk towards the mirror and know what part of your body sway side to side. Most people when they take their first step their bodies shifts over towards the leg they’re standing on you see on my body shifted off the mirror here. Versus if I step on my other leg, my body shifts on my right leg. Let me just show you.

When I step on, when I step forward with my whole body seal, my body weight shifts that way when they step and then when they step the other way my body wants to shift that way, it’s my left. So when I’m walking here, nobody wants to kind of sway.

That Sway is incredibly bad for your back muscles because your back muscles right in here begin to stabilize way too much. And they begin to hurt your back because you’re compressing your spine so much. So what you’ve got to do is reduce the sway. It’s real simple, use the edge of the mirror again. So align yourself on the edge of the mirror, fingering your nose, fingering your belly button. And it’s not going to quite line up on the visual here.

But I can see that I’m cutting half on the mirror here. When I walk towards the mirror, you’re trying to suck in your abs a little bit not too hard that so hard that you can’t breathe, it’s it should just be gentle because it gives you stability. Then as you’re sucking your abs and trying to keep your fingers aligned on the edge of the mirror your nose and your belly button. Walk straighter, try to reduce the amount of sway that you do in your hips.

That’s typically the number one place that people get a bunch of sway sometimes it’s a little higher, I’ve never really seen it up in the head too much. You do see it actually, when people kind of do this lurch motion, they tip their upper body over and over. But it’s less rare than then the waist motion where they do this with a walk. So avoid slow dancing while you’re walking.

Basically, you’re trying to stay nice and straight through here. Now a pro tip here, you’re never going to be perfect. It’s never going to be perfectly straight, you’re always going to have a little bit of a sway. The idea here is just to reduce the amount of sway that you do from this much to just this much.

That little bit amount of sway does wonders for your back because if you’d like to go walking, and especially if you’re trying to walk to help your back pain, just think of your vertebrae in your spine.

When your vertebrae in your spine are moving side to side, you’re bending and rotating or twisting at the spine. If you’re doing that over and over again, for miles or 1000s of steps. You’re hurting your back joints, your discs.

That’s how you’re creating your arthritis, your stenosis problem. And if you can reduce the amount of sway and bending that’s happening your low back then you can begin to allow the irritation to come down on pinched the nerves and stop hurting your discs in your back. Now the abdominal contraction that I’ve mentioned, you have to kind of suck in your abs a little bit to help you reduce the sway.

That’s super important because we’re taking advantage of a reflex in the body When you fire up your abs appropriately, keyword appropriately, it should reduce how much you’re using your back muscles. And that’s important here because if you’re using your back muscles a lot, it could be compressing those vertebrae down on each other, creating abnormal forces to your spine, discs and nerves. And you’re trying to take that pressure off by activating your abs, it’s something called the Reciprocal inhibition. So make sure when you got your nose and your belly button like that, that you you’re thinking about sucking your abs and you’re doing it in a way that kind of does this to your back, you see how my shoulders and chest subtly slouch. It’s not an all-out big slouch.

It’s a very subtle, minor slouch, it’s also called the posterior pelvic tilt when you shift your hips forward like that, and drawing your abs, just joining your abs a little bit like that should help you to reduce the sway, but you’re also trying to consciously think about not swing so much with your body reduce that sway. If you could do this consistently on your walk, you should be able to instantly reduce the amount of pain. And I’m not saying get rid of it 100% forever.

I’m just saying reduce it so that walking can now become a beneficial activity for you. Maybe you can tolerate walking a bit longer, especially if you have a job or a lifestyle where you’re on your feet quite a bit. Or you’re going on vacation, you’re going to be sightseeing and being on your feet walking quite a bit.

This can make the world of a difference in allowing you to get through the day easier without as much pain medication in avoiding a doctor’s visit for an injection, and in the long-term making your problem so bad that you end up needing some unnecessary surgery for it.

My name is Dr. David Middaugh and I’m a specialist physical therapist at El Paso manual physical therapy. And this channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active and mobile, while avoiding unnecessary surgery, injections and pain medications. We have a ton of videos on many different back problems we have all linked down in the description below. And there’s also a program that you need to know about that gets to the root of a lot of these back problems.

It’s called the 28 Day Back Health And Wellness Boost Program. It’s designed at treating the root problems so that you can begin to get long term relief for your back issue. Check it out in the description below as well. Thanks so much friends for watching and I’ll see you in the next video. Bye

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