In this video I’m going to tell you about this must have device to help cure back pain. I’m Dr. David Middaugh. And I’m a specialist physical therapist that’ll pass. So manual physical therapy. This channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active and mobile, while avoiding unnecessary surgery, injections and pain medications. Please consider subscribing to this channel so that you don’t miss out on any of the helpful advice, tips, exercises and stretches that we put out on our channel every single week.

So let me just tell you about this device. It is an AB trainer and I recently did a review on the product itself. And just to update you on that I had a hard time with this screw right here. But it’s all set, it worked out just fine. This headrest is pretty sturdy, and the device is really sturdy now.

So I’m going to just set this down for just a moment and talk about why you would use this app trainer for your back problem and how the root of your back problem is likely caused by some weak abdominal muscles. And this is going to be very helpful for you. So I’m just going to talk a bit about if you want to just see the exercises you can have to skip forward, just read the chapters down on the bottom on the scroll bar here. And you can see where we talk about exactly how to do the exercises.

But to give you the anatomy, because this is really important to understand why you would use this AB machine. Here’s the lower back bones right now the lumbar spine, you have five vertebrae, and then on the back, you can see them a little bit better and how they connect to the tailbone here. Oftentimes when people have back pain, it’s related to back spasms muscles that are really stiff and tight in the back.

Or it could be a more chronic problem like arthritis in the joints of the back degenerative disc disease, disc, herniations, lumbar stenosis, and many other back problems. Sciatica is another common one where you get pinched nerves, these yellow things coming out of the spine. All of these back problems are rooted in a key muscle imbalance, where the muscles that are running up and down the back of the spine, the ones that you can retry behind your back and feel those tend to be over dominance and overused. And they’re the ones that add a lot of pressure to the joints of the spine.

If that pressure is kept up for a period of time, the muscles can begin to spasm, the overdeveloped and they can get really hard back here. And they also cause a lot of pressure into the joints. And that’s what sets off arthritis, as well as disc herniations. Because you pressurize the discs too much. And you also can pinch the nerves from that pressure, the muscle group that opposes these back muscles that you need to get stronger so that you can take pressure off the back of the spine here, muscle group is going to be the abdominals.

But here’s a key important factor. There are five lumbar vertebrae, right. So in your abdominal area, your abdominal muscles generally, where your belly button is, is about the midpoint, and that corresponds with L three lumbar vertebrae three here. So the muscle fibers that are at about the belly button level, not directly this is more indirect they there’s one muscle the transversus abdominus.

The muscle fibers that tighten at the level of the belly button and above generally stabilize the upper part of the lumbar spine and then the abdominal muscles that are in the bottom area right here. When those contracting gets stronger, they generally stabilize the lower part of the spine. So when you can get these abdominal muscles stronger, the upper and the lower, then you can begin to relax the upper lumbar muscles, the lower back muscles and the lower back muscles.

If you think of the lower back as an upper and a lower half, this is why abdominal strengthening is so important. And it’s often done wrong. Meaning people get the idea that back pain is helped by strengthening your abs, but they go strengthen their abs and it ends up hurting their back more. And the reason for this is because of that muscle imbalance that I’m telling you about. And often people when they work out their abdominals are working out the upper abdominals above the belly button.

And they really need to be targeting those lower abdominals because those are the muscles that are going to give the lowest part of the back the most stability where most back problems tend to happen as far as herniated discs, pinched nerves and joint problems in the like arthritis in the spine. That’s where this device comes into play. You can easily target your lower abs using this device and I’m going to show you how to do that. So let’s get onto the tables so you can see this.

Now when you lie down you may want to use this on the floor and you just lay down the frame and scoot the frame Under you so that the headrest is read into your head and keep your knees bent just like this, you can technically do this with your legs out flat outstretched like this. But I recommend starting out with your knees bent, because when you bend your knees like this, it puts your low back down.

And when you relax your back in a downward position right here, it’s not marked up, that’s going to want to relax those back muscles so that you can focus on using your abdominal muscles. On the front, the more arched are in your back, the shorter those muscles get. So your legs are down, it’s going to want to arch your back, it shortens the muscles on your back here, which makes them want to activate or want to be used while you’re doing this exercise.

It is insane how you can actually do a crunch type or a sit up type exercise and Miss using your abdominal muscles and end up using your back muscles. And it doesn’t make sense at face value. But the way the body works is it likes to compensate however it can in the presence of a weak muscle. So that’s why this happens. But this device is going to help you out so that you’re not using your back muscles.

So start out with your knees bent, then you’re going to grab the handle right up here, you can grab on the sides, if you want, whatever is most comfortable, I find appears easiest. And then you’ve got to push your back down. Notice when I push my back down flat, my bottom comes up a little bit, my glutes, my butt comes up a little bit off the table, and it doesn’t need to completely come off, it just lifts slightly, you might still be in contact with the table. But in doing that this is called a posterior pelvic tilt.

You’re already engaged in those abdominals. And now put your finger on your belly button. And you want to try to get those lower abdominals below your belly button to activate just doing this, this tilt motion or this back flattening motion. Now holding that nagging to your crunches or your sit-ups. And it doesn’t matter how you come up, you just need to tighten those muscles. So if I come up right here and hold, I can already feel the lower abs working pretty good. I feel the upper abs working too.

But the harder I push down my low back, the more I feel my lower abs go. And I’m pushing with my hands downwards as well to help support my head, but also kind of give my shoulders a little boost to help me get my low back flat and get my lower abs engaged. After about 10 seconds, you can come and rest down in the field with just one rep. And that’s it, I work out my abs on a pretty regular basis. This is helping me nicely.

So I’m going to do a few more reps here. And I’m going to tell you about how to do this at home on a schedule so that you can begin to get pressure off your back to help your stenosis your disc problem your degenerative spine problem, so that you can begin to cure it, literally cure it because if you can take the pressure off for the long term, then you can stop the progression of arthritis stop the progression of our of stenosis and other chronic problems that people typically get surgery for.

So that you can be more active without having unnecessary surgery relying on medications or injections. Alright, so back flat, sit on up and hold it for 10 seconds, pushing my back down as much as it’ll go. And I’m starting to get a little shaky here, arms, my legs away that feels more comfortable for me. And after 10 seconds, I’m going to relax. And when you come up, if you’re doing this, if you have this device or you’re considering doing this, you’re trying it because you can do this without the device.

When we show you that. It’s like that, but the device helps you to really support your head a lot better. And when I push the frame down the list my head and shoulders a bit. I feel like I get just a bit more out of this exercise. That’s why I really think this is a must use tool if you’ve got a back problem. And by the way, got this off of amazon for $23. It says it was a sale. I don’t know if it’s always that price or not.

But it’s the best $23 You’re going to spend if you’ve got a back problem compared to all the medications, injections, doctor’s visits, and you know God forbid you need a surgery, that’s going to cost you a lot too. And plus this is natural stuff, it’s going to make you feel better getting stronger. So back flat and curl down and hold it there for 10 seconds.

After about 10 seconds, you can start to relax and you really have to tune in when you come up and you’re holding it so that you use your low abs below the belly button. You want to really get those lower abs to engage and almost even produce a little bit of a stretching your low back if you can do that. You don’t want to use your back muscles.

Remember I said that’s not a good thing. That’s your body compensating but if you can get those muscles to relax and stretch them out, then you’re on the right track. Back foot that, come up and hold it for 10 seconds. And never holds are really important. You may be asking How come I’m not doing reps where I’m coming up and down and up and down.

The holes are a big deal, because I’m assuming that if you’ve got a back problem, that’s probably why you’re watching this video, your abdominal muscles have not been used properly, especially the lower part of your abdominal muscles. And they need to wake up. And by holding the contraction, you can make more of those muscle fibers wake up and recruit them, bring them into the exercise, so that they turn on and engage.

After you’ve done that for a time, usually a month to two months, then you can begin to do reps and effectively use them. But right now, if you go into reps up and down, and up and down, there’s some of those muscle fibers that are just not going to fire very good. And you’re only going to train the ones that you are using and you’re going to skip training the ones that are more dormant.

So the holds right now are incredibly important for you, I would just do them indefinitely, it’s not going to hurt you to even do them past the one or two months, it’s only going to help back flat, and then come on up. And I am shaking here, and I’m the therapist, I literally will do 100 Sit ups every few days. And this is tiring me out who has loved this cyst from this device back flat, come on up and hold it. And if this is your first time doing this, I would go for about 10 reps or so and just get a good idea for getting those lower abs to fire.

Now let’s talk about how to begin to use this device on a schedule so that you can get your abs strong enough to defeat your back problem. My recommendation to you is that you start by doing 25 reps every day. Now ideally spread out like say five here, five there, because when you activate your abs, then they’ll stay activated. Like right now my abs are toasty, I can feel them just a little bit tight. And they’ll keep like that for the next 20-40, maybe an hour, minutes or time.

And so you’ll get that decreased pressure going through your spine because your abdominal muscles have now activated. And that’s going to relatively counterbalance the back muscles and depressurize it. So you can spread that out throughout the day. That would be ideal. And once you’ve completed 25 reps on a consistent basis for a week or two, then start upping it to 50 reps. And you can make small progressions, you can say well, I did 25 yesterday, I’m going to go for 30 today or 35.

And work your way up. Just be careful not to overdo it, because you can overdo it and start to recruit other muscles like your back muscles or the upper abs too much, because your lower abs just ran out of gas, and you’re starting to compensate. And that’s going to feed into your back problem. That’s the problem that people run into when they go try to do sit ups or some sort of abdominal work and end up flaring up their back pain making it worse when the intent was to help their back pain.

Now after you’ve gotten to 50 reps every day, at least once a day, you can begin to do them closer together at this point, because the hope is that if you’ve been doing 25 reps or so, you’ve been waking up those muscles better and they recruit better. So you don’t need to fire them so frequently throughout the day.

Now you can do your 50 reps all at once in the morning or in the afternoon or whenever it’s best for you to do them all together. After you’ve gotten used to doing 50 reps, then work your way up to 100 reps in a day. And if you can do that for a few days, then you can start backing off from doing this every day to once or twice a week.

And you’re going to be in a maintenance plan where you use this ab roller device and you’re getting your lower abs to engage primarily. And you’re taking a tons of pressure off your low back so that you can free up your discs. Your joints, if a set joints is what they’re called the set. arthropathy is a common diagnosis that people get with back pain, and then the nerves as well so you can unpinch those nerves.

Now there’s a link in the description below. To order one of these from Amazon, I highly recommend you get one if you’ve got a back problem. I am going to begin recommending this to my back pain patients when they come in. I just started using this device and I had seen it before and I have forgotten about it. And I was wanting to try one and so I’m so glad that I finally got to doing one. I had to make another video about this because I love it so much.

So anyways, I hope you decide to get one if you’re dealing with a back problem. I think it’s going to be a tremendous benefit to you. And if you know somebody who’s got a back problem, please share this video with them so they can get this kind of help as well with beginning to fix their back problem for the long term really a cure for the back problem if they can get stronger ABS thanks so much for watching friends and I’ll see in the next video. bye

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