Raleigh Back Pain Exercises - Bird Dog Exercise

Video Transcription:

Hi, I'm Dr. Lindsay Mumma, and I'm going to demonstrate a couple of our traditional core exercise workouts. Many of you think that core exercising is actually doing sit-ups, crunches, and things like that, but those aren't technically the best thing that you can be doing.The best thing that you can do for core exercise is actually to strengthen all of these muscles and not just your six-pack abdominal muscles. Your six-pack abdominal muscles are the ones that you get from doing this, but if you pay attention to some of the other videos, this motion is not the best thing that you can do for your lumbar spine.The first thing I'm going to show is the bird dog. In order to do the bird dog, you're going to get on hands and knees. You're just going to be with your hands below your shoulders and your knees below your hips. What you want to think of is having yourself a nice, flat surface here. So, if you put a cup of coffee on my back, as I'm moving I'm not going to knock that cup over.To start off with, we're just going to remove one base of the core. In order to do that, I'm not just picking my arm up. What I'm doing is increasing my stability through here, so almost pushing out, definitely not sucking in, because you don't want to do that. You want to avoid that at all costs. Just slide one hand forward.As you see, none of this moves when I take away a support. I can switch and do my left arm, or I can do my right leg, or I can do my left leg. What you want to avoid is too much movement as you're doing that. Eventually, we'll get to right arm/left leg, and back, left arm/right leg, and back. Then from there, we can actually progress to even more complex movements.All right. Give those a try. Thanks.

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Dr. Lindsay Mumma is a Raleigh chiropractor.  If you are suffering from back pain, we can provide caring, effective chiropractic care.  You can contact us here for a confidential consultation.