5 Exercises to Alleviate Low Back Pain

Hi, I’m Selina, a physiotherapist and a singer. Today I’m going to demonstrate five movement to help relieve back pain and why I like to do them.

Back pain is super common and movement is essential to help our back feel better. These five movements are easy and gentle, that’s why I like to give them to nearly all my patients with back pain, myself included.

That being said, they may still not be suitable for you so please use your own discretion, always listen to your body, if something doesn’t feel good to do, stop. And if you need more help with your back pain, go see your local physiotherapist.

I’m going to do this on my fabulous Mira Mat, you can do this on a yoga mat, on carpeted floor, or even your bed so long as it is not too soft.

First we need to get on the floor and how do we do that when we have a sore back? Let me show you how I like to do it.

I start with my legs in a split stride position, and watch me do the whole thing first so you know exactly where you need to go. From here I want to take one smooth motion down. I will bend both my knees so that I put my right knee on the floor. I go onto the toes on my right leg, one smooth motion down. From here, now I want to put my left knee on the floor as well, so I have to shift my weight to the right a little to make space for it to go on the floor. From here I will sit back a little, using my arms to help support me I will walk my way out until I am on my side. From here I use my arms to help push and I roll as a block onto my back.

There you have it. And I happily landed exactly where I want to be which is this crook lying position. It is called crook lying because we are lying with our legs crooked, very original. This is the position we will come back to a lot so remember the name crook lie.

The first movement is a gentle knee rocking from side to side. We do this with our knees together, you can put a cushion between your legs if that makes everything feels nicer for you, great. I don’t really need it so I will put it back to the side. Okay, arms out for balance, I gently rock my knees to the left, back to the centre, and then to the right, back to the centre. It can just stay at this size, if this feels good and it feels enough, that’s good, you can also also work them out bigger. If it feels good, try it, if it doesn’t want to, that’s fine too.

Now this rhythmic rocking motion is soothing to our nervous system. A key part of pain management is to help regulate our nervous system so anything that can help calm our nervous system can help us feel better. I like to do 10, 12 of these. If it feels productive for you feel free to do a couple more.

The second movement is a single knee hug to the chest. This helps to stretch out the back on one side and the front of the hip on the other side. From crook lying I’m going to hug my leg up to my chest. I can hold the back of my thigh, I can hold the front of my shin, I don’t love this today I’m going to hold the back of my thigh. Then I extend my right leg out so now I’m stretching the front of my right hip and the back of my left side.

As I hold my stretch here I like to add some relaxation breaths because they help soothe my nervous system as well so why not. My favourite one to do is a regular normal inhale with an extended exhale, so 2 seconds inhale 6 seconds exhale, looks like this.

Again. 

Now you can do a couple more relaxation breaths in this position but we’re going to move on because we don’t want this video to be like way too long. So I’ll bring my right leg back up, put my left leg down back into crook lie then I pick up my right and extend my left, and again we can do some relaxation breaths in this position.

One more.

Let’s do another one.

Okay let’s move on. We will bring the left leg back up and put the right leg back down into our crook lying position.

The third movement is a spine twist. From crook lying I will let both my knees drop down to my right side. I let my left shoulder come along to start with so to keep the twist smaller to start with, give it a moment, if it feels good I will slide my top leg further down over my bottom leg to increase the twist, give it a moment and this is a very good time to give my back a massage.

So I’m using the web space between my index finger and my thumb and I’m just going to scoop from the base of my ribs on the side, down my waist towards my pelvis. You’ll see better when I show you on the other side. We have a muscle in our waist called the quadratus lumborum, it goes from the last two ribs, it’s attached to every single vertebra in the lumber spine and it goes down into our pelvis. It is always cranky when we have back pain, I’ve never had a patient whose QL isn’t grumpy so it’s a good idea to give it some love when we have a sore back.

Okay from this position, I’m going to now swap sides so I want to reverse the way I came, sliding my top leg back over my bottom leg, using my arm out here to help me push and roll back to my crook lying position, then I’m going to let both knees drop down to my left, give it a moment, feels good, then I will let my top leg slide down past my bottom leg and now you can see using my web space I’m massaging the base of my ribcage and scooping down towards my waist and then from my waist to my pelvis. Do this a couple of times. And then we are going to roll back into crook lying, reversing the way we came, top leg slide back to on top of my bottom leg, my left arm goes out for balance and push to come back to my crook lying position.

The fourth movement is a hamstring stretch, from a crook lying position I’m going to pick up my left thigh, having my thigh vertical I flex my left foot up and slowly extending my left knee until I feel a light stretch in my left hamstring at the back of the thigh. Now in this position if you feel any tingliness, nerviness, pins and needles, the first thing to do is to un-flex the foot, see what happens, if it is still tingly and nervy then perhaps today is not the day for this stretch and this is definitely something to tell your physio so they can give you a custom exercise to address that. I don’t have any tingliness today so I’m going to continue with this stretch. This is also a good time to do some relaxation breaths.

One more.

And then we’re going to swap sides, putting my leg back down picking up my right leg, flex my right foot, slowly extending my right knee until I feel a light stretch in my right hamstring.

Now with stretching, it doesn’t have to be strong, in fact when we have back pain the lighter the stretch generally is the better. Imagine your nervous system is already alarmed, it’s already on alert, so the last thing you want to do is to barge in loudly with a really aggressive stretch, that’s going to spook the nervous system some more, not a good idea, nice and gentle is the way to go. Okay? Moving on.

The fifth and final movement is a butt stretch. We are going to do the pretzel stretch. First we have to make the pretzel and we do that by crossing our left leg over onto our right. We want to put the outside ankle, the part right above the eye of the ankle on our right thigh. Yours might look like this, it might look like that, they’re all fine. So now we want to pick up our pretzel. Left hand goes through the hole, right hand go on the back of the right leg and we pick up the pretzel, hold it close and stretch out the left butt. This is definitely a good time time to do some relaxation breaths so let’s see if I can get my hand free.

Ready?

Again. 

One more.

We’ll swap sides, so put your pretzel down, uncross the left leg, now right leg go across over onto the left, right hand goes through the hole, left hand holding the back of the left thigh, picking up the pretzels to stretch the right butt cheek.

Now the reason we’re stretching these big muscles is that it is very common for them to hold undue tension when we have back pain. In fact I have had an episode of back pain where it was all coming from tight butt muscles, and once I stretched it out real good my back pain went away so that can happen.

And a lot of the discomfort we feel when we have back pain comes from this muscle tightness from all around our back area so stretching them out can help us feel better.

Okay now we are going to put our pretzel down, uncross the right leg back into our crook lying position and we’re going to work our way back up to standing.

Before I show you how to get up I have a bonus tip to share with you once we have stood up so make sure you stick around afterwards. So from crook lie, extend my right arm out to the side, I’m going to roll as a block onto my right side and my left hand is getting ready to support me, one smooth motion. From here I want to get my right arm into a better pushing position so I slide it underneath my head like that, and then I push with my hands to help me get up onto my side. From here I push up some more so I’m sitting on my feet, then I go straight up onto my knees, now I want to free my left leg and put my left foot forward, to do that I need to shift my weight to the right so this one can come forward, then I tuck my right toes under, put hands on my left thigh, one strong push with the legs and I’m up.

Here’s the bonus tip I promise you. Pain has an inhibitory effect on our muscles especially our core muscles, which are the muscles we need to support our spine, that’s why it is important that after each episode of back pain that we do some core retraining exercises so we don’t lose any capacity in our core.

And for us singers our Breath Support comes from our core, this means that back pain can absolutely affect our singing and how well we can tap into our Breath Support, giving us extra good reasons to retrain our core after each episode of back pain and I’ve got you covered, I have a free mini course called “Introduction to Breath Support” where I walk you through how to correctly connect with your core muscles, and how to Integrate your core with your voice, these exercises are equally fabulous for us to reconnect our voice with our core after an episode of back pain and you can grab that free training using the link in the description.

Now I am a physiotherapist meaning that I am a professional nagger, so if your back pain has been grumbling for over a week already and it’s not really showing signs of it wanting to get better, now is the time to go see your physio for some professional help.

I’m Selina, a physiotherapist and a singer, I help singers build strong bodies to help enhance their vocal efficiency and performance, if you like the sound of that make sure you subscribe.

And this is a playlist I made just for singers so make sure you check it out.

Thank you for moving with me today, don’t forget to go grab your freebie, until next time, Be Free In Your Movement™.