Back Arthritis: The Top 5 Exercises You Need for Relief and Recovery

In this video, I’m going to show you the top five essential exercises that you need to help fix back arthritis. And I just want to give you a quick disclaimer, these five exercises are just a starting point.

Fixing back arthritis is a process that takes time and a progression of exercises, these exercises here are the best place to get started. So that you can begin to fix the muscle imbalance that affects back arthritis. If you want to see more videos about back arthritis, or fixing the muscle imbalance, just head down in the description below.

And we’ve got them linked there for you. Let’s get into it the first exercise that you have got to master and it is super important that you master this motion. Otherwise, every exercise after this is not going to work well for you. It’s a pelvic tilt, a posterior pelvic tilt to be specific. Now in the physical therapy world in the scientific research for this kind of stuff, that’s what they call it a posterior pelvic tilt.

But I’m going to call it flattening your back. So it looks just like this, the best way to start is to lie down on your back somewhere on the floor of the bed with your knees bent just like this. And you’ve got to figure out how to move your back this way. Just like that, what I’m doing, if I put my hand under my back here, I’m putting pressure from my low back down against my hand and on the bed that I’m on.

What you should feel when you do this is the lower abdominals working are tightening up. Where you don’t want to feel is the upper abdominals tightening up a lot, they may tighten up some, but it should feel like you’re working more from the lower abdominals. And another thing that you might feel is the glutes back here tensioning up a bit, we do this properly.

The wrong way to do this, this is the mistake that a lot of people make and get hung up on this movement is they stick out their bottom, they stick out there but an arc they’re back thinking that they’re pushing their back down, but they’re really pushing their butt down into the surface right here.

So you got to think about tucking your butt under, almost lifting it from the table slightly, you’re not trying to push off and lift, you’re just trying to flatten out your back to get your bottom to come up. This movement is super important. If you don’t get this down.

Everything else after this is not going to work because you need to incorporate this motion into the rest of the exercises. This exercise is important because it starts to line up the vertebrae so that you can get the proper alignment to work from so that you’re taking pressure off those arthritic joints in your back.

So to do this as an exercise, because it was just the movement, you’re going to hold it for 10 to 20 seconds. So you flatten out your back, make sure the right muscles are working lower abs below the belly button, and the glutes should be working a bit. It may even feel like your head and shoulders want to kind of come up like this.

That’s okay, that’s actually the next exercise that we’re going to go into. But you need to get those lower abs to work as you flatten out your lower back. Hold it for 10 to 20 seconds and repeat this 10 reps. You can go more than that. It’s just a great starting point a great warm up to the rest of the exercises just to make sure you get the right motion.

Now this should not hurt your back. None of the exercises in this video today should hurt your back. If anything, you should feel relieving. Maybe some stretching in the area. That’s okay. But nothing that hurts that makes you want to wince or nothing that’s going to linger after this time that you’re doing these exercises.

Once you’ve done your 10 reps and you feel like you’ve mastered this motion, you know how to properly flatten out your back rather than sticking out your bottom like this. Then you’re ready for the next level. The abdominal curl exercises. The second exercise, you’re going to have to flatten your back just like I showed you. Holding your back flat, you’re going to lift your head, bring your chin, your chest, bring your shoulders up and reach your hands towards your knees.

If you’re trying to touch your kneecaps. It looks like this. And as you’re holding there, you should be thinking about flattening out your back as hard as you can still because the mistake people make is they flatten out their back first. Then come up and forget to flatten out their back they kind of let it go because now they’re holding up. And the way that you can know that you’re doing this correctly, is when you bring your head and shoulders up.

You should feel more intense muscle tightening in your lower abdominals. lower abdominals are below your belly button. upper abdominals are above your belly button. So flatten out your back. Just like the pelvic tilt we started out with, curl up touch your kneecaps, okay, if you don’t reach areas got different arm links. I have really long arms and reach towards your kneecaps. If you can touch them great.

Touch your thighs if you only reach there and hold it for 10 to 20 seconds as well and you’re flattening out your back and feeling those lower abdominals work. If you still are warm Dealing with flying out your back, then you can put your hand under your back and just reach with one hand, just to make sure that you’re flattening out your back properly. And this, this is no easy exercise.

It looks simple. But I work on my abs, I’m pretty strong, and I’m still getting shaky doing this exercise, I’ve only done a few reps here, I want you to work on 10 reps, you can do more, it’s better if you do more. But to make this into a routine, I’m going to run through all the exercises and give you the reps that you should do to make it into a routine.

The third exercise is called a bent, knee fall out. And the purpose of this exercise is to get your hips to become more mobile, because when you have back arthritis, typically the hips also get stiff along with the back, the stiffness in the back ends up affecting the stiffness in the hips. So making sure you have good hip mobility is essential to be able to be able to get up and move around properly and having good mechanics or good movements in your back joints.

So here’s what this exercise looks like, you got to go back to that posterior pelvic tilt. So you’re pushing your back flat, flattening out your back, holding your back flat, now you’re going to drop one knee out at a time as far as it’ll go without your other leg going or your hips rolling over. So for me back flat first. It’s about right there before I feel like I got to start moving my hips over.

So you’re going to move on, move out like that just to that endpoint, then bring the leg back in than one at a time, you’re going to move the other leg out. Same idea you stop. Once you feel like you’re going to roll over, and then alternate sides. And you’re trying to avoid twisting through your spine. by flattening out your back, you should avoid it pretty well.

But you also want to just avoid rolling over all together. You’re going to do 30 reps each side. But if you’re alternating sides, it’s 60 reps, you can just count to 60. And get those in, you can take breaks whenever you want. You don’t have to do them nonstop, all the way to 60 probably won’t be able to last with your back flat, that long.

If you’re doing these you might go 10 reps and then take a break and do that six times for 60 reps. And you could do more than that. This is just a starting point for you to work from if you’re finding this video for the first time in figuring out how to work on your back arthritis problem. Sometimes it’s called facin arthropathy back arthritis. Sometimes it’s called for set osteoarthrosis back osteoarthrosis.

I’m not talking about psoriatic arthritis or rheumatoid arthritis. Those are different conditions that require a different treatment plan. This is for back osteo arthritis or lumbar osteoarthritis. They use all kinds of terms of the medical field. And they all kind of mean very similar things. There are slight differences between them.

But they’re generally caused by the same root problem, which is what we’re fixing here. Which brings me to a side note, you’re probably thinking that we should be working on back muscles considering that you’ve got back arthritis.

But if we’re fixing the root imbalance, which I’ve talked about in other videos, you should not be working on your back muscles because those back muscles are crunching down in your first set joints and your back joints where the arthritis happens. And it’s feeding into the problems we actually need to be working on the abdominals.

And making sure that mobility is good throughout the spine and the hips. And the fourth exercise is a bridge exercise. So you can be on your back just like so same position we’ve been working from it’s just a comfortable position for somebody with back arthritis. Then flatten out your back, same idea, holding your hips a little bit up just like that by flattening out your back, that’ll tip your hips up this direction, holding that down the back down, then you’re going to start to lift up now.

Now you’re actually going to lift and clear some space from your bottom and the surface that you’re on. And you don’t want to lift super high, you just want to lift a little bit to refuel a very light stretching on the front of your thighs. Hold it there for 10 seconds. Now before you lift up, make sure that you tighten up your glutes.

So let me run through that with you again, back flat that I need you to think about clenching your buns, like tighten the muscles back there is another way of saying that. So back flat, tighten the muscles, you might feel like your knees open to like they want to open when you tighten your muscles. That’s okay, that’s normal.

You might even try it out and get a better glute contraction than lift your bottom up from the bed, the floor wherever you’re at and hold it for 10 seconds. This can get kind of intense after doing several reps of this. I want you to do 10 reps.

You could do more just like I’ve said with all the other exercises but 10 reps is a good amount of reps to start getting the muscles to wake up and get you get your pressure off your facetted joints or your back joints so that you can help your back arthritis 10 seconds just like this. And then after 10 seconds, you can relax I’m estimating here, I’m not going to exactly 10 seconds.

It’s okay if you end up going 15-20 seconds, but I would at least do 10 seconds. There are scientific reasons. For the whole, we’re trying to take advantage of something called muscle tetany, which is helpful for waking up all the muscle fibers in the muscles we’re trying to work and make sure they’re getting strong all uniformly rather than just some muscle cells getting strong and not others within the same muscle.

So hold it for 10 seconds, get those glutes working, you should feel like your glutes are starting to activate starting to work started to tighten up better. What you don’t want to do on this one is lift real high just like this. Because you’ll use other muscles to compensate besides the glutes, you might start using your hamstrings quite a bit, or your back muscles.

On that note, if you’re starting to feel like you’re getting a hamstring cramp, you’re using your hamstrings too much, you need to barely lift off the table or not even lift at all. But just tighten up your glutes as you’re pushing your back flat so that you can avoid using your hamstrings. That’s a very common compensation.

That is another sign that you’ve got a muscle imbalance that’s feeding into your back arthritis. In the final exercise, I call it an angry cat you’re going to get on all fours. Just like this. It looks like what you’ve been doing so far, just like you’ve been practicing flooding out your back. Now you’re going to do it right here. You’re going to second your abs right here and think about pushing this part of your back up as high as you can get your abs work in here.

Hold it there for 10 seconds. You can go 20 seconds if you want. And I need you to do at least 10 reps. And the point here is to get your abs to work and stretch out those back muscles that have been compressing your back joints causing the back arthritis problem. Alright, so you have a little regiment to work on, go back, rewind this video and make sure you have all the components of each exercise correctly.

Now this is just a starting point. The question I often get is How long do I keep doing these exercises and how often I would do these exercises every day, even multiple times a day 234 or five times a day, if you can, depending on how severe your problem is and how well you tolerate it. If you’re getting pain after the third or fourth round of doing these exercises, then stop you’ve probably just capped out as much as your muscles are able to tolerate for the day.

But see if you can do them again the following day. Keep going like this until they become easier and easier for you. At that point you probably need to get more muscle contraction need to intensify the exercise somehow because progressing you’re strengthen your abdominals and glutes is going to be key extremely important in making sure that you take the pressures off your back so that your arthritis is calming down and allowing you to move better and stand better walk better bend over better all the things that you’re having trouble with should begin to improve as your glutes and abdominals get stronger not your back muscles.

You don’t want to work out your back muscles are specific reasons for that, which I’ve mentioned in other videos. If you’re looking for a more comprehensive program to address the root problem of back arthritis, check out our 28 day back health and wellness boost program. It’s linked in the description below.

You can learn more about it there. We’ve also got playlists for other problems like disc herniations and degenerative disc disease you can check those out in the description below. I hope this video was helpful for you if you did give us a thumbs up in the same row is that like or thumbs up button. There’s a super thanks button. It’s got a heart with $1 sign in there. If you want to support our channel monetarily, you can definitely do that by doing the super Thanks. I appreciate you guys so much and I’ll catch you in the next video. Bye