Lumbar Spinal Stenosis Exercise Routine

Are you suffering from lumbar spinal stenosis? It’s a type of back pain that tends to bother people that are over 50, 60, 70 or beyond years of age. I’m going to cover with you today, an exercise routine that you can do if you think that you’ve got lumbar spinal stenosis or spinal stenosis in your lower back.

Hey, real quick before we go any further, just in case you don’t know me, my name is Dr. David Middaugh, I’m a specialist physical therapist over at El Paso Manual Physical Therapy, where we help people avoid surgeries, injections, and pain medications so they can live a healthy active and mobile lifestyle.

Our focus today is going to be in helping somebody who’s got a low back stenosis problem. But let me tell you about stenosis, in case you don’t really know a lot about it and you’re looking to learn more, and this is the first time you’re looking for information about it. There are two types of stenosis. The lower back one is called central stenosis and the other is called lateral stenosis. Another name for lateral stenosis is foraminal stenosis. They mean the same thing.

Stenosis, the actual words to gnosis just means that there’s an opening where nerves pass that is closing off, and stenosis in the low back, it’s affecting the nerves that come off the low back that end up going into the legs.

So oftentimes people that have stenosis in their back may have back problems or may not, they may not actually feel any pain in their back that is significant. Maybe they have a little bit of tightness or stiffness from time to time. But oftentimes, what they do experience is some sort of pain or discomfort into both legs, or at least one leg more than the other, but both legs tend to be affected most times.

Left untreated, people with stenosis might end up having a surgery to clean out the areas where the narrowing is happening and allow more space for the nerves. Here, at El Paso Manual Physical Therapy, we do help people with lumbar stenosis problems. And we do it naturally in a way that opens up the spaces using muscles, using stretches, using the own body to naturally create more space around those nerves.

I got my partner here, and we’re going to demonstrate a basic exercise routine that you can start at home right now, to begin to open up the space around those nerves and reduce the symptoms that you might be suffering from lumbar stenosis.

So, we’re going to start with exercise number one. We’re going to do this one twice, once the beginning and then we’ll do another exercise, a different one, and then we’ll come back to this same exercise. This routine needs to be done like this to get the full effect of opening up the nerve spaces as well as gliding the nerves within those spaces.

The first one, we’re just going to free up some motion here. I call this one a slow-motion bend. And if you think about it, actually think about this, every bone in your spine, starting at the neck at the neck at the top, you want to bend forward segmentally one at a time and create a little bit of stretching through the spine.

Let’s have you go through that start with the neck here. Go ahead and tuck in the neck first that that sets the first bone to bend. Then begin to look down gradually, just at this pace. Begin to curl those shoulders forward so that you bend to the upper back area. And then suck in your abs so that you push the low back out and bend the parts of the low back, the bones and low back, and they are just going to slide your hands down towards your feet. Go as far as you can comfortably go.

This is going to produce a stretch. You don’t want to do an aggressive stretch here. Once you feel like you’re at the limit of your stretch, then start to reverse the motion. So keep that chin planted down against your chest. Keep those shoulders rolled until you’re up at that point where they have to unroll your head to get out of that position. Let’s just repeat that three to five times, redo it a couple more times here.

Go ahead and tuck the chin in, just so you can get a good view of it. Yep, curl those shoulders down so that the upper back bends, and start sucking in those abs and come down. Now the intensity at which you’ll stretch on a scale of zero to 10, go and come on up whenever you ready. On a scale of zero to 10, if 10 means you’re going to tear something, or it’s the biggest stretch you’ve ever felt, keep it low, like a one or two is enough. Once you get to that one or two down low. Do one more time here.

Once you get a one or two at the at the bottom point of your stretch, you may not even past your knees and that’s okay. No need to force your way down to your feet. That’s a common misconception with this type of motion is that you need to force your way down your legs, touch your feet, touch the floor if you can. I’ve seen some people really work their way into getting their palms flat on the floor. And it’s just not necessary to achieve what we’re trying to achieve here to get the nerves to move in the spaces to open up.

So, after you’ve done that a few times, then you want you to lie down. So we’ve got this treatment table here, but at home, you can lie down on your bed or on the floor, if that’s okay with you. And what you’re going to do is keep your knees bent just like so. With your low back, just like you sucked in your abs on that last one, you got to flatten out right here and suck in your abs to do the same motion here.

Holding the back in that position, you’re opening up the spaces where the holes are, where the nerves pass, and making sure there’s enough clearance for all those nerves so that they’re not getting pinched into the legs. Now just getting into this position, it may cause some mild stretching in the low back. As long as it’s not painful that’s okay and it’s okay to just feel that stretch.

Now, hold that back down flat, then what I want you to do is start to curl up. You’re doing the exact same motion, even with the chin and head, like you were doing standing. But now this is going to challenge those abs a lot so that you can strengthen those abdominal muscles. Hold it for 10 seconds, you should feel like you’re shaking a bit and you’re not going to come all the way up, you’re only coming up enough to the point to where you feel those abs working pretty hard. Then he gets a relax for a bit.

Now I’m going to have my pall here go through just a few reps, but at home, I want you to do 10 repetitions, holding each one for 10 seconds. So let’s do another one or two here. Yeah, back flat, really good. Chin is curled. Shoulders are curled, abs are going and he’s getting a little bit shaky, and he’s a strong fella guy, he works out a couple times a day, sometimes, most days of the week.

But this position really challenges your abs. So if you feel like you can’t go up as far as my friend is here. That’s okay. Just do what you can to where you feel your abs working. The most important part of this exercise is that you feel these abdominals working hard, but not so hard that you’re getting a cramp or that it’s hurting you as far as like pain. I do expect for you to have muscle fatigue though, that can feel painful if you haven’t had a good ab workout for a while.

So just mind the difference between true pain, like it’s reproducing your problem that you’re looking to get help for, versus your muscles are just getting tired. After you’ve done 10 reps, go ahead and come on back up, stand up, and we’re going to do that same exact one that he did the beginning.

Start with the head, it’s like a double chin motion that you’re doing. Then begin to look down as you’re holding that double chin, and then segments only move each bone of your spine down. Remember in a second those ads at the bottom and you might find that you can go down further easier with still reaching that same stretch intensity. That’s cool. Just don’t pass that two out of 10-stretch intensity, like I said the first time around.

And again, do another three to five reps here. Theoretically, you can do more than five and it probably won’t hurt you just don’t stretch aggressively. Now, if you’re pushing it to a three, four, or five or eight, nine, ten stretch intensity on this exercise, you’re probably going to run into some discomfort. And you might be pinching or really aggravating those nerves, which can cause some pain later on and just worse in the whole situation. So please be careful not to over stretch this if you’ve got a true stenosis problem.

I want you to repeat this process hourly if possible. If your symptoms are really bad, if they’re more than this severe case, and the way that you would notice a severe case is if you’re having trouble every time you’re up by your feet and you feel the leg pain right away. That’s a severe case. A more mild case is where you feel it once or twice a day. And a really mild case then is where you feel once or twice a week.

If it’s on the more moderate smile, then that you would just need to do this a few times a day, you can probably get the effects you’re looking for. But generally, the more severe the problem is, the more often you would do this, and you probably cap out at doing this once every hour for really severe case.

Guys I hope this video was helpful for you, if you think that you’ve got a lumbar stenosis problem and you’ve tried this out, or you’re looking to try this out, and you think that we might be able to help you out, we do offer other services in person and the way that you can find out about getting help from us a manual physical therapists, to get our hands on your back and move the joints and move the muscles and all the other tissues back there to speed this process up. By going to the top part of our website here, find the menu bar and click on the part of the menu that says cost and availability.

Once you click on that, you’ll get taken to a forum where you just leave all your details there and one of my staff will give you a call back to discuss your back problem. Want to know what’s the type that we can help out, we don’t want to waste your time want to make sure that we’re the right people to help out your problem. And if we’re not going to send you to the right person so that you can get this problem addressed as fast as possible. and be a part of your success story real soon. Have a great day. Bye