Three Exercises For Lower Back Pain For Women That Have Had Children In The Past

Hey there, are you looking for help for back pain that you think is related to having children in the past? Well, I’m going to cover with you today, the top three exercises that you can do if you’re a woman who’s had kids in the past and are suffering from back pain problems now.

My name is Dr. David Middaugh, a specialist physical therapist over at El Paso Manual Physical Therapy. And I’ve been helping women that have had back pain troubles, years after they had babies, whether they’ve had a C-section or natural deliveries. It could be 10 years later, 15-20 or more years later, or sometimes we do get moms with small children that are a year or two old that come in or dealing with back pain.

Women that go through pregnancy go through tons of changes in their body. Of course, a pregnancy itself with baby growing, and then the birth, the actual delivery of the baby is a whole other trauma that women have to go through to have these little blessings and unfortunately, they can do a ton of bad stuff to the back, to the pelvis bones, the hip bones, and of course abdominal muscles. And even other parts of our bodies or Sciatica nerves, and even our legs and all the way down to the feet.

I’ve seen women that have had changes in their bodies that have lasted all the way into their feet. But one of the most common lingering effects of going through a pregnancy is definitely lower back pain. Sometimes the pain comes on during pregnancy, or right after pregnancy and it can be light and, in some women,, it is kind of intense. But when women go through pregnancy, of course, their abdominal muscles get all stretched out and having to make room for baby. And then they don’t work the same way anymore.

When those abdominal muscles get stretched out, they get thinned out as well. And so they’re just not efficient at helping the rest of the body get the stability that that it needs. That’s partially why women do the wattle whenever they’re really big at the end of the pregnancy. Of course, the weight of the baby is part of what’s throwing them off balance, but they also don’t have the strength and stability that they should be getting from their abdominal muscles.

And for ladies that end up needing a C-section, the surgeons literally taking a scalpel to those abdominal muscles to open them up, to allow for baby to come out safely. And it’s a good thing if people need that C-section. Of course, it’s saving us from some of the other complications that could potentially happen, but it’s at the expense of the abdominal muscles. And we haven’t even touched on the long-term effects of an epidural injection, but we’ll save that for another time.

But let’s get into the top three exercises that women need to be doing if they’re having back pain after they’ve had kids. The first exercise is an abdominal bracing maneuver. And now I call this an exercise but really, it’s kind of a posture. It’s something that you need to be doing all the time! Whether you’re standing, walking around, or sitting. This is something that provides instant stability to the low back, to take away some of the pain. But it also wakes up those abdominal muscles that you may have not been using properly for years since you’ve had your last child.

I’ve got Monica here to help me out. And what she’s going to do is demonstrate to you exactly how to do this exercise. So put your hands on your tummy, ideally right below your belly button and what you want to do is, draw on your abs, kind of suck it in if you will. But do so in a way that flattens out your lower back.

And what will happen, if you’re doing this correctly, is your shoulders up top will slightly drop down rather than perk up. You don’t want your chest to come up, or your shoulders to come up, because then you’re actually stretching out the ABS further and you’re using the back muscles, which is not what you wanted to be doing.

In this case you want to be using the abdominal muscles, so your shoulders are going to come down. So try that again. Just relax for a moment and then suck in the ABS and let your shoulders kind of dip down forward a bit. Flatten out the back here a bit more. Yep, there you go. You did it right there, you got the shoulders a tip down.

When you do this initially, you might feel like you’re holding your breath. And you might think, “How am I supposed to do this all the time?” Well, let me tell you, you don’t want to go 100% on this abdominal contraction, you don’t want to squeeze as hard as you can like that. You want to just brace like 20-25%. There should be a light contraction, very subtle, shoulders and chest coming down. And you should be able to sustain that posture for hours, theoretically.

Now, I want you to do this all the time when you’re sitting, standing, and walking. But realistically, if you can do it like 70-80% of the time, that’s pretty good. And you should see a reduction in your back problems just doing this alone.

This isn’t really strengthening. This is more of a posture control movement type of exercise, but we’re going to be doing some strengthening next. And by the way, you don’t have to hold your hands on there the whole time when you’re walking. That’s just for learning purposes. Once you’ve mastered you can put your hands wherever you want, you can stroke your hair, you can do work, you can have a meal, you can drive, you can do all the things that you need to do. But your abs, without anybody else knowing, should just be a little bit tight here, and the back should be flattened out with the shoulders, just slowing down is an abdominal brace maneuver.

Let’s get you on the table here for the next exercise number two.

The next two exercises that we’re going to cover, number two and number three are going to be ones where you want to lie down, either on the bed or on the floor. Somewhere where you’re comfortable. You’re going to work your abs pretty good here and the whole point of these two exercises is to wake up those abdominal muscles that likely haven’t been working very well since you’ve had your last baby.

First things first, I’m going to put my hand under Monica’s back here, right along the lower back here and you can do this on your own. Just slide your own hand under your back. Then with your back, push down as hard as he can like you’re smashing the fingers. I’m going to slide my hand out, but Monica is going to keep pushing.

As you’re holding that down, what you’re going to do is stretch out your hands towards your knees and feet towards your feet, and start to lift up your head and shoulders. Bring your chin down to your chest and keep smashing that lower back down pretty hard. What you should feel here is your abs working hard, and that’s what you want. As long as it doesn’t hurt you. Hold it there for 10 seconds, do a slow 10 count and then just go ahead and lie back down and relax.

You want to do that 10 times in a row. You could take a little break between reps but do it again where you flatten out your back, then straighten out your legs, and then come up a little bit, and hold it there for 10 seconds.

As far as frequency, how many times a day to do this? Depending on how severe your back pain is. I would do more if it’s more severe, doing it once every hour would be an appropriate level for some patients that we see or that have severe back pain, just for them to get the stability that they need for their low back, take pressure off the discs, off the joints, off the nerves in the spine, how really is not a bad idea.

If it’s less severe, then you can get away with doing it every two to three hours, or maybe even just a few times a day. But what you have to figure out for yourself is exactly how much you need. So what I’d recommend is start hourly, and then taper back from there to find out what’s the right dosage of this kind of exercise to me.

Now the next one’s going to get a little bit more intense. But before you start thinking about Oh, I’m going to do this every hour. Watch this next one. Let’s cover exercise number three, same setup. You’re going to push the back flat there, and then this time we’re going to hold your hands like so and just kind of move your elbows out, go ahead and come up again.

You have to push that back down flat, it’s critical that you push this down as hard as you can. Holding that there. Now you do some easy twists, one, go the other way to three until we get to 10. And then we’ll take a little quick break, you keep counting there.

If you’re doing this at home, you can feel your abs probably screaming at you if you haven’t done the work in a while, but you want that to happen because at the level of the cells, of the muscles for the abdominals, the abdominals are made up of tons of muscle cells, and we call them muscle fibers, because they run the length of the muscle. So, they go up and down along the abdominals and diagonal for the obliques. And when you hold a contraction like that, you turn on more fibers, and some that have even bit potentially been dormant because they got cut through with a with a scalpel during a C-section or they just never really woke up after being so straight branched out from being pregnant.

And I’ve seen my wife, she’s had three pregnancies, we’re expecting a fourth at this time. So she’s starting to grow a little bit and those abdominal muscles, they get pretty stretched out. And for them after baby comes out, then it’s all loose for a while. And so doing exercises like this can really begin to tighten up those abdominal muscles to get them to return to their previous states where they can function and support your back properly so that you’re not having to deal with the back problem over and over.

Now, back to this exercise, as far as how often do this exercise, I would do it along with the other one, we’re used to just set up the ab curls with a call that we did 10 reps to the side, going to five rounds of that to 10 rounds of that is appropriate depending again on your severity, how severe your back problem is. You have to use some common sense here.

Think about it critically. Don’t overdo it if you feel like you’re hurting your back. And by the way, none of this should hurt your back ever. If it’s hurting You’re not using your abdominals properly, or there’s some pretty severe back problem that you should probably get some professional help for.

I hope this video was helpful for you. If you’re a mother, who’s had kids in the past, maybe they’re already in high school or even in college or older than that. If you have grandkids, this can still chase you into those years. If you think that you’ve got a problem that you need some professional help with, and you’re considering the possibility of hiring us to help you with that. Then the next step to take is to go to the top of their website here, find the menu bar and hit the cost and availability button.

Once you hit that button, a form will pop up and you just leave us your details. We’ll call you back, one of my staff will call you back. It might actually be Monica that calls you and just ask you questions about your back problem in your history and when you last had your kids so that we can determine if this is the type of problem that we can help you out with. If it is then we’ll tell you what the next steps are. If it’s not, we don’t want to waste your time we’ll make sure to point you in the right direction so that you know what steps to take next to resolve your back issues. Thanks. And I hope that we can be a part of your success story real soon. Bye