Top 13 Things That Absolutely Make Back Pain From A Herniated Disc Worse

A herniated disk on an MRI can be scary to hear about because it often leads to surgery and lifelong problems. But it is possible to heal from a herniated disc as long as you do the right things. Sadly, there’s so much confusion about what the right thing to do is and what the wrong thing to do is for a herniated disc.

In this video, I’m going to explain to you the top 13 things that absolutely make back pain from a herniated disc worse. Now, before I continue, I want to make sure that I let you know I’ve got other videos that explain how to help a herniated disc, including exercises to do and they’re linked in a playlist in the description below called herniated disk help, be sure to check that out.

So you can find out some of the right things to do. But be sure to watch this whole video because number 13 is rarely talked about by doctors. And it may surprise you, because it’s often recommended for people suffering from a herniated disc.

The first thing that makes back pain from a herniated disc worse is planks that this exercise is often recommended by healthcare professionals and fitness professionals as well. And the reason why it’s not a good thing to do is because if you have a herniated disk, you’ve likely got a muscle imbalance where your abdominals are very weak, and this exercise is going to be too challenging for you.

And because you use your whole body on a plank, even if you do it from your knees, instead of your feet, you’re in a position where you’re going to compensate with other muscles, the most frequently compensated muscle on a plank is your hip flexors, the muscles that are on the front of your hips here, because they’re right next door to your abdominals.

And if you don’t have good abdominal strength, you’re going to end up using your hip flexors, which actually makes things worse. I’ll tell you more about that on another thing coming up.

The next thing is Cober stretches. When you’re in this position for a long period of time, you can add a lot of compression to your disk. And that’s not a good thing, because if it’s already herniated or it’s injured, then you’re going to make it worse.

Now this can help with some short term relief, because when you get in that extended Cobra position, the muscles that are on the back of your spine here are often tight and short, because that’s part of the root problem that’s setting up the herniated disc. So getting into that extended position, take some tension off of the muscles, and it can bring you some short term relief. But it is not a good thing to be doing long term.

Because of the compression it adds to your discs, repeated back bending like this is also not good for a disc herniation. And it’s the same concept that I just explained. With the Cobra stretches. When you bend backwards like that repeatedly, you’re repeatedly putting pressure on your herniated disc, it’s very much like taking a wire coat hanger or a paper clip. And if you bend it back and forth too much, it’s going to eventually break.

Now your spine doesn’t break, but you make your herniated disc worse, or you at least keep the problem there longer than needs to be. And this can offer you that short term relief by taking pressure off those back muscles, those back muscles are already shortened and tight. If you’ve got a herniated disc, they’re usually the dominant muscle.

So they’re working a lot. And so getting into this position takes some of that tension off and allows you to feel better just for a short time. But doing repeated back bends consistently for a long period of time, like for weeks, or months on end is not a good idea, you’re only going to make it worse. Twisting stretches like this, where you’re holding your upper body in a twisted position is not good for herniated disc. Because of all the motions that a disc can go through.

The number one motion that it absolutely cannot take very well is twisting, it can take compression, distraction, bending forwards and backwards and sideways just fine, but not twisting. And the reason for that is if you look at the molecular structure, if you look at the cells the way that everything is built in the rings around the disk, they’re just not set up to take rotation.

So stretching like this may give you some short term relief because of the muscle tension relief. But it’s not helping your disc in the long term. This isn’t something that you should be pursuing consistently. Doing resisted twisting exercises like this is even worse than just a stretching exercise.

That’s why this is the next thing. When you add that weight and you’re repeatedly twisting. Now you’re just really forcing your disk into a full stretch position, which the tissues that make up the rings of the distance called the annulus fibrosis. It is not designed to take this pressure and you’re going to make it worse, it may feel good to do this exercise in the short term because you’re using your muscles, you’re waking it up, you’re temporarily gaining some stability.

But you’re just training your body to learn to rotate more, and that’s not good for your poor herniated disc. back exercises like this are also not good for your disc herniation because if you strengthen the muscles that are on your back right here on the sides of your low back, you’re going to add more compression to the disk by getting these muscles stronger.

Let me take a super quick detour to explain a bit about the muscle imbalance. In your lower back, you have three main muscle groups that are stabilizing and moving the lower back number one is the back muscles that run up and down the sides of the spine here, number two is your abdominal muscles that around the front here, they attach to the ribcage and the pelvis.

And they do send tendons directly into the lower back. And then number three is your hip flexor muscles, which the main one does. So as runs from the thigh bone right here up vertically and into the lower back.

Those three muscle groups offer the spine, its stability and movement. So if you have an imbalance, and you’re training your back muscles quite a bit, and you’re going to be adding lots of compression, those three muscle groups need to have the right balance of force in order to have the proper forces on your disk so that it’s not becoming herniated or not worsening in so that they can heal.

Walking is often recommended as an exercise to help a herniated disc problem. But for some people, it’s not right to do, you have to make sure that your muscles are in the proper balance. Otherwise walking is going to be harmful for you.

If those lower back muscles are the strongest muscle in your core, those the strongest muscles that are supporting your lower back, then what’s going to happen as you walk more, especially if you’re walking for exercise, is those muscles are likely going to last the longest, they’re going to be the strongest.

So as you get more tired in your walk, your weaker muscles are going to not be able to help you out as much. And your big strong dominant back muscles are going to be the main ones carrying you through the rest of your walk. This is why if you’ve ever had back pain during walking or after walking, or maybe not even back pain, people often have back tightness.

If you have back tightness or back pain, then that’s a strong indicator that’s a strong sign that you have that muscle imbalance and walking is not a helpful thing for you to do. Once you fix that muscle imbalance, then walking should be just fine. You have to be able to use your abs properly and other hip muscles properly in order to take pressure off your discs during walking. Ball squeezing exercises like this are not a good idea.

If you have back pain from a herniated disk, the reasons that I’m going to do is because you’re using your inner thigh muscles, and these inner thigh muscles directly oppose the glute muscles back here. And if you’re using your thigh muscles allow your inner thigh muscles, then you’re shutting down your glute muscles.

That’s how the body works. It’s something called Reciprocal inhibition, which means that if you fire one muscle on one side of the body, like the bicep here, then it shuts down the other muscle temporarily, in order to be able to do the motion that it has to do. Well the same thing happens when you fire the adductors.

Here, the inner thigh or the groin muscles, it shuts down the glute muscles. And so if you’re repeatedly doing this and you’re training the body to not use your glute muscles very well, glutes are the second most common weakness when it comes to herniated disk problems. It’s part of the muscle imbalance. So adding more strength to your inner thigh muscles is just not a good idea, because it’s going to make that muscle imbalance worse over time.

Now one variation I’ve seen of this exercise that kind of makes sense, but I still wouldn’t do it is we’re seeing a therapist teller patients use your abdominal muscles while you’re squeezing the ball. So those they’ll still have the ball there, there’s still squeezing the knees together this way. But then there’s ton of the drying their abdominal muscles, or you can do something like a posterior pelvic tilt.

That’s good. It’s actually really good for your lower back to be doing a posterior pelvic tilt and getting your abdominal stronger. But because you’re still squeezing the ball, you’re still using these thigh muscles on the inside of the thigh and you’re still shutting down the glute muscles. Not a good idea.

There’s other ways to get your abdominals stronger and get your glutes stronger at the same time without making your inner thigh muscles or your groin muscles stronger. The next thing that makes back pain from a herniated disc worse is avoiding abdominal exercise. Many people know that abdominal exercising can help back pain, but they get confused and often stopped doing abdominal exercises when it hurts their back to do the exercise.

That’s one of the biggest complaints that I see from my patients coming here is they’re trying to do ab exercises at home. Maybe they even do them in a health care facility. But their back was just feeling worse during and even after the exercise. But let me tell you something very important. If you want to avoid surgery and heal your herniated disc naturally, then you must figure out how to strengthen your abdominals properly.

You’ve got to crack it you’ve got to find out what exercise what method works best for you to strengthen your abdominals without it hurting without it hurting during the exercise or afterwards so that you can get the right stability and strengthen your core to protect your spine and offload it or decompress it while you’re doing your everyday activities.

Because doing it this way will allow you to get back to doing the things that you love with confidence that your muscles your own muscles in your body are giving you this What you need in your herniated disk to be healthy, active and mobile again, having weak abdominals is the root of most herniated disc problems.

And that’s why we developed a 28 day back health and wellness boost program, which it’s a program designed specifically to address the root muscle imbalance, the abdominal weakness of course, but also the glute weakness is often seen combined with the abdominal weakness. This program is 100% online, and it’s on demand.

So you can access it from anywhere that you have the internet or mobile device or a laptop, and you can watch the videos and begin to do the exercises to fix a root imbalance that leads to a herniated disc problem. You can learn more about the 28 day back health and wellness mousse program in the link in the description below.

I’ve seen so many physical therapists over the years give their patient this very exercise, they call it leg raises or straight leg raises, where you’re just picking your leg straight up and working out the muscles right here on the front of the hip. Now, this is a bad idea. Because part of that muscle imbalance, the muscle that you’re primarily using to do that leg raise is called the psoas muscle.

There’s other hip flexor muscles, but the psoas I want to highlight in particular, because it starts right here on the bumper on this bone and it runs upwards and attaches directly to the lower back. And if that muscle becomes too strong or too dominant, and it begins to work too much as is the case, if you keep doing that exercise, then you’re going to add more compression to the spine here because that muscle pulls vertically pull straight down and compresses the spine.

Now that motion right there is just not a normal everyday motion that you have to do. So it’s not something that I think you should be training, you need to be learning how to do your everyday motions using the right muscles. That’s what that program is focused on. That way your muscles can behave properly and put the right pressures on the tissues around them.

Like the discs, the joints, ligaments, tendons, all the things that allow your body to move properly. I trained physical therapists all the time, and even through their advanced training. And whenever we talk about this specific exercise, they always gasp in horror at all the times they’ve given their patients this exercise, unknowingly making their imbalance worse, by getting that hip flexor muscle, the psoas muscle stronger, because it’s adding more compression to the discs of the spine, the hip joint as well.

It feeds into so many problems. So if you’re doing straight leg raise exercises, you need to stop it right now and figure out a way to work out other muscle groups instead. So that you can flip that muscle imbalance. So if you’re doing straight leg raises or leg raise exercises like this, you need to stop doing them right now and figure out some other way to work out your other hip muscles, your glutes and other muscles so that you can fix this muscle imbalance and take pressures off your spine.

The next thing that makes back pain from a disc herniation worse is impactful activities, especially when they’re done too soon. What I mean by impactful activities is things like running, jumping, any sort of field or court sports where you have to change directions all of a sudden, and also weightlifting can be impactful. And the reason for this is that all of these activities are definitely more intense than just your everyday walking moving around activities.

And so they require more muscle activity from your core. And if you have a muscle imbalance, then you’re going to tend to use the wrong muscles to get more stability when it comes to doing more intense activities. And that paired with the actual force of the impact on your disk that is not ready to be stabilized properly, you’re setting yourself up for a flare up again.

Now often people go back into these impactful activities. Once they’ve improved. Some of you may have been dealing with a back pain problem from a herniated disc. And it’s gotten better, they’ve maybe done some treatments or they’ve rested enough for it to calm down. And they feel confident enough to get back to running or weightlifting or whatever the activity they like to do is that sport they love.

And then after doing it for a few days, maybe a few weeks, in some cases, maybe the last a few months, that back pain starts to creep back up again. And that’s a sign that the muscle imbalance was never addressed. So they’re starting to add compression to their disk again and working on worsening it over time.

Wrong weightlifting technique is another thing that can hurt a herniated disc. And the reason for this is when you put weight on your body, it’s going to make you use your muscles a lot more intensely. If you don’t have your technique down, then you’re going to default to using the wrong muscles to get the most stability.

The most common problem that I see is with anything that involves squats, even deadlifts, people are arching their back too much sticking their butt out. That means that they’re using their back muscles too much because as soon as you stick your butt out, these back muscles tighten up and work and that’s going to add more compression to the discs of the spine.

Instead, you need to figure out how to turn off those back muscles and use other muscles like your glutes, and the simplest way to do it is by tucking your butt under your spine.

So when you’re sticking out your butt like that, instead of doing that you have to do this right here and make it more of a butt driven exercise a glute to driven exercise. If you can use your glutes properly during all the squat and deadlift activities, then you’re going to be well off and it’s actually going to help your disk rather than harm it.

Many people get disc injuries after they’ve been lifting weights, and they blame the weights, but it’s not the weights fault. Almost always, it’s how you’re picking them up. It’s the muscle imbalance that you carry into the gym. It’s the muscle imbalance that you overtraining into. If you figure out how to fix your technique, how to fix your muscle imbalance, then weightlifting can be your best friend and helping your disc stay healthy for the long term.

Number 13. The last thing that can make your back pain from a herniated disc worse, is getting surgery if you’re not the best candidate for it, if your disc is not pinching on your nerve. And if you don’t have any pain going down into your leg, and I mean consistent pain that doesn’t improve because it’s possible to get pain down into your leg.

Like a sciatica type symptom temporarily, but then it goes away, if it goes away, then that means that somehow the pressures off your nerve, and it may not even be coming from the back, it could be coming from other areas on your nerve, the time that you’re likely to get the most certainty that a surgery is going to help you out if you have a herniated disc, is if you have that consistent pain down your leg doesn’t ever get better.

And the MRI absolutely confirms that the disc is herniated and pushing against your nerves, then your surgeon is probably going to say this is a done deal that if I go in there and take the pressure off that nerve by clipping the disc doing something like a diskectomy procedure, then you’re probably going to get a lot of relief. And I would agree in those situations.

Now where I disagree about getting a disc herniation surgery is if you only have back pain, and you don’t have any leg pain at all, or even if you have some leg pain, but it’s not that bad, or it’s not even constant, it can be pretty bad in some cases, but there’s days that are better, then you have a shot, you have a chance at healing naturally in avoiding surgery altogether.

There’s slowly more medical research coming out showing that a diskectomy surgery is actually not that much better than getting conservative treatments, which conservative treatment is physical therapy treatment. And insurance companies and even surgeons are becoming gradually more aware of this. And so they’re not recommending surgery as quickly as they used to.

But you still might be working with a doctor in a region where this isn’t common knowledge. And to tell you the truth, it’s not common knowledge yet that you can heal a disc in your spine naturally without surgery, and that the surgeries done for disc herniations are actually not that much more beneficial than not getting surgery.

So be weary and get a second or even third opinion. If a doctor is recommending you get a herniated disc surgically repaired because there might be other options for you that you just haven’t tried out yet. If you’ve been to physical therapy, make sure you go to a physical therapist that specializes in helping people heal naturally.

Because if you’re going to a clinic that specializes in treating people right after they’ve had surgery, just ask around if you look around the patients in the clinic, ask them do you see a lot of patients that have just had surgery? And they say oh yeah, so and so just had a surgery and that person and that person, that person, then you’re sitting at a clinic that specializes in treating people after they’ve had surgery and it’s probably not going to be the best fit for you.

Now well, we don’t have very much research on I can tell you because I’ve looked high and low is muscle imbalances. And that’s what I talk a lot about. That’s what that 28 day back health and wellness boost program is geared towards fixing. We’re in the stone age when it comes to figuring out how the body works as far as the discs, the muscles, the spine, we really know this much. And I think there’s much to come.

So if you have not tried fixing the imbalance yet, I strongly encourage you to do that, especially before you go have a surgery. Unless you’re one of those that’s a perfect fit for surgery. Hey, I hope this video brought you some much needed insight on how to heal a disc naturally and what not to be doing. Of course, if you’d like this video, please give it a thumbs up.

Please share this with somebody you think needs to hear this. And don’t forget to subscribe and turn on your notification bell so that you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos. We post each and every week. I’ll see you in the next video. Bye