Top 3 Exercises For Lower Back Arthritis

Are you dealing with back arthritis? Are you having trouble in the morning when you get up? Do you feel really stiff and achy in your back and you just need a good 20 minutes 60 minutes even in some cases, to just free up and move better? Is your back just kill you after you’ve been sitting for a while? Or do you have trouble bending over to get to your feet?

If you have these issues, or if you’ve been told by somebody because you took an X-ray or an MRI, that you have arthritis in your lower back, then these tips are going to be helpful. I’m going to cover with you today the top three exercises for back arthritis.

Real quick, just a bit about me. My name is Dr. David, I’m a specialist physical therapist at El Paso Manual Physical Therapy, and I’ve been helping people with back problems for years. Back arthritis is one of the most common things that we see here.

Specifically, with back arthritis, the joints have changed a bit inside the back. There is, at every level of the spine in the in the lumbar is the lower back, there are three joints. The disc is one where the disc connects one bone to the next bone. But then you have something called a set joints on the back of the spine. And that’s where we’re talking about the Arthritis occurs. You may have been told you have a set arthritis. That’s the kind of arthritis that that we’re talking about here.

Just to be a little more specific, there are different kinds of arthritis. There is of course, osteoarthritis, which is the most common one, and that’s what I’m looking at addressing here. Psoriatic arthritis, or rheumatoid arthritis are two of the common ones as well. But we are not talking about that, that’s a different condition. But the age-related arthritis, that most people talk about, which is osteoarthritis, that’s what these exercises are going to help you out with.

Let me get into the top three exercises. The very first exercise that I’m going to discuss here is a knees to chest exercise. I’m going to have my partner here, go ahead and bring your knees to your chest. You are going to wrap your hands around your knees, and just hold it there as tightly as you can. Without hurting anything or squashing yourself too much, but you should be firming your grip, and you’ll hang out there anywhere from 10 seconds to 30 or maybe even a minute.

I would do this three or four times, right before you get up in the morning. You can do this any other time throughout the day if you feel like you need it. The point of this is to just open up the joints in the low back, get the joints that are stuck where the arthritis is to free up and move. And in that begins to loosen things up. This is kind of a stretch. It’s not really an exercise but it is a little bit of effort from your arms and your legs, just a bit to get those joints to open up.

Now if you have trouble bringing your legs up in this position, there’s an alternate position for this exercise, you can lie on your side. Let’s have you demonstrate that here. Just make sure your legs are resting against the bed or the floor, or wherever you are doing this and just pull those knees in. You might do it one handed, or you can sneak in both hands. You can do it that way too. And just hang out there.

What you are trying to do here is to get the low back to curve it out. Not curve it in towards your belly button, but kind of go opposite towards the belly button. For him here, he has to be going up against the wall, his back should be pointing up against the wall.

The second exercise is where you get your hands and knees, please. This one you’ll do in your bed or on the floor, wherever you find comfortable. It’s called an angry cat exercise. It’s a yoga type exercise, actually. It’s really good. What you are going to do is, with your lower back, go ahead and arch your back up as high as you can. This will round out up here, that’s okay. But your target is to round out the lowest part of your back, right where you get that stiffness and that arthritis problem. Hold it there for 10-20 seconds or more if you can, and what I would do is 10 repetitions.

Just relax after a while and then when you are ready, go up again and just get a stretch to occur here. But what you’ll realize, the harder you push here, you are going to feel some muscles working in here and back here on the glutes. So, between the abs and the glutes, they should be activating and to get you to move in the right direction in your lower back here. Same thing do this in the morning, and then you can do this as needed throughout the day.

Let’s talk about the third exercise. This is a mini crunch. Let’s get you on your back here with your knees bent, please. For this one, you’ll be in this position, and this one takes the most effort of the three, which you are going to do is I’m going to slide my hand under his back here. And if you do that with your hand on your back, and what you are trying to do is smash the fingers back there with your back. So go ahead and push down here as hard as he can, and you’ll see his shoulders and his head came up. That will likely happen with you.

If you are pushing down hard enough there, you should feel your abs working pretty hard, and your head and shoulders will likely lift off the bed, the table or wherever you are at, the floor. If you have trouble with your neck or shoulder you can slip a pillow under there, and that’s fine. That’ll be perfect fact. Let me just show you what that looks like. Here’s a pillow and then go ahead and do the same thing. Push down as hard as you can.

I would hold this for 10 seconds or more if you can and do this repeatedly in the morning. About 10 reps is a good amount to do it just to get the muscles to activate and get the joints to open up in the back where the arthritis is. And then you can do this throughout the day.

This is generally a pretty harmless exercise. And if you get pain or discomfort with any of these exercises, I encourage you to stop right away and talk to a health care professional. These exercises are places to start with fixing an arthritis problem. It’s not going to fix it all the way 100%. But what I’m hoping to provide you with, is a way to kickstart that process so that you are not relying on medications, or having to get injections or worse yet, eventually having to have some surgery done.

Most of the time, like we see here in the clinic, we see people that recover and get back to normal, they don’t necessarily lose the arthritis, but they get it under control, so that it’s not stopping them from bending over. And so they’re not feeling so stiff in the morning. So, these exercises are kind of step one in the process that it takes to get arthritis problems under control so that it’s not a big problem anymore. And it’s a very manageable situation that most people cannot even think about. They even forget that they have arthritis in their back.

If you are thinking about hiring us to help you out with your low back arthritis problem, one of the easiest ways to get started is by going up to the tab up here at the top of the website, the one that says cost and availability. You’ll see a window pop up where you can leave your details, and what we’ll do is we’ll give you a call back to hear about your specific back problem. We want to know if it’s a thing that we can help out. We will tell you over the phone honestly if this is something that we have the potential to help you out with, and if not, then we’ll make sure to not waste your time and send to the right person. But at least we want to hear your story about your back problem to see if we can help you out. You can also call us at 915-503-1314. And we can just get started on the phone call from there. I look forward to being a part of your success story real soon. Bye