Top 5 Lower Back Degenerative Disc Disease Exercises

Degenerative disc disease is one of the scariest things that a patient can hear inside of a doctor’s office. Usually people will get an MRI or an X ray. And once they meet with the doctor regarding those MRI or X ray results, that’s when the doctor will mention that they’ve got degenerative disc disease.

And one of the reasons it’s so scary and frustrating to deal with is because the doctors usually leave their patients hanging on this, they don’t have many other solutions besides taking pain medications, getting injections, and potentially a surgery if it’s bad enough, but I’ve got great news for you, it is possible to get back to normal again to restore your back motion, your mobility, your strength, and to feel great in the mornings when you get up to move around.

I’m going to show you the top five exercises for degenerative disc disease to get going on feeling normal again. But before I show you those exercises, you need to know that it’s a process to heal degenerative disc disease enough to get better, it doesn’t happen overnight or even over the course of a few weeks, it can take you more like months or the better part of a year to restore your back to normal.

Again, the exercises here, a few of them that was the beginning are designed to get you some quicker pain relief, but it’s not going to take it away completely. You’ve got to be on yourself with these exercises, just like I talked about with the reps and sets so that you can get longer lasting relief and compound that over time. And as these exercises get easier for you, you need to get the next level exercises, which we’ll make videos for here on our channel.

After these exercises get easy, then it’s important to progress these exercises so that you can continue to improve for the long term, we’ve got a program available called the 28 Day Back Health And Wellness Boost Program. The link is in the description below. And that program is a comprehensive online program that you can access anytime you want. And begin a 20 day process for strengthening your core your muscles that support your back your hips as well, so that you can have a healthier back as time goes on. Let’s get to today’s exercises.

The first one is called quadrupeds rocking, let me show you, you’re going to have to get on the floor for your bed. To do this, you’re going to be on your hands and knees just like so. And you can be on your fists or your flat hands, whatever is comfortable for you, I’m going to do it like this. And then all you got to do is rock back with a cat or a dog and sit on your hunches. You can stretch here a bit if you like, and then come back up over your hands. And just repeat that nice and easy.

If you want to hang here and stretch a bit you can if you want to just go back and forth. That’s good. And what this does is it’s offloading you because you’re not vertical your heads not above the rest of your body, it takes pressure off your back so that you can take that pressure off the discs in your lower back. And then adding this movement makes the muscles and all the other tissues inside your body, the nerves, ligaments, tendons, all that stuff. It allows it to move in a way that isn’t stressful for it.

Now, if you’ve got knee problems, this could be a little aggravating for you. So just move as far as you can back if you can’t bend your knees all the way. Or if it hurts to put pressure on that underneath, just lean away from that knee so that you can still go back and forth, putting pressure on the other side. And if it just doesn’t work for you to be on your knees like this at all, then you can do this standing with your feet on the ground. And you would still lean your hands over a table or a counter or a bed.

Wherever you feel like you can do this and do the same motion but with your feet on the ground. After you’ve done 30 reps, you’re going to do an angry cat exercise. If you’re in the same position, what you’re going to do is suck in your abs here and arc your back as high as you can go up as high as you possibly can and hold it there for 10 to 20 seconds, you’re actively trying to suck in your abs pull this in. And what that should do is push your backups.

So think about pushing your backup as high as you can as well just like an angry cat would do it hold it there for that 10 to 20 seconds. And then after after the time’s up, you can relax you don’t have to sink down necessarily just come back down to wherever you’d like to be comfortably. And repeat that 10 times. Second, your abs real hard.

Push your back away from your from the table or from the floor wherever you’re at hold it for about 10 to 20 seconds. And then you can relax and just repeat this 10 times. So it’s a good way to turn on your abdominal muscles and get your back to move correctly to take pressure off that degenerative disc disease in your back.

After you’ve done 10 reps of this, we’re going to do some control rotations. Now. You can call this a stretch I call it a rotation exercise. And the reason is your spine is not designed to twist and rotate very well. It’s best designed to bend forward backwards go to the sides and even to be compressed or stretched out but twisting is the least tolerated to the spine, and I’ll show you why.

If you just from wherever you’re sitting, twist like so, and carefully, don’t hurt yourself if you’re if you’re hurting, and you’ll see how far you can go this way, or go the other way if you want. Then just like you tighten up your abs on that last angry cat exercise, suck in your abs and kind of arc your back a little bit, you see how I’m slouching, that’s what needs to happen. hold that up a bit. 50 to 100%, whatever you feel comfortable doing.

And then try to twist again. And you’ll see you don’t go as far your abs are preventing you from twisting as far as and that’s good, you want the ABS to do that, because it protects your spine, from worse situations, it protects you from getting more degenerative disc disease. So here’s the exercise, you’re going to suck in your abs just like you did a second ago. And then twist as far as you can comfortably go.

Don’t hurt yourself, of course, don’t hang out there too long. And then go the other way, you’re going to go back and forth. 30 times. So 15 each direction, holding your abs in the whole time. And I’m subtly slouched here. As I do this, if you want to hang out there and stretch, I’m okay with it, it’s you got to judge it and see if it’s good for you. If it’s if it’s okay, on your back. If it doesn’t feel good on your back, don’t stretch there, especially if you have any lingering effects.

Afterwards, you don’t want to hang out in a stretch position for your back. The next exercise we’ll do after this will actually directly stretch your back but it’s it’s a very controlled motion as well just like this one. So second, those abs and twist as far as you can, I’m kind of grabbed my leg to pull me over just a bit further. I like to do that.

Because if you just twist on your own, you may not go as far you can just get an extra few degrees if you push with your with your hands. But please do not let go of your AB contraction, it’s critical that you hold your abs direct during this whole exercise. So after you’ve done 15 rotations each direction, the next we’re going to work on a lumbar flexion exercise.

Bending over is basically what I’m talking about. So when people bend over, they usually just fold at their hip joint and don’t really bend through their back bones. They don’t they don’t bend their back joints. In fact, I got the skeleton just to show you what I’m talking about here. They vented their hips down here rather than bending these bones. And these bones don’t bend a whole lot.

But they should bend some in order to take pressures off the joints in the back and normalize motion in the spine. So what you’re going to be doing right now is thinking of bending each bone one at a time as you go through the lower back especially in order to get these joints to open up and take pressure off the nerves so you don’t have any pinched nerves and normalize motion the back.

So here’s what it looks like. I’m going to stand up. I’m going to stand sideways here so you can see this. And I’m just going to suck in my abs. And as you can see, my upper body wants to slouch a bit. My butt muscles even fire a bit. That’s okay, I’m pre curved, but my ads are set so my back bones and my discs are being protected.

Once I do that, let me show you what my head is doing. So once my abs are set, now I’m going to look down so I’m bending one vertebrae or one bone in the spine at a time starting with the neck and then to the upper and mid back and then we’ll get to the low back.

So abs in, subtle slouch. Look down double chin, start to curl shoulders down. And I’m gonna reach my hands. And right about here, my lower back starts to feel a little stretched, I’m sucking my abs in pretty darn good. As much as they can. That’s the motion but I’m doing standing.

You can do it and seated if you have balance issues or just prefer seated for whatever reason. So abs in subtle slouch, looking down on my head bringing the shoulders down. My butt muscles want to fire more to do this. That’s okay. And I’m just going to reach down and I’m not going to go over to the ground.

I’m going to go just past my knees a bit. I already feel my back muscles stretching and my abs are working. I feel my abs working pretty hard. And then I’m going to come back up and just unfold.

Start with my goal, push my hips forward. And then second, those abs continue to second those abs and straighten up to the rest of my body of high men to 10 reps like this. I want you to do 10 reps like this. As I’m I’m going to do it as I’m talking to you a bit. So abs in looked down, start to bend over and fold to the spine.

And what I wanted to mention to you is you know it’s kind of embarrassing but my skin is folding right here in the front. You know I’m getting folds right here and that’s good. Everybody folds right there anyway, but I feel it much more intensely when I do this exercise and if I were to just bend over without sucking in my abs when I suck in my abs, it really pulls everything in here and start.

Everything’s folding on itself. And in case you get some funny sensations, like your organs might actually be, you know, just a little compress, it shouldn’t be anything harmful for you, you’re just gonna be there for a moment anyway, and the thing that’s going to make you worse, but it’s a bit of a funny sensation, you can feel your skin folding on itself more than you normally Mike. And that’s okay.

Come back up like this. And then straighten up at the end. And my background is just feels more mobile, because I’ve opened it up this way. So the final exercise is kind of a posture more so. But it’s very, very important. It’s abdominal bracing throughout everyday activities. So what you should be doing is basically tightening up your abs.

It’s a version of what I’ve been showing you already. But you need to keep this up while you’re waking up in the morning, getting up to go to the bathroom, going down the hall to the kitchen, or doing chores around the house, what you had to work while you’re at work, or anytime that you’re sitting, standing, or walking, you should be doing this. And it’s really simple, you’ve already been practicing it, all you’ve got to do is suck in those abs.

But let’s talk percentages for a moment. If on these exercises, you did 90 to 100% intensity of what you could do maximally I want you to back off to just 25%. So instead of 100% like this, when it back off to about 25%, I feel some tension right there, I can still talk I can breathe just fine, I can move just fine, but my abs are just a little bit tight.

Now this isn’t going to last long, especially if you haven’t been doing this for a while, you’re probably going to get tired or forget pretty quick here. And the trick with this exercise is to challenge yourself to do it for several minutes at a time.

So you can go five minutes or 10 minutes and work your way up beyond that 20 or 30 minutes, what you should do is find that activity that you’re going to do next, like say you’re going to do the laundry or something or you know, go get the mail from the mailbox or, or go to a grocery store.

Challenge yourself to hold your abs as best as you can during that time. Or maybe a drive because you should do this way driving to the drive from here to your next destination holding your abs. And inevitably you’re going to forget and just beyond yourself, you need to have some reminders system to be yourself about this throughout the day, everybody’s got smartwatches these days, you can use that or your phone, you can put an alarm on there, you know how long go off every 30 minutes every hour just to remind yourself to suck in your abs a bit and hold it for 25% and then go on with your day.

I can’t stress how important this exercise is for immediate pain relief. Most of the time, I’d say seven out of 10 people that come in with back problems of all sorts, especially degenerative disc disease, because we’re getting so much compression to the spine, when they fire their ABS like this and learn how to do it as they do their daily activities, they can get a dramatic reduction for a long time as long as they’re firing their abs. But he had dramatic reduction on their back problem.

So it trust me, you know, these exercises over here there, it’s a little more self-gratifying because you can count the reps, you can kind of focus on them for a finite amount of time. And then you’re done with it and you forget about it. But if you go back to the normal posture that you’ve been in, you’re not really firing your abs, then you’re going to harm your back.

And the reason for that is because if you’re not using your abs to balance and stabilize yourself, whenever you’re sitting or standing, you got to be using something and usually it’s those back muscles on the back of the spine. Right here.

Those are the ones that people get tired in that they feel achy, and those are the ones that are working they’re usually really hard and dense are kind of big, even on somebody who’s not that big. those muscles there, their job is to extend the spine but also compress the spine and say a lot of pressure. And so if you don’t fire your abs to counteract the pressure from those back muscles, you’re going to be making your back situation worse that degenerative disc disease is just going to progress.

But if you can file your abs throughout the day, like I just said, then you have an excellent shot at halting that degenerative disc disease and even beginning to reverse it for the long term so that you can avoid surgery, avoid pills, and avoid having injections. Guys, I hope this video was helpful for you. If it was, please give it a thumbs up. And don’t forget to subscribe to our videos so that you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos that we upload every week. Thanks so much and have a wonderful day.