Great Exercise to Strengthen The Lower Back in Portland, ME

Hi, I'm Dr. Robert Liguori with Chiropractic and Sports Health here with Austin. Today, we're going to talk about one of our favorite starting exercises for people to learn, it's called The Bird Dog. And it's for people with low back pain, whether it's acute or chronic, it's something we tend to start people with to help them start stabilizing the area.

The Bird Dog Exercise for Low Back Pain

So we're gonna get down to the floor right now. So Austin, if you get in position here for the start. So let's get you on all fours. So this will be your starting position, one thing you want to really think about is that you're maintaining a neutral spine here, keep it a little inward, curved, if they're not too far, but just enough that you're not flattened out, your hands should be right below the shoulder, and your knees should be wrapped below the hips. So what I'm gonna Austin do is he's gonna at the same time, first engage his core, but then he's going to lift his opposite arm and leg straight out, kind of like he's trying to balance between the opposite too. So just like that, of course, he's done this before he teaches it, he knows what he's doing, His leg is straight out parallel to the floor, almost like he's trying to touch the wall behind them. And then his arm on the front is doing the same exact thing in the opposite direction. He's going to hold that for a few seconds, that's something you can kind of build up as you go.

Make Sure You Are Stabilizing Your Core

Go ahead and do a couple more reps here for me, Austin, when you're starting out, you can really start with just a simple back and forth not too long. But then as you progress to get stronger with it at that point, you can really start to hold longer. Now one thing I'm really looking for here is make sure that his hips are not rotating very much. Show a little mistake here. Also, if you were to tilt like that, that means you're not stabilizing well at the core, you want to make sure you'd kind of twist that back in a place and nearly activate your abdominals to kind of help with that. Let's have you slowly lower back down. So let's see one more rep here, Austin for a come right up, hold, no twist, you stay in tight there. He looks really good with this. This is essentially how you want to look when you're doing that at home. That's how you come right back down.

So again, that's called The Bird Dog. That's one of our favorite exercises to start our patients with. If you have any other questions, give us a call.

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