From pain medical expert Dr. Sean Wheeler, 6 steps you must know to successfully navigate your journey from chronic low back pain to pain liberation:
1. HOW TO ISOLATE THE BRACING MUSCLES® OF YOUR SPINE
Finding the correct muscles usually involves patients lying down in a position that isolates particular bracing muscles of the spine, and the making extremely slight movements that force the bracing muscles to stabilize the spine.
2. HOW TO ISOLATE THE BRACING MUSCLES OF YOUR GLUTEUS
The gluteus muscles are the easiest bracing muscles to isolate, so we usually start there and then look for other areas of weakness.
3. FEELING – AND KNOWING – THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BRACING MUSCLES AT WORK VS. ACTION MUSCLES AT WORK, AS ACTION MUSCLES COMPENSATE FOR AND ‘HELP’ DIMINISHED BRACING MUSCLE FUNCTION
The stronger the compensating action muscles get, the weaker the bracing muscles get, and the more pain and troubles you develop.
4. WHAT GOOD POSTURE LOOKS LIKE
once you know good posture, you then have a great measure of exactly when your bracing muscles fatigue. And if you keep track of how long you spend your day in good posture, you now have an accurate daily measure of your endurance.
5. HOW TO STRETCH YOUR COMPENSATING ACTION MUSCLES PROPERLY
What you will begin to find is that your hamstring and hip flexors are very strong. They’re much too strong to stretch, and allowing themselves to be stretched keeps them from compensating for weak bracing muscles.
6. HOW TO STRETCH YOUR JOINTS PROPERLY
You can begin working on lumbar spine mobility and hip joint mobility whenever you want, and I recommend that you do so from the very beginning, but this will be a late feedback in that it could take a long time to have lasting results.
With guidance from your doctor and physical therapist, and similar to how a beginning guitar student gains expertise by learning the fundamentals of their guitar and how to play it, your mastery of these 6 steps serves as the basis for achieving freedom from your chronic low back pain.
It all begins with fully understanding the role of Bracing Muscles in your low back, as diminished Bracing Muscle function is where your low back pain begins and, with restored function, ends.
