Strengthen & Pain-Proof Your Back: The McGill Method | Dr. Andrew Huberman

okay so this video is designed to go with the hubman Lab podcast solo episode where I talk about how to strengthen and pain prooof your back I'm going to show you the so-called McGill's big thre so-called because they were developed by Dr Stuart McGill an expert in spine physiology I'm also going to show you a soaz stretch and I'm also going to show you a what sort of looks like a cobra pose in yoga it's a certain kind of um up dog push-up where it's not a real push-up but that too can be used to both pain prooof strengthen the back especially if you're experiencing some bulging that is some herniation of the discs one thing to keep in mind is that every body everybody is different in the sense that some people can do these movements with a little more arch in their neck or a little more holding of the neck in neutral position than others can without pain and with stability so you'll see examples of these exercises multiple places online and everyone does them slightly differently what you're about to see are the core elements of the big three the soaz stretch and the up dogs or uh Cobra Cobra push-up uh for relieving some stress on impinged nerves as a consequence of bulging or herniation of the discs again everyone does these slightly differently work within the range that is challenging for you but that doesn't cause or exacerbate any pain for you all that said the exercises I'm about to show you require minimal time investment no equipment can be done by most everyone painfree and have been shown to be very beneficial for strengthening and pain proofing your back okay so the first exercise in Mill's big three is the curl-up the curl up is essentially where you lie down like so with at first legs extended is where you're going to start you're going to take your hands and with Palms down and you're going to put them in the small of your back so in the arch of your back and you actually want to maintain that arch in your back probably want to make your spine nice and long put one knee up with the leg flat the other leg is extended and then you're going to again keep the spine long meaning you're not going to move the chin towards the chest too much you're just going to keep it in a neutral position as if you were looking straight forward or in this case straight up at the ceiling and then you're essentially going to you could keep your elbows down or you can float the elbows which is a little bit more difficult I'll float the elbows and then you lift your upper torso just a bit and of course the head goes with it but you're not going to lead with the head you're going to lead with the chest okay like so and as you do that I'm trying to talk while I'm doing this you'll feel a nice hard contraction in the abdominals okay you're going to hold for about 10 seconds and as you do that you're not going to want to talk like I am now you're going to want to put the tongue on the roof of your mouth breathe through your nose and exhale and then you're going to relax down to the floor again set the head down you might want to rest somewhere between 10 and 30 seconds depending on your particular needs and then you're going to raise up your torso leading with the chest letting the head follow holding for about 10 seconds you can really get a nice hard contraction of the abdominals there which is going to help to build stability the reason as I described in the episode for doing these 10-second holds as opposed to a 30- second set or a minute long set is that repeated 10-second holds help you to build the neural Pathways that allow you to contract those muscles very hard which is the goal here so after repeating that say three to five times per set okay so one set would be say 3 to 5 10c holds with 10 to 30 maybe 60 seconds between each hold that would be one set with um the knee up you could perform multiple sets with this knee up and then switch to the other side talk about this in the episode I recommend starting with just one set per side and then progressing to about three sets per side you're going to switch to the other side in this case so here again it's nice long spine this leg extended this foot planted with a bend in the knee use the tops of your hands so Palms down to find the small of your back put your tongue on the roof of your mouth float the elbows if you can otherwise you can keep the elbows down if you're not able to do that and then just lift the upper torso and hold for 10 seconds and down and then you would repeat several times or more for this side and then you could go back to the other leg or simply do all the sets for one leg extended then all the sets for the other leg extended I talk about sets and Reps Etc in the episode on how to strengthen and pain prooof your back is a great exercise because it actually takes advantage of the ability to contract the abdominals much harder in this position and more efficiently than crunches done the conventional way and I also talk about in the episode how crunches done the conventional way can often exacerbate discernation and bulging whereas this should not although again if you experience pain or exacerbation pain from doing this you should cease to do it so that's the curl up okay so the next exercise in stum Mill's big three is the side plank and the side plank can be done through a number of different progressions which many people find they have to start with the easiest one and work their way up to the more difficult forms of the side plank so the side plank as the name suggests is where you get on your side um the easiest way to start this meaning to begin this exercise if you haven't done it before is to do a kind of right angle Bend in the arm that's in contact with the ground you make a fist on that side the knees are bent okay and the feet are stacked and then you're going to both lift the hips off the ground but also push down hard with the arm and the fist that's in contact with the floor that's important and it essentially looks like this okay so the idea is to not let the hip sag like so to try and generate as much of a of a hard contraction in the abdominal muscles and the muscles of the core they're on the side here okay so that's and the first progression you would hold for 10 seconds or so I'm not counting exactly tongue on the roof of your mouth and then let down okay maybe rest 10 30 maybe 60 seconds if you need to and then repeat focusing hard on pushing the ground away the next progression after doing this with the legs and feet stacked with the arm at 90° would be to do it with the arm straight you can do this with a fist if you're really strong I'm still working up to that or you can do it with hand planted like so so I'd probably suggest starting the foot here can really feel a strong contraction there then moving to it with feet stacked and this is really fatiguing me you can see some quaking in that arm clearly have some progression to work through and relax okay so that's the side plank and of course you would do it on the other side as well like so really emphasizing pushing the floor away and there are a bunch of variations on these as well there's some rotational stuff you can do so with some people like to do arms ahead or the foot floating those are harder progressions you can find all of these online very easily as you can tell because I'm breathing hard now I've worked up to the point where I can do the feet stacked one for the sets but I'm still working through the progressions of the side plank Okay the third exercise in McGill's big three is the bird dog love that name because I love birds and I love dogs and basically what you do is you're going to get down on all fours like so you're going to at first plant your hands plant your knees then what you're going to do is you're going to actively push the ground away with one hand that's important you're going to raise up the other one and into a fist that's important I explain why in the episode on how to strengthen and pain proof your back and then you're going to extend the opposite leg to the one where the arm is extended okay so opposite side and I explain the logic behind this in the episode okay some common mistakes are that people Arch the back too much and ra raise this leg too much you don't need to do that you just want to raise it up some people will point the toe it's fine to point the toe or to just keep heel to the ceiling you're going to actively reach with this fist out in front okay and you're going to actively push down you'll really feel that contraction in the core take some concentration to make sure that you're activating your core tongue on the roof of your mouth neck in a you know slightly arched position neutral is okay too looking forward and then if you want to make this a little bit tougher you can do some circles or squares with the extended leg and hand in both directions if you want to make it even harder you can gently while maintaining contraction of the core touch your hand to your knee then back out definitely don't just you know swing the hand in and touch your knee go back TR move it nice and slow so you can feel the contraction in your core forward and go for at least a 10c hold with the repeats as described in the episode before you start doing some of these kind of Square movements and touches Etc and then down okay and then You' repeat for the other side so actively pressing down that's a key feature here you know fist out in front and reaching tongue on the roof of your mouth opposite leg extended don't go too high not trying to get a steep arch in the lower back just get that core contraction take some concentration and then hold for at least 10 seconds helps to Exhale and if you want you can do some of these movements you can do the nice slow touching at the fist to the knee keeping that contraction in the core and out keeping contraction in the core and out building spine and core and upper back stability that's the bird dog okay so the next exercise is a soaz stretch the soaz as described in the episode is a muscle that attaches the spine to the pelvis does some other things too it's involved with the diaphragm which of course is involved in your breathing and guess what your diaphragm is also involved in your heart rate regulating your heart rate by virtue of how much space there is in the thoracic cavity so a lot of interesting stuff about the soaz you can read up you can learn more about it in the episode but stretching your soaz is wonderful it both can provide some relief for tightness in the hips challenges in breathing especially after sitting for relieving pressure on certain nerve roots and there a bunch of other benefits as well it's very easy to do it more or less looks like a warrior two pose in yoga and forgive me I'm not a trained uh Yogi I've taken a few yoga classes in my day however and what you're essentially going to do is get into a lunge where the front knee is a little bit bent this is going to depend a little bit on your degree of flexibility again every body is different but what you're essentially going to do here is you're you're going to go into a lunge which this for me I can start to feel a stretch on my uh hip here and then you're going to raise the arm on the side for which the leg is behind you and you're going to put the palm of your hand to the ceiling and then you're going to turn your pinky towards your head and really reach and then move into the lunge a little bit deeper so now I'm getting a deeper stretch in the hip flexor really feeling it all the way from the hip flexor up through the soaz through the arm and you can really reach reach reach reach reach exhale again tongue on the roof of your mouth eyes can be forward or eyes can be up and relax you would repeat that three or five times per side and call that one set and then you would do it for the other side so like so so again and by the way the heel of my back foot is off the ground Some people prefer Andor can do it with their heel in contact if of course I tighten my stance I can do it with the heel in contact I prefer to do it this way with my back heel up front foot completely planted and then it's lunge forward until I start to feel a stretch in the hip flexor here then arm goes up my eyes are up in my case Palm parallel to the floor parallel to the ceiling and then turning the pinky toward my head head exhaling through my nose tongue in the roof of the mouth again I feel the stretch the whole way down and back to the toes we talk about some of the fascial that is the fascia aspects of this the neural aspects and the neuromuscular aspects in the episode on how to strengthen and pain prooof your back you might do that for one to five sets depending on how much time you have how much work you're trying to put into strengthening and pain proofing your back as you can see you can do this in work clothes these are not my workout clothes these are my work clothes and generally you can do it without working up a sweat I've got a little bit of perspiration here because I'm putting a lot of effort into it and I'm talking at the same time but you can essentially do these anywhere now this last exercise was one that was taught to me by a guy named Grant Elliot who has a terrific Instagram Channel called Rehab fix it's a back exercise designed to relieve pain when you're getting some bulging that is herniation of the disc that's impinging on the nerves from me that was about an L3 L4 impingement it was so bad that I could barely walk like I was like doubled over like this I could barely walk I didn't know what to do I thought maybe I needed surgery or I need pain meds some people yes do need surgery Andor pain meds for lower back injuries and pain but in my case what Grant Elliot instructed me to do which helped immediately and resolve the whole thing within just a couple of days was to do a sort of Cobra pose pushup so what I do is I'll get down on the on the floor like so put my hands more or less at clavical level a little bit behind maybe in line with my chest my feet are together and pointed back my elbows are back and then I push up off the ground again tongue on the roof of the mouth sometimes I'll go up higher like so but usually it's just to about here and then release and relax and then I'll repeat doing about anywhere from three to five second holds I'll do that for maybe five to 10 repetitions I'm going to do fewer now for sake of time and then on the last repetition I'll hold trying to go long with the spine for anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds and then relax and I'll do that several times throughout the day it helped tremendous ously and immediately to relieve my back pain which was again excruciating was also causing pain in the hip and down the leg if you listen to the episode on how to strengthen and pain proof your back at least for the back pain that I had where there was a disc impingement on a nerve rout and the direction of the herniation of the disc was that away towards the my back um it made perfect sense it does make perfect sense why that would help relieve it because it's essentially taking that disc and encouraging it to move back under those vertebrae so to speak I realize that's not the technical term for other types of back pain you might need to do a slightly different variation or avoid that variation for instance if the impingement is in the front that exercise would actually exacerbate it however what I was doing prior to that exercise such as crunches was actually making the dis herniation worse so that exercise I just showed you was the way that I relieved my back pain and many others that I know have used it to relieve their back pain because it was caused by the same discernation pattern okay so that's the Cobra push-up sort of up dog type Cobra push-up I don't have a better name for it maybe you can come up with a better name for it put that in the comment section below I'll take a tally and we'll go with the top one from here okay so that's Mill's big three meaning that's the curup the side plank and the bird dog I also showed you this in a Warrior 2 pose with the Palm towards the ceiling which is designed to stretch the soas and involves some fascial stretching as well and some activation of the entire pathway from hand to hip and provides a really terrific stretch obviously you want to do those both sides and this Cobra push-up slup dog thing that can in many cases provide relief for the nerve roots that are being impinged upon by a bulging or herniated disc at least that's what it did for me hope you found those useful again lots of variations on these you can find them on the Internet you can find them in Stu Mill's book and other resources we provided links to the various people as well as the book resources and a few other videos that are going to be useful for you as you try to navigate back pain and strengthen your back and pain prooof your back and of course please check out the full length episode of The hubman Lab podcast that I did all about how to strengthen and pain prooof your back gets into all the logic the science the details and of course protocols and last but certainly not least thank you for ignoring the color of the carpet and thank you for your interest in science

Channel: Huberman Lab Clips

Views: 238,709

Keywords: huberman lab podcast, huberman lab, andrew huberman, dr. andrew huberman, andrew huberman stanford, back pain, back health, improve back pain, improve back health, health

Id: f7HLP96HVNM

Length: 18min 24sec (1104 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024