Hey guys, I’m dr Emil Tompkins and today we’re going to talk about five ways to take care of spinal stenosis. Maybe you’re dealing with pain in your back and maybe you’re dealing with pain in your back that really seems strange pain that that starts in the back, but then seems to travel down the legs and not just one leg, maybe one leg or maybe even both legs. That happens when we have a condition called spinal stenosis. What that is is when you think about your spine, we have these bones that support your back, but then in the back of those bones we have, we have a hole and opening for the spinal cord to travel through and then out of each of those vertebra, these holes on the side for the nerve roots to travel through those nerve roots go to every single part of our body.
It’s a big reason why chiropractic is so important to your health, but there are some different things that can create problems in those vertebra where those spinal nerves and the spinal cord are supposed to travel through one of those issues as stenosis. Now what stenosis means is the hole that that nerve is supposed to travel through. That hole is getting smaller. Now that hole gets smaller, um, for a lot of different reasons. One of those reasons could be we have a disc that’s bulging and if that disc is bulging, it closes up that hole. If the disc is bulging into it. Another thing that can happen is the spine is significantly out of position. If, if the spine gets significantly out of position, that hole gets smaller. Now if, um, some other things, some common things that can create this is arthritis and degeneration. When the spine starts to wear down, that degeneration then will create, you’ll have extra bone growth growing in to that area.
And as the, the bones grow in to that area, again, it starts to make that hole get smaller. And when it gets smaller, that can turn into a really serious type of issue. And there are certain things that we can do to take care of it. So let’s talk about that. Now sometimes when the stenosis is incredibly severe, there might not be anything that you can do besides have surgery and I’m not a surgeon so we’re not going to go over a lot of detail with that, but I’m going to talk to you about some things that you can do way outside of surgery that can make a difference for you. The number one thing we’re going to talk about, and I can’t leave this out and it has to be chiropractic here because if your stenosis is happening because things are out of position in any way, we’ve got to improve the positioning because if the hole is smaller because of bad positioning, as soon as you put things in the right position, the hole gets larger.
So that’s a very important thing actually, no matter the cause of synosis, if you put things in a better position, the size of that hole will change. Now, there’s some other things that we need to do to make a difference with that as well, and we’re going to talk about that today in terms of exercise. I’m going to give you four different exercises that can help you with stenosis. One of the first ones we’re going to do is really simple. It’s an exercise called pelvic tilts because as you tilt the pelvis, that helps to open things up and create more space in between those vertebra. So the way this will work is you’re going to lie on your back and while lying on your back, this exercise is called pelvic tilt. You’re literally just tilting the pelvis. Let’s go. It’s going to bring your hips up and then bring them down and then bring your hips up and then bring them down. Then we’re going to have some backup and then bring them down. You want to do that 15 to 20 times and that’s going to help create some more mobility in that lower part of the spine. Helps open up those joints. If we’re dealing with stenosis, the next thing we’re going to do are need a chest stretch. We’ve done this for some other purposes. Bring the knee to the chest, hold that for five to 10 seconds, and then switch legs. You’ll do this over and over again.
10 times on each side. That creates a lot of really nice mobility in that lower part of the spine. Next is a glute stretch and disclude stretch is um, a real good one. It’s important when we’re doing the glute stretch to make sure as best as we can that your back is straight. Now, if you’re a person that has not as much mobility like myself, um, this can be a little bit of a challenge, but the first thing you want to do, do you want to cross the leg, one leg over the other, and then the way this works as you lean forward, you’re going to feel that stretching in your hips. You’re going to feel that stretching in your rear in that glute muscle is lean forward as much as you can. You work on that about 10 seconds, and then you relax and then go forward again about 10 seconds.
As long as it doesn’t increase your discomfort, you’re going to do that five to 10 times on each side. First to gnosis. The next exercise we’re going to do is called bird dogs. Now the way the bird dogs work is you’re going to start in this position. You’re going to bring one arm out and you’re going to bring the opposite leg out nice and slowly. This gets the muscles that, that coordinate the right side and the left side of the back. It gets those muscles working together. You do this 10 times on each side, nice and easy. There’s never any like fast work. You go really nice and slow and easy. You get those muscles communicating with each other. Some of the problems that we have with our spine, it’s not usually an issue with the muscles not being strong enough. It’s an issue with one muscle, not communicating with the other and the right way or having imbalanced in the muscle. So we’re going to work on promoting that normal balance between our muscles. Let’s do those exercises. They’re going to make a big difference, a big difference in your stenosis, and let’s see if we can avoid that surgery. Guys, I’m dr Emil Tompkins. I hope you have a great day and we’ll see you soon.
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