How To: McKenzie Press Ups for Low Back Pain and Sciatica

Dr. Neil Boecking, chiropractor at Pro-Care Medical Center, shows you the proper way to do McKenzie Press Ups to help relieve lower back pain and sciatica. Learn more at procaremedcenter.com Transcript: This particular exercise is called a McKenzie Press-Up. It's more of a movement than an exercise. This is the quintessential movement that physical therapists and chiropractors and physical medicine doctors around the world are taught. It's the gold standard. With the McKenzie Press-Up, I'm going to show you a few ways to do it correctly and a few mistakes that people make as we do this. Caitlyn here is having low back pain and leg pain while standing. This is called a McKenzie Press-Up. In a McKenzie Press-Up, Miss Caitlyn is going to come on up through here. It's okay if she moves her elbows through here. What we're going to look at is this curve in her back here. One of the most important thing that we have to keep in mind to get an effective press-up is to make sure that our glute muscles are not engaged. How we get our glute muscles to disengage, to get all of this area to relax is you actually push the heels out. The patient has to, Caitlyn has to actually press out against my hand here, all right? As we get up here, we're going to relax our low back, we're going to relax our glutes, and take a deep breath in and we're going to breathe out. As we breathe out, I want you to pretend like you're dropping your belly button to the floor. As you do that, you'll feel the tension in that low back or pressure, okay? You hold it there for a two to three count and then you come on down. As you come on down, it's okay to move the elbows like this. You want to completely relax, stay down here for a count or two. Then I want Caitlyn to press back up, move the elbows back into that position, make sure that this is relaxed, make sure the glutes are relaxed, turn the heels out, and then take a deep breath in and out, and let your belly button relax to the floor. Then you come back down. There's a couple things to keep in mind when doing this particular motion is it's okay to have some increased low back pain. You just want to make sure that when you stand up, you get some relief. Now, if you're having severe sciatica or sciatica-type symptoms, which would be numbness and tingling in the thigh, numbness/tingling in the lower leg here, when you come up, go ahead and press up, and you have a decr- ... Yep, relax the back, relax the glutes, press the heels out. And you have a ... What you're looking for is a decreased sensation that is if the sensation comes down to the mid-calf here and you're in this particular position and you're getting this sciatica to actually where you're only getting the pain down to here, you may want to hold this position a little longer. That's okay to hold this position. I've had patients who have severe disc herniations who actually have to stay in this particular position multiple times through the day for weeks at a time to get their disc to move back into the normal place, so they're not having that nerve pinching. Let's come on back down. In this particular position is different than seated flexion in the fact that when you do press up, and this time I want you to press up all the way on your hands, and this is what people in yoga would call a cobra pose. If you get severe low back pain with this one, don't worry about it much, go back down to the elbows, all right? If you're having wrist or elbow or shoulder issues, again, I think that you need to go see a healthcare professional and have some professional guidance on that. Press up again. The same motion with this. You press up. You let your back relax. Make sure your glutes are relaxed. Make sure you press the heels out. Come back down and relax. You want to do these in sets of 10. You want to stand up and go weight bearing, walk around a little bit, move a little bit. Then you want to do another set of 10. If you're having decreased sensation in the leg, in sciatica, or the low back, because the low back has weight bearing properties on it all the time, I think it is advantageous to do it regularly, because you're having to reset that, push the reset button on the low back. And because you're sitting on it, you're sitting, you're standing, you're weight bearing, you're compressing that low back all the time, if you get relief with this particular position, you literally can't do it enough. The things to look out for. Again, if you have increased leg pain with this particular motion, please seek the advice of a healthcare professional.

• #howto_style
• #chiropractor
• #chiropractic
• #austin
• #san_antonio
• #back_pain
• #low_back_pain
• #mckenzie
• #mckenzie_method