The Blog

When clients ask me about building endurance I always tell them there is a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it when it comes to impacting the spine. In this tutorial I want to look at the right way to do it.

The anatomy of the spine and surrounding muscles

The main components of the spine ...

One of the therapies I use to overcome lower back pain is fast walking. But why is it so good and how exactly should you go about it for best effect?

The benefits of fast walking for lower back pain relief

Walking is a whole body exercise. It allows us to work a number of core muscles and tissues....

When people come to me with back pain they often talk about strengthening their back. The thing is a ‘weak’ back is rarely the cause of lower back pain. After all, there are plenty of strong people who have bad backs and plenty of weaker people who don’t.

But if that is not the answer to back pain,...

Do you struggle to get down far enough when you squat? Do you feel restricted when you’re deadlifting, doing particular movements in the gym or simply as you’re moving around in everyday life?

It could be that you have tight hips.

How can you tell if you have tight hips?

If you are suffering wit...

I may have said in the past that the biggest mistake people make when treating lower back pain is using exercise. However I’m about to contradict myself. There is a time and a place for exercise in lower back rehabilitation and it’s all about creating a stronger biological scaffold to help support t...

I often talk about the importance of building strong and healthy muscles to protect the lower back and avoid pain and injury. But just which muscles am I talking about here and how exactly do they do their job?

Which are the key lower back muscles?

In the tutorial above I focus on two muscles – o...

When it comes to rehabilitating the lower back, there’s a huge amount of information out there. Some of it is valuable, some should be used with caution, and some is just plain wrong. The problem is, that if you try something that’s not recommended for you, it might be that it just doesn’t work, or ...

Wondering about the process we’ll follow if you sign up for the How to Overcome Lower Back Pain consultation and the online course? Here I’ll go through the process in detail and explain how it worked for one recent client, Beth (not her real name.)

An overview

1. Questionnaires are filled out so I
...

When it comes to exercises for lower back pain, there are plenty to choose from, but how do you know which ones are right for you?

Some exercises can help lower back pain and some can hinder it, it all depends on your situation, but arming yourself with information about how each exercise works ana...

The floppy push-up, or McKenzie press-up, as you might have heard it called, is an exercise that is often prescribed as a way to help overcome low back pain. There are good anatomical reasons why that is the case, however, there are also limitations that it’s important to understand before you decid...

McGill’s ‘Big 3’

Thanks to years studying the spine, Dr McGill has identified three specific exercises that work together to effectively rehabilitate the back and build core stability. Known throughout the industry as ‘the Big 3’, these are some of the first exercises reached for by people and prof...

 Have you ever thought about how hard your spine has to work? It allows you to stand and bend. It enables you to walk and move around. In fact, it’s integral to almost every movement you do. And if you suffer with any degree of pain in your spine, you’ll know it can be really quite debilitating, imp...