Every stretch on lowerbackstretches.com
Why these eight, in this order: they cover the four mechanisms that produce most non-specific lower back pain (flexion-bias decompression, extension-bias centralisation, rotational release of the QL, and glute-driven stabilisation). Together they let one site answer most of what a physiotherapist would prescribe in the first month of care.
Child's Pose
Child's pose is a common starting position when the lower back feels tight. It rests the spine in gentle flexion with no load to carry. None of the studies in our references tests child's pose on its ...
Knee-to-Chest Stretch
Knee-to-chest is a common, low-effort lumbar flexion exercise. None of the studies in our references tests it on its own. The wider evidence concerns whole programmes: a review of 43 chronic low back ...
Supine Spinal Twist
Pearcy and Tibrewal (1984) used three-dimensional radiography in healthy men and measured about 2 degrees of axial rotation at each lumbar joint. So the lumbar spine itself turns very little, and this...
Cat-Cow
Cat-cow moves the lower back gently through flexion and extension. It comes from yoga, and a 2008 review of yoga and Pilates for low back pain (Sorosky and colleagues) noted that few studies of their ...
Sphinx Pose
Sphinx pose is the introductory position in the McKenzie Method extension protocol. Extension-bias exercises are for the subgroup whose symptoms centralise (move up toward the spine) with extension, n...
McKenzie Press-Up
The McKenzie press-up is the centrepiece of the Mechanical Diagnosis and Therapy (MDT) extension protocol. In a randomised trial of 312 patients with low-back pain and sciatica (Long, Donelson & Fung ...
Pelvic Tilt
Pelvic tilts are a basic exercise in lumbar stabilisation programmes. The reasoning comes from Hodges and Richardson (1996), who found the transversus abdominis switched on later in 15 people with low...
Glute Bridge
Glute bridges train the hip extensors. Leinonen and colleagues (2000) compared 19 women with chronic low back pain against 19 without, and found gluteus maximus was active for less time during trunk f...