 It's really normal to feel like a lot of tension, a lot of stress in this area. We're living a sedentary lifestyle right now. So what we want to do is we want to open up these joints. We want to stretch these muscles. We want to help stabilize the spine so we can live a nice long, healthy life with our core stabilization here. Hi, everyone. This is Dr. Nathan Sumento, coming at you from the Southern California University of Health Sciences. I'm one of the full-time faculty members on campus. We're going to get a position for the first move. It's going to be called the child's pose position. You're going to sit back through your hips onto your ankles, and you're going to bring your forehead down to the table. Okay, walk your hands forward. Feel that nice stretch here in the low back. Now, we can hold this position for about 15 to 30 seconds just to kind of open up those tissues and feel that stretch, or we can kind of move back and forth to really mobilize those joints and stretch those muscles. So let's come back up. Let's do a couple reps. Just come up to the top. Good, and then slide back down. For this particular stretch itself, that child's pose position, we can alternate hands here. So we're going to bring this hand, cross over to the other side. Go ahead and sit back. And as we do that, we're going to open up his side here on the right. It's going to give it a little bit more of a stretch. He's going to come back up, open up these joints, mobilize these tissues, and help alleviate some of that low back stress. Go ahead and come back up, hands and knees. Next exercise here is going to be called the dead bug exercise. It's really, really good at engaging our core while we're moving our limbs. That way we can train our body to stabilize here while our limbs are moving. This is a great exercise to engage our core and teach our body how to move our limbs at the same time. We're going to start out here with the feet flat on the table, the knees bent, and then both hands are going to come up about the level of the shoulders right here, about 90 degrees, palms facing each other here. Now, we're going to train our body to move the arms. One arm's going to stay perfectly still. The other arm's going to move back so that our arm lines up with our ear. We're going to move back here overhead. Good, notice his thumb's kind of pointing straight down to the ground. He's moving in a nice straight line coming back to the top. And bring it back. Make sure the arms stay nice and even. We don't want them drifting apart or moving around. They're going to stay nice and parallel to each other. Let's get the legs involved here. We're going to start with a very simple movement. All I want them to do is keep this knee bent and we're going to actually start here at about 90 degrees at the knee. Keep that 90 degree angle at the knee and I want you to bring this knee up right about to where my arm is here, about 90 degrees of hip flexion. So we have this sort of 90 degree angle here at the knee and the hip. And if we're really advanced, we can alternate the arms. So I want you to tap this heel down to the floor, bring this arm back overhead. Good. Now bring them back to the top. Excellent. This heel down, this arm up to the head. Okay, and now his core is really working strong here to try to maintain this stable position as the arms and legs are moving on the opposite sides. So this next one is what's known as a piriformis stretch, okay? Sometimes we call it a figure four stretch. The patient's going to have their feet flat on the table, bend the knees and we're going to do this on both sides. We're going to take one foot, we're going to cross it so that the ankle rests on the opposite knee. And so you can see how this kind of makes a figure of four right there. And now on the side where the foot's still touching the table, you're going to reach through the legs and you're going to grab the back of that thigh, try not to strain your neck. You're going to stay nice and neutral right here and you're going to lift your leg and pull that towards the chest. And now here on his right side, we're getting a nice deep stretch into that hip capsule and all those tissues that sort of cross that joint. Okay, go ahead and let that down and we'll go ahead and try the other side. We're going to switch legs, okay? Bring the ankle over the opposite knee. Perfect, reach through. Again, we're nice and neutral here. We're not trying to flex the neck. We're not trying to do a sit up here. We're trying to bring the leg to the body. That way we can stretch this tissue and still protect our neck and our back. Now he should be feeling us all on this left side in the hip, is that what we're going? Perfect, okay? And again, he's going to hold this position for about 15 to 30 seconds. When people are in pain and they have an obvious problem, you know, my shoulders pinching, my back hurts, my knees, my hips, whatever the case is, it's going to take some time for the body to come out of that as the inflammation goes down, as the joints start to get back into their normal position, as the muscles and tissues start to get strengthened and do more resiliency, that's going to go away over time. And so the key is being consistent with the exercises, right? We can't just do it for a few days. I start to feel better and then I throw it away, I'm done with it.