how to CURE back pain.

How to cure back pain. First, for this to make sense, we have to cover how to not cure back pain. Any of these band-aid movements, cobras, hundreds a day till your spine breaks, decompression, hanging from a bar every single day, these entry level stabilization exercises, bird dogs, dead bugs, or my old favorite was sideline clamshell with a band. None of these are going to cure back pain.

Further on the list, pain-based treatment, steroid injections, anti-inflammatory pills, pain meds, ablations, GABA, muscle relaxers. All of these things are never going to cure back pain because they're not getting at the root cause. They're treating the effect, not the cause. So today's presentation is so critical, so dire. I've got notes as any good presenter must. So, I'm going to make sure we understand the difference by the end of today.

So, let's understand the reason those things don't work is that they're focused on alleviating. They are relief-based. Do you need that? Maybe on your worst day. Maybe to get through life. But if you want to cure something, you have to resolve at the root. So, in order for us to even get to the solution, we have to know what is the actual problem. What leads to chronic persistent degradation at the spine that leads to all these symptoms? So two, what are we actually going to do to cure it? What is the root cause? It's going to be two things. That's going to be the main focus of the whole video for us to get there. I want to explain the process of how this even happens. Why did we even think of the back wrong? How did we get to the right viewpoint of it?

So we need to learn how to ask why. When you're suffering through pain, when you're going through symptoms that keep coming back, when you try to work on it through the expertise of what you're supposed to do and it doesn't work, we feel defeated and we learn to mask harder. You may even go to your doctors like I did and say, "Hey, I've been doing all the things I'm supposed to." And you get presented with more hopeless options of, "Well, you're young. The age should help you. Wait it out." That didn't help. Well, you still have back pain after. This is just a fact of life. Once you reach a certain point in age, the back breaks down. You're just unlucky and it started earlier. That's hopeless. Further, the treatment is going to be surgery. Be careful. Stop sports. Learn to move like a robot and lift safely. All those things are avoiding the real, real issue. But if we learn to ask why, we stop running from the issue and we learn how to reverse engineer our weaknesses. And the symptoms are saviors. They're begging to be paid attention to. So this slogan, learn to ask why, is the principle number one in the program and community formed with LBA, low back ability. We have tens of thousands of members and it's so core to the entire thing because if you don't know what your goal is, you're not going to solve this. I know I'm talking a lot early in the video, but it's so critical you come in with the right mindset. 99% of these other videos are going to tell you 45-second drills of how you're going to immediately twist and crack your [ __ ] back. It's not going back. It's not going to work. You've tried it. I tried it. You're going to be back around watching the same dozen videos. They want views or money or don't care. I'm someone who's been through it. That's why I make these videos.

So, to explain who I even am before we get into the exercise why you should listen, I'll give you 60 seconds. I was chronically injured. I had two herniated discs. This led to SI joint issues at my sacrum. My hips got out of whack, 2 inches higher on the right. I'm lifting like a maniac. I'm an athlete. I'm 22. Then I get hip impingement from all the imbalance lifting. Then I get a sports hernia and tear. I already had nerve pain from the sciatic and now I had nerve pain in my groin and organs inside everywhere. And all in the while I lost mobility. I was being more careful. I already had a knee surgery that didn't go well. So I was so averse to trying to get the spine surgery I was offered. And the whole time I was being gaslit by the professionals I was trying to receive help by. Disclaimer, I'm going to say my story is a lot of the past, what happened. I'm not anti-doctor, anti-medicine, but it's the truth. And viewers are going to understand what I mean when I explain these stories. So that's how I ended up here and a leader of a low back movement and teaching this stuff. So as we enter it, just keep that context of who you listen to matters. If you don't trust me, that's totally fine, but that's where I'm coming from.

So the two things we're going to build extremely important. You may have thought I was going to say build two muscles, build this exercise, that exercise. That's coming. The two things we need to build to get to the root cause, the root problem is build evidence. We got a busy road nearby. Build evidence and build the structure. Build protection. These are the two core things that get lost through every round of flare-up, every round of spasm, every year that goes by of inactivity with our spine after injury. The breakdown that occurs, it leads to a lack of evidence. So evidence is teaching your body that it's okay to work neuromuscularly. Back injuries are not just a tissue issue. They become a whole body issue, a firing pattern issue, an identity-based issue. You form tension everywhere every time you reinjure yourself and it learns to be guarded off and avoidant. That's why when someone would normally pick up something like this, they learn through all the times of bad evidence, pick it up careful, or else what might happen? You've seen it. Bang, you get shot in the back.

So, building evidence can be done through a lot of things. We're going to do it through exercise and slow graded exposure. So, building evidence is trying to teach your back it's okay to fire and not spasm. It's okay to use these things and wake them up. There are motor neurons in your back that control how hard a muscle fires as well as whether it fires at all or not. So, gamma motor neurons are aspects in your muscle fibers. They're neurons that control the dial of "should I squeeze a little bit or should I squeeze to spasming?" If I'm firing, should it be really intense or not at all? Through injury, that gets lost. And the only way to retach it is through training. So that's evidence. We need to build exposure at the things that scare us. If you're scared of picking up something like this, you need to face that exact fear. Ask why. Why is my body seizing up? Go backwards. Let's not pick up here. Let's start on something like a gentle hold or a small range, which is like picking something up off a 2-millimeter reach versus learning to bend all the way down again.

So, we're going to build evidence. The second part is we're going to build protection. There is the structural element of back pain. When you get a disc herniation like I did or multiple, you're going to have immediate shutdown of the most important protective spinal muscles deep along the grooves of the spine. Multifidus is like the VMO of the knee. If you're familiar with this muscle on your quad, the little teardrop here, you will probably know that it protects the knee and tracking and strength tendon issues. The spine has an equivalent. It's called the multifidus. This is small muscle groups that run in the groove of every bit of your spine. It is alive. Your spine is not just bones, discs, nerves. When you get an MRI, they're only looking at those things. It doesn't show that there's all these muscles that are meant to protect you, to round forward, to twist, to stabilize, resist movement. When you start getting disc injuries, nerve pain, inflammation, the natural response in your body when there's chronic pain in an area is to inhibit contraction and movement as a protective mechanism. That was helpful in day 1 through 20 of your injury, but now you're years in and these things have shut down and they don't know how to fire again. The only way to do it is to do it scaled back at an easy level that won't punish you.

So our approach is to build two things. Evidence, neuromuscularly, retach it to fire, rebuild the trust, change our identity of fear and avoidance. Then two, build the protection, build the structure. All these small, I call them intraspinal muscles. Your back has big muscles of the spinal erector group, but then they have small, tiny interwoven muscles along the grooves of your spine that control everything piece by piece at the vertebrae. So even if you had loss of strength, loss of disc height, degenerative disc disease, issues at the bones, the fact you can rebuild all the tiny muscles that go up the groove, that's what's supposed to protect you. So that's what we're going to work at. We all good on the nerding out? I made y'all wait long enough. You can see sweat dripping down my nose. I'm in Atlanta summer heat. We're on an LBA tour doing workshops around the country and it's 95°. So, you're going to have to deal with that. Let's go over the route. The actual exercise route. I'm going to teach you the main fundamental. Structurally, back pain can become a full body issue. There's hip mobility and strength that matters relevantly. There's low back up to the midback, shoulders, posture that can really matter. Today, we're focused on the 90% meat and potatoes of rebuilding your spine with protection, your tightness, your imbalances, the inability to touch your toes. All those things we're going to work on elsewhere, but we're going to build up that spine to be healthy, responsive, robust.

The route's going to be on this machine. A 45-degree back extension machine. The reason being it is so easy to start at any level. Gentle for a great grandmother. I've put my grandmother through it. You can see on the screen. Our starting point is going to be an isometric hold. High pad. You could even have your feet off the machine. We're leaning over the edge of the bench, holding ourselves up through the strength of our back muscles to stay contracted in a long board. If you were to go up higher and have more of your weight off the machine, now you're holding more of your own body weight. If the pad goes lower, you're now holding 50-60% of your body weight. Gradually putting the load onto your back. This is the first step we talked about building evidence. This isn't about gains. This isn't about building huge muscles yet. This is me teaching my low back. Okay, we are going to fire and trust this process and just hold. You may say, Brendan, I do deadlifts. I don't have to do this. I know people that can deadlift 405 and then go to pick up a ball, go to grab their shoe, and then bang, they're done. It's a cut scene. The reason why is because your entire back may be strong enough for 405, but one little vertebrae hidden in the movement of your hip hinge and the momentum is not. Your L3 to L4 section is atrociously weak, but you don't know that 'cause you're braced, moving, lifting heavy. This machine, given it's an isometric hold the whole time, no movement. If you have a weak point, you'll feel exactly there. So the 60-second hold we start with assisted high pad, whatever we have to do, is going to make you acutely aware, "Okay, my whole back is working, but man, that one spot. I have to work to get that back." And so compound movements are great, deadlifts are great, the momentum of it, the heavy bracing that lets you hide. So this is true. This is exposing. This is where we get to the root problems.

So the core goal. Start at a high pad. Slowly work your way down to the hips. Start 30 seconds. Deep breath. Calm nervous system. Think about the firing you want to happen in a positive manner. Don't fear it. If 30 seconds is good today, try it again in a couple days. Keep going for a few weeks. Then go for a minute. Two minutes. Good. Keep doing this process of slowly turning it up over a month, two months until you go for the LBA standard test, which is a 2-minute hold all the way up, long as you can, 120 seconds on the low back. Every piece of the vertebrae, every single muscle in there is going to be tested. So that may take months in itself and that's fine.

The next step is then we go to single leg holds. As soon as I pop one leg out, there's a semi-temptation to twist and rotate. Now, the glutes help with this, but what really keeps you centered is now smaller muscles in the spine like rotator, multifidus, the things I described that give you extra protection in the vertebrae from rotation forces. Two legs is good. It's training. Single leg trains even more to resist the twist, stabilizing further. The goal is to work up to one minute on each leg. So, I would do one minute here. Then, I'm going to switch, build up a minute here. You'd be surprised how the single leg can expose you to having issues.

Third level is we're going to go through take our flat back strength. It's like the iso hold. Now we're bending at the hips, only going as low as we can without losing that flat back position. This is just the start of our process of the back extension. So what changes? Our back's still a board. We're treating it as one long piece. And then when we go down, we're stretching the hamstrings, which increases the sciatic nerve stretch. So that's something we have to start to rebuild is the pull of the fascia and nerves from the posterior chain with strength. This is a stretching process but with the contraction. If you have chronically tight hamstrings and you know it's not helping your back. The problem with this is you're passive. You're chilling out. So you are yanking on the fascia which has the nerves inside of it without any protection of a pump, any protection of contraction. So we want to go through the gradual process of regaining movement of our hips with our back working. I could feel back three, four years ago, good on my back, good on my back, good on my back, little tingle starting from the hamstring up to my glute. I'd work just short of that and come back. As you start to get better at that, the distance you can go down gets further and further and further.

The eventual goal is full reps. This is level four, where you decompress at the bottom. By this point, you're back to a toe touch flexibility without even stretching. That's how serious of range we get through the whole posterior chain. So, hinge reps may take you two months in itself. Take your time. And work through a set of 20, two sets of 20 until you're ready to start trying rounded reps. Semi-bending. Do for a few weeks. You could do two sets of 15. This isn't a game of strength. This is a game of tissue tolerance. How much can your back handle without flaring up in pain tomorrow? You don't know that off rip. You have to try and test very sensibly, very gradually. If you do day one 30 reps, you're going to kill your back.

So, speaking of the 30 reps, we're at another LBA standard test. The end goal of this entire back extension journey is to be able to do 30 bodyweight reps fully decompressed at the bottom. As I lower down, my elbows reach to the ground. I'm inverted. I'm getting the decompression of hanging from a bar in an inversion table. But the difference is as I initiate back up from this relaxed decompressed position to here, I'm recompressing the spine with those little muscles with the multifidus with the rotator with the intertransversary, all these little nerdy things I could talk about. It's what starts and initiates you out of this relaxed position. So the ability to round down mobility in the vertebrae, little muscles, big muscles, relax, then engage with the tiny muscles, put the spine back together piece by piece, that full protection. That's why the guy who could deadlift 405 still hurt his back picking up a pencil 'cause he didn't have from here to here relaxed. He just knew he could do really heavy flat back from here to here. That's not piece-by-piece spine insurance. You need to see what can I go through relaxed, unresisted, decompressed, recompressed. That's a whole another ball game. This itself, this part where you get into rounded reps, the time frame on this is not to be said. It depends on the person, but it's not going to be weeks. It's going to be months. And so our goal, I'll go through 30 so you can see me sweat. You're gonna feel hamstrings. You're gonna feel the glutes. You're gonna feel the low back. You're probably gonna see me miscount. But the ability to start training your back's tolerance to handle a pump. That's the game. When you go years of injury and then avoidance and then you go through physical therapy and you learn little exercises, you end up dissociating with your back and avoiding feeling it altogether. Even as a trainer for years, I always ask people, "Where'd you feel it? You did RDL's. Where'd you feel it?" If they said their low back, I'm pausing and I'm hitting the panic button. You should never feel your low back with a pump or fatigue. That is just not true. As you build your back tissue tolerance, you can handle more without pain. Now you turn it up for strength, for the muscle endurance. And by the time you get to this, going for a 30-rep test, I have zero clue where I'm at. You're going to get a back pump like I'm getting right now. My low back is inflated. I'mma do two more. So when I hop off this machine. Yeah, they're coming for me. Oh, I'm swollen. It's like I just hit curls, guys. I'm over here. I'm over here. They're not coming. This is good. So, I don't feel pain in a bad way like I used to. I feel an overwhelming swollen effect like I'm walking on bricks. The big muscles are all pumped up, but even the small ones hugging the spine. Your ability to work up to this point to treat it like any other muscle group. That's the game.

The problem is you're going to watch hundreds of videos of people giving you [ __ ] that's way too easy, way too hard, likely not even really relevant, not direct enough to the spine, and you're going to try it. And then you're going to either feel nothing, get hurt, and think, "This isn't for me," and you're just going to think my back's unsolvable. You have to pick something scary and direct and then zoom way out and see, "Oh, I'm a [ __ ] beginner." and then plan a year plan, 12 months of steady micro deposits. You're in back debt. You can't afford to do reps yet. You need to go on like I showed in the beginning and wake up the neurons of your back to fire again. They're not even firing. So, if you stay here non-stop holding for 60 seconds, by the end of it, you got some contraction back. But you didn't test your joints. You didn't test mobility yet. You didn't test the tolerance of things being opened up and pulled apart. That's dangerous. You can hurt yourself, reinjure a disc. It's not where you start, but it's where you got to go. If something's potent, that means it has potential to heal you or potential to harm you. You got to touch the scary stuff over time, but zoom way out.

So, this route alone, let me get back to my presentation. This route alone, what I wrote on the paper was just "play the long game." That's my slogan. I believed in it so much, put it on my arm because I keep forgetting. The reason why the entire LBA slogan is "play the long game" is because over time everything makes sense. You get data when you look back. The hindsight's 20/20. Only if you're clear and focused on an actual route that takes you far. If you're just doing dead-end stuff, back to all the little drills, back to morning routines of twisting and hugging my knee and trying to get that last crack. What did you learn after you hear that? There's not much to look at. There's not much feedback. There's not many real losses. There's not many real wins. But if you choose something that's honest and potent, then you get to look back and find out what's going on. So "play the long game" means this is going to take you a year. The first two, three months is getting re-communication with your back. You may think your back's good till you start training it and then you get hurt. You start getting little flare-ups, little aches. That's not that this is bad. That's you actually trying to make withdrawals out of your back's bank deposit and you realize you're broke. So it's time to make deposits. It's time to put in little bits of work. And so I think the last thing I want to really explain. Well, let me make sure this camera's not dying. Check. Check. Yeah, it was dying. I just revived it. So, last analogy I'll give 'cause I I don't like to do the information overload like I used to do. Maybe this stuff resonates, maybe it doesn't. I'm going to add one more thing to look at with this whole problem you're faced with and why this makes sense.

So, where do you go when you start to have serious back issues to where it's altering your life? You're going to go get checked out. You're going to go to an ortho. You're going to get an MRI. They're going to test for stuff. What do they test? On MRI, the results are mainly going to show 90% of the time they're testing for bones, discs, and nerves. They're looking for injuries here, whether disc herniations, disc bulge, DDD, thinning, wearing. They're looking for disc height loss, dehydration of the disc, degenerative disc disease, a blanket term that means a lot of stuff that isn't so much of a disease. They're looking for bone problems, bone spurs, pars defect. They're looking for stress fractures, modic changes. Maybe these terms mean nothing to you. Maybe it means a lot. They're looking for misalignments in the nerves, in the bones. They're looking at the vertebrae being in spondi or retro or misalignments of where the bone should be stacked. Then they're looking for compression of the nerves. They're looking for things that they can immediately say, "You have pain. Let me see. Oh, no [ __ ] It's broken." That's end-stage problems. By the time you have something that shows up there, you have a huge problem. This has been going on for longer than you knew because the day you find out you have an issue is not the day pain comes. That's way later. The day you have pain is not the day you have a problem. That's the day you realize you have a problem. The problem was brewing for months to years of slow atrophy, of slow imbalance. Things get extra tight and contorted and then all of a sudden, boom, you get that deadlift that broke the back like I did. It wasn't just the deadlift, otherwise you would have snapped back in 3 months. It became chronic.

So they test for the deepest level and maybe you do get something diagnosed, maybe you don't and they give you non-specific, non-operable back pain, which is kind of like nothing's wrong with you. No, something's wrong with you. And so let me tell you what that may be. You go to the doctor, you go get tested on that level of the problem. But what you failed to realize when you get the little model off the shelf at the doctor's office and they have the bone, disc, nerve, you think that's all the spine is. That's not true. You have layers and layers like an onion within the back. All the little muscles I told you about, multifidus, rotator, interspinalis, every little woven groove, that's part of the spine. It's alive. It's moving. You can get a pump, blood flow through there. But they're not testing for atrophy on that. They're not going to diagnose you with on the imaging, "Oh [ __ ] your multifidus is super shriveled up. It doesn't look very vascular. There's fatty infiltration. It's like wagyu meat. There's a bunch of fat in there. It's not getting blood flow. It's getting nasty. It's not working right." They're not telling you that. They don't test for that. They're testing for the end stage when it's an effect. It's not the cause. This is like after the problem has really marinated.

So the reason this matters is because your approach to solve this issue has to happen in the same order that the problem occurred. The problem occurred through issues from the outer stuff to the deeper stuff then to the late-stage diagnosis. Boom. Degenerative disc disease. You have just so many problems. Everything's breaking down. By the time it reached that, you already had diseases of the muscle. You had disease and atrophy and misuse and abuse and lack of contractability. The neurons are not firing right. Everything neuromuscularly is off for the bones to get wrecked for the ligaments to not be holding the alignment like they're supposed to. So the approach to fix it, let's go through the layers like an onion. This is the analogy I use in the group, in the big group chat in the program we got in LBA. You have the biggest muscles, spinal erectors. We all can feel them. We all know them. You have the biggest muscles first. You're getting a pump through just doing the holds. That's where we start. Get the big stuff. Get it firing. Feel something positive in the back. The next level in there is you have smaller muscles. You have smaller grooves of muscles that run all the way along like I described. They get worked extra when you go single leg and you resist the tipping and have to stabilize even more. They work extra when you don't just do a back extension to here. You decompress and relax. And then to recompress and recontract out of relaxation, you're calling upon those small, deep stabilizing muscles. So you got the big muscles, you got the little muscles, then you got ligaments, anterior longitudinal ligament. It's a long ligament that goes through the entire front of your spine. That's what's supposed to prevent slippage of the vertebrae of the spondi and the retro and the misalignments. That's not just happening. The ligaments are getting abused because the muscles aren't helping. So you got big muscles, small muscles, ligaments, tendons, then you got the bones, then you got the disc. And so when you only try to jump to solving the middle, you skip this, you skip the work, you skip all the opportunity to fix the bigger foundation and you go in and you just inject something to the disc, inject something to the spinal canal, you go do surgery and remove something or you add hardware. You're skipping every layer of the onion of your back, going to the deepest problem, repairing a part like you're a [ __ ] car at an auto shop. Then you're surprised when you go driving in the road, the [ __ ] get your back is not a car. You can't just replace the deepest part and fix nothing of what got you there on the outer layers.

So to fix it the safest way, holistic, long-term plan, start with the biggest stuff. Get a pump, get a contraction, just hold. Then you test more on the tendons. Then you test a little bit more on the small muscles by doing range. So, by the time you get to being able to do a full Jefferson curl, years in, where you're actually testing the deepest vulnerabilities of your spine to be fully flexed with load, I've gotten to doing one. I went from where I couldn't bend forward and pick something up off the ground with just my own body to being able to put my body weight in my elbows and just folding forward like a pancake, relaxing, and then recompressing my spine to strength. That's me working through the outer layers, the holds, then the reps, then the deeper reps, then weighted and getting to half my body weight on my back on back extension, then testing the spine further and further. And I'm was someone that had serious disc injury. And I had to get away from the fear of, oh, it's just all downhill from here. The tissue is only going to degrade further. I learned how to meet it where it's at and slowly make the deposits. And you'd be surprised how back wealthy you could become. So, your spine's alive. It is adaptable. You just need to find the right entry point. If you want to wait it out, go through more rounds of treatments, try some of the band-aid stuff, I'll be here when you come back, 'cause it's inevitable. I'm not saying I have all the answers. I'm saying you need to find any route, whether it's mine or not, that is progressive, is going to face the fear, and is long-term, and is no [ __ ] It's not for treatment. It's not for relief. It's for resolving the root issues for robust foundation building.

So, I have my heart in this and I speak just candidly and passionately because I lost my life damn near to back pain. When I had the back issues and the hip issues and all the things I described when I was a student, I got so messed up. I couldn't sleep ever. I went insomniac for days and days and days and I got super sick all the time. Flu, strep throats, bacterial infections, and then I got a brain fog headache that started to spread and got so bad I could barely open my eyes. And then I lost my mind. I went into a full psychosis and I was brain fogged out and could barely speak. And I I didn't know how to read. I couldn't tell you my last name. It was my birthday and my whole family's around the table and I don't know what day it is. I was in the sunken place for a year. Literally the entire year from age 22 to 23, no memory. And I'm 28 now. And it all started with back pain and following the advice to avoid and be careful and do less and less. And it ruined my life. It all led to a spiral of losing my mind, losing my health. I had to drop out of school. I ended up homeless in New York City, sleeping on my friends' couches. That's what happened when I went down that route. That's why it means so much to me. I know it may not be that deep for you yet or at all. Hopefully never, but pure ignorance and such a core thing of our body can cause detriment to everything. And I just want to make sure if this is the only video of mine you see that you become equipped with viewing this in the right light and you feel empowered that there's some level of improvement that's going to save your future of your back.

So, I'm going to end it there. If you want a full route that includes training from the toe to the head for back pain, all the imbalances and the other things we didn't cover, hip mobility, persistent tightness, pulling through your posture, your pelvis is misaligned, you have shoulder issues that are keeping you back, everything focused to the back, but the widespread effects I cover at lowbackability.com. We have the world's biggest low back community and program, tens of thousands of people. That's only because I made it so accessible. It's pay what you want. So, you could decide to join at $2 a month. You could do $10. Some people do $300 a month because they're so grateful. This whole community, we have a group chat. We talk every day. We're working through the same route. I believe it's special just because it's what I needed when I was younger. So, hope to see you there. If not, see you in an Inerson workshop soon. Uh, I'm grateful you watch and I hope you take away the real value, which is that it's not hopeless. It's just not in the dead-end band-aids. You're going to have to do the work. You're going to be your own back expert and it's not over. Play the long game.