Lower Back Exercise: Find the End of your Spine

This lower back exercise is useful in itself, but also prepares ground for the other lower back pain exercises. Please do this one first, every time, before you do Rock on Hands and Knees, Gentle Leg Movements or Gentle Pelvis Rotation.

An alternative, seated version is Find Sitting Bones.

Standing Up:

(You might want to lean against a wall.)

Gently press a couple of fingertips into your side at buttock level. Raise and lower your knee. Gently prod with your fingertips until they are touching hard bone and they move a little as your knee moves. You're now touching part of your hip bone.

Now find the other hip bone in the same way.

Leave your fingers where they are for two minutes. Remind yourself regularly during that time that this is where the bottom of your spine is. Keep your eyes open: you can look after your body and live your life at the same time!

When you take your hands away, this lower back exercise should give you a clear sense of your hip bones, and a feeling that your fingers are still touching them.

That feeling shows you roughly the level at which your spine ends.

Most people believe (wrongly) that their spine is much shorter, and ends much further up their backs.

The more you repeat this lower back exercise, the more the "true" length of your spine will "sink in".

Why?

Many people injure this part of their backs because they have a faulty "map" of it and are therefore likely to contort their backs in this area. Your hip bones are at about the same level as the end of your spine (the coccyx or tail-bone.)

By feeling your hip bones, you experience where the end of your spine is. This is much more powerful than being told. People who know instinctively where the end of their spine is tend to move with greater freedom, and without fixing or collapsing in their lower backs.

How Often?

This is a core lower back pain exercise, and the more you do it the better. Do it as often as you can during the day. Morning, evening and lunchtime is a good start.

Interesting Fact!

Human beings have bony tails at the bottom of their spines, like other animals, but in our case the tail is inside our bodies.

Injuring your tailbone (often by falling heavily on the base of your spine) is very painful-- it's an important bone that affects your legs, back and even your arms and hands!

Next Lower Back Exercise

Go straight from this exercise to Lower Back Exercise: Gentle Leg Movements.

To see another way of imprinting the end of your spine, go to Find Sitting Bones.