UNIQUE ANDERSON: Hello. My name is Unique Anderson and I'm a certified personal trainer. All right. On this clip, we're going to talk about tightness in the lower back. A lot of times when you have a tight lower back, it's not necessary your lower back that's tight. It could be your hips, your hamstrings, your glutes or your quads. So this is what we're going to focus on. To begin, anything that you do, you want to make sure that you seek the advice of a medical physician or a practitioner. Someone that is licensed in this field, but this is just to help you to the next level. Okay, so what you want to focus on for your lower back is that you can do a piriformis stretch. Your piriformis is the muscle that connects underneath the glute into the hamstring. Sometimes that pulls on your lower back. So what you can do is if you have a tree like this one that I have here, you can hold on to it, or a bench, and you want to cross your leg here and you want to think about sitting your body back. You don't have to really go really, really low on this stretch. A lot of people go extremely low. You'll need to find it. Just think about sticking your behind out and then bending. What you're going to feel automatically is a deep stretch around the glute medius, the maximus and your piriformis. Again, those are muscles that connect at the bottom of the hip. Another stretch that you can do is you can lay on your back here in a nice mud like I'm laying. It's really good for you. It's good for your skin. And you're going to be here and you're going to cross this leg and you can grab the back of your leg and pull the leg that's in a 90-degree angle, this one, into your chest. Again, that's another deep stretch for the piriformis. Also, you can do a quad or hip flexor stretch. Remember you've got three parts to your hip and we're going to talk about that another time. But you can grab the tree again here and you want to always grab on the inside in here. You don't ever want to have your leg away from your body. If you can have it straight behind you, grabbing it in is really, really a good stretch for your hip flexor, thinking about driving your hips forward to focus on the stretch. A lot of times when people have lower back injuries, they just focus on the site but it's not just the site. Remember your body works interdependently, so your lower back connects to your hip. Remember that old saying, your hip bones are
connected to your knee bone. Do you know stuff like that? That's how your body is. So you want to focus on that flexibility and keep your core contracted.
