Multifidus Training

Now we're going to work on teaching her how to feel that multifidus contraction first of all reflexively, and then ultimately we want her to feel it volitionally. But this is kind of the first step. So what I'm going to have her do is I'm going to have you take this hand and bring it and find the kind of that bone in your back there, kind of the spine bone there. Good. And then come a little bit in there. There you go. Right there. That's where the location of the muscle that we're trying to contract is. Now go ahead and bring this arm forward. Take a step forward with your left foot. Good. And what I want you to do is simply bring that arm up and down. Do you feel how that muscle contracts on and off underneath your thumb there underneath your fingers there?  Good. All right. Now let's go ahead, and there's another way you can do that is go ahead and put your hand back down. And you can just shift forward and back and simply that weight shift will turn on that muscle. Even with that, we can also now start to do a transverse abdominis contraction where she brings her belly button in just real gently toward her spine. And that'll tend to facilitate that as well. Good. Let's go ahead and try it on the other side. And I'm going to feel it here first, because I want to see if we can actually get that to contract. Because we couldn't get it to contract when you're lying on your stomach. Go ahead up and down. Good. So we can get it to contract in this position. So that's really good. So I want you to reach around, feel where I was feeling right there and go ahead and lift that. Do you feel that contraction? That's exactly what we want to work on at home. You can drop your arm down. We can do some of those weight shifts there. Feeling that contraction. And now you know how we tried on your stomach to try to bring your belly button in toward your spine and try to make this contract? I just want you to go ahead and try that again. It's probably still a little bit hard for you, but this is where we're going to go when you come in next time. This is really what we're going to work on. You can try this a little bit at home as well. But that's going to be our next step.