C1 Blog

Well, the answer is not a great deal. These are pretty inert structures and should be tackled by experts however,

These are the exercises – but check with your Chiropractor before you go wild.

McKenzie exercises for disc protrusion

Firstly, lie face down with your hands under your shoulders in the press-up position. Let your low-back muscles relax and lightly tense up your gluts and continue to breathe normally. This can take a couple of minutes to get fully ready to go.

Then, slowly raise your shoulders off the ground until you are resting on your elbows and let your low-back ‘sag’ with gravity on to the bench. If you can hold this for a couple of minutes.

Then, if comfortable, lift your shoulders up a little further and hold for a further few minutes.

What’s it going on – your pain should shrink towards the centre of your low-back, called ‘centralize’. The exercise stretches some of the low-back muscles that compress the discs. It aslo lowers the internal pressure in the disc by pulling the disc apart slightly and so encourages the ‘stuff’ in the disc to move back into the disc body.

• Don’t do them for 1 hour after getting up. Let gravity work on your discs and let them settle down.

• Avoid these if you have been diagnosed with spondylolysis.

But there will be some discomfort so work with this but don’t push through the pain, it’ll do you no good.