This article is a transcribed, edited summary of a video Bob and Brad recorded in August 2017. For the original video, watch 7 Exercises You Should Do Absolutely Every Day.

Bob: Oh, hi folks, I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.

Brad: Brad Heineck, physical therapist.

Bob: Together, we are the most famous physical therapists on the internet.

Brad: In our opinion, of course, Bob.

Bob: Today we're talking about the seven exercises you should do absolutely every day.

Brad: Yes. Because seven is complete.

Bob: Right. Seven's that fancy number that seems to work for a lot of things.

Brad: Exactly!

Bob: These are exercises that, you know, I eat my own cooking, I guess, as you put it. These are seven exercises I do pretty much every day; some of them I don't do every day. The vast majority of them I do. And they're easy to do because you can incorporate them into your day. You don't need to say, " Now, at 10 o'clock I'm going to do seven exercises." A lot of these are ones that you should be doing throughout the day.

Brad: Right, you can do them while you work, while you drive, some of them. Let's go on; they'll figure it out.

Bob: Let's start off with the first one, Brad. This is a very common one that everybody is having trouble with. I just saw some research this morning that showed that they're studying the necks of young people, teenagers, and young adults, and they're finding out they have deterioration in their neck that's equivalent to someone who's like 20 years older, and that's been doing a job where you are looking down or bent forward.

Brad: Yeah, it's from the head-forward posture. Stresses the neck and the joints and the disc in the neck terribly.

Bob: Could be with them on the laptop or an iPad or on their phone, coming forward.

Brad: Or they're just sitting like this.

Bob: For every inch that your head is forward, there's ten more pounds of stress on the neck. So he's quite a few inches over here, so here's 40-50 pounds more stress on the neck. So, throughout the day you're going to want to be doing chin tucks. So you're not going up, or you're not going down. You're backing your neck up, backing your ears up, basically.

Brad: Like someone threw a pie at you. Get that chin into the throat or head.

Bob: Or like someone very undesirable is trying to kiss you, right, eww. How many times have we seen that, Brad? In our life?

Brad: It happens.

Bob: So you know what you can do is do a bunch of these, and what's nice about these is you can do them everywhere. You can do them in your car, you can do them at the computer, you can do them at your workstation. If you wanted to add a little bit of pressure, too, you can actually give a little extra stretch and use your fingers, or you can take your hand and just go in there and push.

Brad: I think that's the hypothenar eminence.

Bob: Very good.

Brad: Anyways, this is one I do when I'm driving because I check myself out to make sure my head isn't getting too close to the steering wheel, and I'll do that chin tuck, and you get some weird looks when you stop at the stoplight. People are wondering what he's doing, but anyway.

Bob: They don't know who you are.

Brad: Exactly, it's all fun.

Bob: All right, next one, Brad. Again, because of the head-forward posture, and we see this quite often in people when we've seen patients. Generally, they're lacking mobility into extension because they're always working in this forward and flexed direction. The head's down, plenty of motion this way. So when we test people, we go ok show me chin to chest so you can do that. Then we have them go back, and a lot of times, how far do they go back, Brad?

Brad: Yeah. It'll kind of hurt back in there, may hurt over in the shoulder blade, and then they don't go back that way; a lot of people do not look up.

Bob: They don't work in this direction, and because of that they start losing that direction, and lack of motion almost always is equivalent to pain. I mean, if you start losing motion, you start gaining pain, so if you want to show, Brad, just the way that we often start people because a lot of times this hurts to go back.

Brad: I take a towel. There are a couple ways; Bob's going to show you his way, and we actually do each other's ways, but we claim these. Kind of roll the towel and put it down like this; keep it low on the neck, not up here so much, but if you got a nice cushy towel and you're having a hard time going back, that will make it much more comfortable. And then you can use it to help pull up.

Bob: Tell them about the patient you just had, Brad.

Brad: Yeah, she is 58 years old. She's having neck pain. She just drove up from Arizona to Minnesota. That's about a 20-hour drive at least, and she had pain for weeks after this. This was kind of fun as a therapist because she's seen a chiropractor, and she wasn't having success. She brought her head back and went, "Oh, oh, it hurts right back there." And so I had her get the towel out, and it was, "Oh, that feels a little bit better." I said I want you to do 10 of these every one to two hours.

Bob: Yeah, you can do a lot of these. I think people don't realize how often you can do these. If you're having pain, it's not "let's do it once a day, ten times." You can do it like you said: every hour, every two hours.

Brad: As long as it feels better when you're doing it, and you're getting back farther. Two days later, she came back pain was gone.

Bob: Yup, that's when it's fun being a therapist. We call that the miracle. You know, we hope to see a miracle a day in our clinics.

Brad: Exactly, you want to show the other thing?

Bob: The other thing is, you could take the salvage. That's the edge of the towel. And you're going to go ahead, and you're going to take that, and you're going to put it right below the ears here, and you're pulling on it. So that acts as kind of a counterforce. This should be a little longer too, but what's nice about this is you can work on different levels of the spine; now I'm a little bit lower. I keep it up by my eyes, and I keep the towel moving along with my eyes. So this level here goes up.

Brad: This is best to be done in a chair with a backrest; we wouldn't do it like Bob is.

Bob: Exactly, I'd want to be in a chair doing this, and again you can work on different levels, and it works out really well. Again, if you're not having pain, all you have to do is just go ahead and do a couple of these every day to maintain that extension.

Brad: Again, with the towels, when you're working it, the pain should improve with every repetition, every time you do it. If it's starting to get worse, you're not ready for it, or there's something else that may be the problem.

Bob: The other thing I guarantee you, most of you people have a tight chest because, again, all of our activities throughout the day tend to bring you into that rounded position. And you can tell by standing up, Brad, if you face the camera and if your thumbs are pointing toward each other, that means the shoulder is internally rotated and tight.

Bob: So you need to stand up straight to the point where the thumbs are pointing straight forward, and that means He's in a good posture. So you're going to want to stretch the chest muscle. You can do it in the doorway. If the doorway is right here, I put my hands on both sides of the doorway.

Bob: I lean in like this, but a lot of times you don't have a doorway, or you might be at your desk, so I just grab like this, and when I do this stretch every day, Brad. It's right before my run; I'm just walking as I'm getting ready to do my run. I just do a bunch of these to get the chest to stretch.

Brad: I take a towel, and I go use it behind my back because it's hard for me to grab my hands because I have tight shoulders or something, but that helped me a lot. So that works out really well using a towel instead.

Bob: Next one, again, is an easy one you can do at your desk; it kind of fits along with the same one. We're working on posture: shoulder squeezes. You want to go ahead and show Brad. So he's going to bring his shoulder blades together and squeeze them like this.

Bob: Now, this is again one you can do frequently; you can do this every half hour. You know, you can just go ahead and squeeze and even hold it: one, two, three, four, five, relax. Squeeze and hold it: one, two, three, four, five. Good if you're having knots in your shoulders, if you're having postural issues.

Brad: Tell them about the critical direction that you want to see.

Bob: Ideally, if you want to have a visual in your mind, you're trying to take these shoulder blades, and you're trying to put them in the opposite back pocket. I'm trying to push the left shoulder blade down and into the right pocket, pushing the right shoulder blade down into the left pocket. That's the thing you want to think about: you're not doing it.

Brad: As opposed to up and back. We don't want that.

Bob: Next one, Brad. And I definitely do this every day, and I actually do it twice a day. This is just good back maintenance. This is for about 80% of the population. Their backs, again, you tend to do forward activities all day long, so you really want to make sure you do some back extensions.

Brad: So people are doing a lot of sitting, a lot of slouching, a lot of bending forward. This helps maintain your range of motion and a pain-free life.

Bob: So, you put your hands underneath your shoulders like this, and you're just going to press up. Now I'm keeping my pelvis on the ground. Eventually, you want to see if you can work all the way up like this, and because I do a lot of these, you can see I can go all the way up, can't I, Brad?

Brad: Yeah. He's got very good motion.

Bob: If I were tight, I'd be lifting my pelvis; my back wouldn't be going up.

Brad: Now, this is not for somebody with spondylolisthesis or spinal stenosis.

Bob: It's going to actually probably make it worse. That person might actually go ahead and just do some of these, single leg to chest,

single leg to chest, then even double legs to chest. They're the ones that are going to be the opposite direction.

Brad: That's a small percentage compared to everyone else.

Bob: All right, next one, Brad. If you sit a lot, these muscles, the hip flexors, tend to get really tight, and so this is a good stretch. It's another one I do every day. So you just go ahead and put a pillow down for your knee and half kneel on the floor, and you're stretching those hip flexors.

Brad: So he's getting that stretch in the front of the right hip. He's keeping a good posture to keep him in line with everything else we've talked about.

Bob: So again, I've got good posture, although we did see somebody doing like this, Brad, and it actually does kind of give it a little different stretch.

Brad: Doesn't it? It does, so we're learning something new every day. Again, do that on the floor, not up on your table at home.

Bob: The last stretch, Brad, would be a hamstring stretch. I just saw a study that said there are three muscles you want to stretch for your back pain, and one of them is the hamstring.

Brad: Sure, very common.

Bob: And the other one was a QL, quadratus lumborum. But the hamstrings, they attach to your pelvis and attach to your back, so you want to make sure your hamstrings are being stretched out. So you go ahead and put your foot up there, and I mean this is just one way to do it, keeping your back straight. This is something you can just do throughout the day.

Brad: Don't round your back while doing this; keep it straight.

Brad: I usually don't do them while sitting; I'll do it standing at a stairway or something like this. But then I'm keeping really good posture; it doesn't take much to stretch. If you round over, you think, oh, back in high school they said, put your nose to your knee, but you're just stressing your back all the way, and you're not isolating the hamstring.

Bob: So you're stretching your back too, and not in a way that we want to stretch it.

Brad: Do you want to show them the one lying down?

Bob: Sure, with the stretch-out strap.

Brad: This is if you have back problems. This is probably the best way to do your hamstrings, I think, because it eliminates stress on your back.

Bob: The best place to do these is on a firm surface. A bed is fine. The problem with the bed is it's so soft that you sink into it.

Brad: You don't get the same support. Hopefully you have a firm bed. And that's what I do with the older patients or people that, for whatever reason, can't get to the floor.

Bob: If you have a firm bed, that's best. You can definitely do the back extensions on the bed, but if you're a little bit on the more mature side, a good exercise for the back when you wake up in the morning is just to wake up, put your legs up like this, and rotate back and forth. This is kind of a go-to one we use for people with back pain and hip pain because it's getting the hips moving and it's getting the back moving. It's just a good universal one. I had a lot of patients do that when they wake up in the morning, just to make sure they're doing that. Thanks, everybody, for watching.

Brad: You bet. Take care.

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