There are three exercises.

There's two of them that I've done consistently for quite some time.

I really fancy them a bit.

The third one, the bird dog, I only do occasionally.

But let's go through the three of them.

And is it safe to say that you, and just for the listener, we're going to link to videos of these, right?

So you're going to do your best to explain them and provide the rationale for them.

But ultimately, a demonstration will be forthcoming through videos we'll link to in the show notes.

But this is kind of like your, I don't know, your core nutrition, right?

This is sort of the, everybody should be doing this.

You don't wait till you have back pain to do this.

Is that safe to say?

No, it isn't.

No, this is a bit of a myth and something that I've been fighting basically my whole career.

Oh, McGill is the McGill Big Three.

There are some people that are far too stiff.

And this is not the mechanism of their back pain.

And we don't need to go there.

Have you ever seen the type of body build where they have a huge pneumatic cushion in front called the belly and it slaps on their thighs?

It's that pendulous of this.

Do you ever see spine instability in that type of architecture?

I don't.

So probably those people have difficulty getting on and off the floor.

The Big Three is not for them.

So there might be, again, the assessment always leads us to the solution.

And so no, the Big Three, well, I need to have a discussion of what stability is in terms of creating resilience and performance.

Then why are those particular exercises important?

And then how to do them.

If I could follow that logic line, Peter.

Absolutely.

Yeah, let's do it.

And then the other thing, Stuart, if you want to throw it in there, do you want to talk about some of the hallmarks of your assessment, wherever it fits into those three things?

So take it away, yeah.

All right, so remind me, we're going to talk about nonspecific low back pain and how I think it's a myth and it doesn't exist.

That will take us into the assessment.

So let's go back to a basic discussion of stability.

So if I was, I might use an example of a backhoe.

So a backhoe is a machine with a tractor and it has an arm on the back to dig earth.

The first thing the operator does is put down the stabilizer bars to lock the tractor into the ground.

Because if you don't do that, you can't pull earth, you just pull the machine around.

So what's the human equivalent of that?

We live in a linkage, just like machinery.

In other words, let's take the bench press muscle, pec major.

Pec major originates on my rib cage, spans my ball and socket joint of the shoulder, and inserts on the humerus.

So when I contract and shorten the pec major, it flexes my arm.

So if I'm wanting to do a push or a punch, there it is.

That's on the distal side of the joint.

Proximally, that same muscle shortening collapses my rib cage towards my shoulder joint.

So if all I used was the muscle that spans the joint, that isn't a very effective push.

All I'm doing is collapsing my own linkage.

Or as an engineer, we would say, well, you've just created an energy leak.

So I'm now going to build proximal stiffness.

I'm going to lock my core, create stiffness through my torso, which is proximal to the joint.

So now when I contract the muscle, 100% of the motion is directed distally.

Now I've got my push.

So what is the best, most efficient way to create a proximal stiffness?

We searched for years doing all kinds of tests of every abdominal exercise.

You could think of back exercises, twisting, pull-off presses, throwing things, et cetera.

The three exercises that kept bubbling up to the top in the criteria of sparing the spine while you're doing them, because these people are hurting.

You don't have carte blanche to load up their spine.

A guaranteed stability or proximal stiffness.

And it was later in my career that we found there is a residual stiffness that occurs.

So if you do the big three and you are an NFL football team, if you do the big three prior to practice, you will run and cut just a little bit faster.

So you're on the field, you run and you cut.

The stiffer, the core, when the hips explode into external rotation, you're now creating a faster directional change.

So what were the muscles or what were the exercises?

A modified curl-up, which remember, and now I'm just gonna start a little bit of an assessment.

I'm gonna take a patient,

I'm gonna have them sit on the stool, and I say, do you have symptoms right now?

Humor me and let's say you don't.

Now I'm going to say, drop your chest down.

Is that causing, oh yeah.

My left toe is going numb and I've got back pain.

Good, bring your chin down.

And they might say that'll increase their pain or decrease it.

But the point is that posture created their pain.

If that is true, when they lay on their back and they imprinted their back into the floor doing a Pilates roll-up, for example, that would be their specific pain trigger.

So it's not much of a therapeutic exercise, but we can say, put your hands under your low back as you're laying on the ground.

Lift your elbows.

Now, hover up your head, neck, and shoulders.

And we're going to propel the abdominal contraction, breathe through first lips, and allow the diaphragm to become the athlete inside this barrel.

So that was the foundation of the modified curl-up.

Now, if the person has a rotator cuff issue, we will hack it and make it tolerable.

Then I would see, well, let's take a dumbbell or a kettlebell and we're going to raise it up laterally in the frontal plane like this for the side of the core.

That would trigger pain in a lot of people, but I'll demonstrate all this if you want.

But we could then do a side plank on the floor.

The beauty of the side plank is only half the musculature is heavily challenged.

The downside is heavily challenged.

The upside is not.

You've only got half the load on the spine.

Very spine-sparing.

We prescribe it on 10-second intervals.

Why?

We use the Russian training science to show you build endurance through repeated 10-second exposures, not getting tired to the point where you break form, nor do you develop a neural fatigue and you get a much higher tolerable training level with this, what we call the Russian descending pyramid.

And then for the back muscles, look at the beauty of the bird dog where you extend one leg, the opposite leg.

One half of my low back is active.

One half of my upper back is active on the other side we're developing a nice ENF pattern.

We're creating stiffness and stability in the core.

We're teaching the brain to disassociate ball and socket joint motion of the shoulders and hips with only half the spine load of say a Roman chair extension or something like that.

So that bubbled up to be a fabulous exercise.

Then we did experiments where we would train people.

We would just have a single session exposure.

We would measure the core stiffness prior to doing the big three.

They do the big three on the Russian descending pyramid.

And then we would remeasure their torso stiffness.

Peter, they were stiffer.

And some of my muscle physiology colleagues said, well, you've added a turgidness to the muscle.

I don't think so.

I think the brain created a lasting neural stiffness.

And in some people, it lasts about 20 minutes.

Some people it lasts longer.

So you will see some patients who say, you know, when I do the big three,

I don't have pain for the next hour.

Fabulous.

What you're going to do is mid morning, do a 12 minute big three session, mid afternoon, do a 12.

So these are the little tricks and hacks to slowly wind a person down out of pain.

That was the pain side of the big three.

Then we started to look at the performance side.

If you train a group of athletes versus graduate students, the typical university experiment, not much difference was found in the athletes, but in the graduate students, we would see an increase in stiffness over a six week training trial.

Now, really interesting things started to happen.

If you do isometric holds in the manner I've described, you punch harder.

We took a group of Muay Thai athletes.

And when they did the big three and we measured the punching impulse, it was greater after they trained for six weeks.

When we did dynamic core exercises, it increased the closing velocity.

So the closing velocity is when you first get the first muscle pulse, boom, and then you relax closing velocity, and then you strike with the second pulse, boom, boom.

The closing velocity was faster with dynamic core exercises, but the strike force, boom, in the end, was greater with the isometric big three.

And again, talk about performance.

I know I'm a bit of a pugilist.

I certainly study the combat techniques.

If we were to take three styles, so let's take Joe Frazier.

And you know, you would see him just always on forward progression, but the punches came from his body weight behind them.

He would create a beautiful thrust line straight, but his body rotated and he lent his weight into them.

And that was his footwork.

Wasn't the greatest for getting hit because that means you get hit a lot.

Now, Mike Tyson, different body type, very compact type of a body, but contrast his footwork.

Oh, it was just beautiful.

He would drop step, drop step, drop step, hook the liver, come back very quickly, hook, boom, and cross him, and there was the knockout.

Again, all coming from the hips.

Drop step, boom, you see, it's all hips.

You know this.

And then Ali breaks all the rules.

Little Ali juggle, and then he would turn, rotate, hang on to it, and then at the end, look at that.

Beautiful thrust line all through the second core.

I can go through athlete after athlete.

You know, I saw the other day,

I've never worked with Mick Jagger, but there's Mick Jagger, you know, doing the bird dog in his training.

Usain Bolt, the fastest man on the planet, does the bird dog.

Breathing, extensor, pulsing power into a stone form.

Just to finish that off, Usain Bolt does bird dogs.

So, you know, again, this is, bird dogs are beneath people.

Really?

They should see what I see.

Anyway, I just want, that was the end of that story.

I'll see you next time.

Bye.