Today we're going to talk about SI joint pain and what's actually happening with this injury and what to do about it. My name is Dr. Ryan Peebles and I've dedicated the last 20 years of my life to better understanding and reversing the root causes of chronic lower back pain. I believe there is a massive misunderstanding about what is going on with SI joint pain in the industry, among healthcare professionals of all kinds, and just normal people.
And so in this video, I want to provide clarity. I think it's actually necessary to give you a better understanding of what's most likely going on with SI joint pain, if you're having that, and what to do about it. And I'm also going to show one of the most powerful exercises that I know that helps to address this problem. And you will most likely feel comfortable. instant relief from this, although this is not a quick fix.
This should be done regularly over a long period of time to help stabilize the SI joint, but you most likely will feel immediate relief. And I'm going to show this at the end of the video, but I strongly encourage you not to skip to the end because it's really important to have this understanding about what's going on with your SI joint. So let's talk about it.
There seems to be a bit of an obsession among people of all kinds, professionals and non-professionals, that SI joints that are in pain are stuck out of place. And so there is this upslip or this anterior rotation and the SI joint is stuck that way. And so the tendency for people who believe this about their bodies is to want to go get adjusted, to go get a manipulation from a chiropractor or some other healthcare professional.
And oftentimes, and this just happened with my friend, they will walk out of there feeling more pain than before. And this is the reason why. I want you to think of an SI joint injury or SI joint pain like you think of any other ligament injury such as an ankle sprain or a wrist sprain or a knee sprain or anything like that.
You wouldn't go to a chiropractor and get your ankle adjusted right after you sprained your ankle. When you sprain your ankle, it's a roll. and those ligaments on the outside of the ankle get stretched out.
And this is the same thing that happens with SI joint pain, especially chronic SI joint pain. There are ligaments on the back of the SI joint called the posterior ligaments, posterior SI joint ligaments. And these ligaments get stretched out. They get sprained and they get strained through repetitive trauma. And the repetitive trauma is often related to muscle imbalances, chronically tight hip flexors.
pulling on those joints, creating torque in those joints. Every step you take pulling on this joint and eventually breaking those ligaments down. And so when you have pain in those joints and you believe that the joint is stuck out of place, getting that sprain manipulated is potentially going to cause more micro tears in the ligaments. And what you really want to do is think of it like this. Your SI joint may be getting out of place.
but it's not getting stuck there. It's moving there maybe every step you take. And so it's moving too much and it's just like a loose joint. Think of any other loose joint in your body and what do you want to do with it? You want to brace it.
You want to strap it in something like an SI belt and brace it and allow it to heal. But the problem with SI joint pain is strapping it in a belt will make it feel better, most likely, if you get that belt in the right position. But it doesn't do anything to address the root of the problem.
because often SI joint pain is not from a traumatic injury like an ankle sprain. It's often a gradual slow breakdown through repetitive trauma. And so you have to address that root cause so that one day you can take the belt off and not have a problem anymore.
If you haven't already seen the masterclass about muscle imbalances, this is going to apply directly to SI joint pain. And I mentioned that my friend just did this. He walked out of a chiropractor feeling worse after getting his SI joint manipulated. So this friend of mine is a professional. He's a physical therapist.
He's one of the best physical therapists I know. And he's been dealing with SI joint pain for a while. And he was of this mindset.
My SI joint is stuck out of place, which is what led him to the chiropractor. So after this chiropractor visit, we got together and we talked about it. And he agreed with me that, yeah, he can feel his SI joint moving every step he takes. And I said, let's get down on the floor and try this exercise. So he did the exercise that I'm about to show you and got up and felt immediately better.
It was fantastic. But then we continued our workout and we did some other things. And one of the things he decided to do was to hang from his gravity boots and get some decompression in his spine, his neck, potentially his SI joint. So he hung from his gravity boots. And as he was going to get off the bar, he was sitting up to reach and grab the bar and unhook his gravity boots.
He got a sharp pain in his SI joint. Oh, electrical sharp pain. And very cautiously and carefully continue moving up to get off. the bar.
And I was thinking this in my head the entire time. Like I was going to ask him, like, how does that feel on your SI joint? You're literally hanging on your ligaments that we just talked about wanting to stabilize, right? So let's go back to the ankle sprain analogy.
If you sprain your ankle, you put in a brace, right? Should you also hang from your ankles? Should you also stretch those ligaments out?
No, that would be undoing the goal. This is precisely what happened with his SI joint ligaments is hanging on them was extremely stressful on them and spraining them further and undoing the goal. And so I want you to think about not only needing to stabilize the joint, restoring muscular balance in your body, stabilizing with the exercise I'm going to show you and some other things. But also you need to not do things that are going to sprain it. You need to stop rolling your ankle.
If you haven't already seen the video that I put out, it's got hundreds of thousands of views called Stop Hurting Your SI Joint. This entire video goes through the different exercises that you should avoid to allow your SI joint ligaments to heal so it can stabilize. So I highly recommend watching that video. But I also just kind of want you to think about it from this perspective. Think about the things that you would not do to a sprained joint and avoid those things for a little while.
And that is going to be... equally as important as doing the right things, which are stabilizing the joint through exercise and creating muscular balance in your body, most likely by lengthening your hip flexors and strengthening your glutes and your abdominals to remove the underlying cause of the problem, the repetitive trauma caused by micro stress from tight muscles. pulling on the joint, creating torque in the joint every step you take. So this is the message I wanted to send you about SI joint pain.
And let's go ahead and get into the exercise now. And we will show you exactly what to do. And I just want to mention that this is the bridge. This is a version of the bridge.
And if you don't know how to do the bridge the right way, the way that we teach it in the program is what I would consider to be a healthy way to do the bridge, then it could potentially hurt you it could potentially cause more problems so i highly recommend doing the bridge in a healthy core connected way if you don't know what that means you can just do the free trial of core balance training it's completely free seven day trial and you can learn how to do the perfect bridge and this is a prerequisite to be able to apply this progression to the bridge to stabilize the si joint and so here we go lie on your back get in the bridge position you're gonna get a belt not a stretchy band but a belt that It does not stretch. And you're going to strap it around your thighs just above your knees. And when you come up into the bridge, you're going to do it in a healthy way, a core connected way, which is like what we teach in the program.
And you're going to push out into the belt, basically trying to stretch the belt, even though it's not going to stretch. So your legs aren't really going to move, but you're pushing out with your hip abductors and hip external rotators. And you're going to push as hard as you can. Basically.
100% maximum effort for as long as you can. So if you can push as hard as you can for 20 seconds, make sure you continue breathing. Really push into that belt. Stay up in the full bridge the entire time. Breathe, push, and slowly let off when you can't go anymore.
And so you should feel, while you're doing this, you should feel a force in the back of your pelvis closing that SI joint. It's force closure of the SI joint. So they're pushing together and you should feel that force as you're pushing as hard as you can and take a little break take a breather and then you can do another set or two of this and just embrace that feeling of closing the back of the SI joint because those posterior ligaments are the ones that get stretched out so what you're doing is you're using your muscles the glutes primarily to help close that joint and take the stress take the tension off of those ligaments for a minute so that they can relax and potentially heal.
And so yeah, do a couple sets that get up off the floor and you should feel like your pelvis is nice and stable. You should feel relief, but don't get ahead of yourself. Like I said, this is a basically a relief method that does have long-term effects, but it's not just going to be fixed in one session. You've got to do this regularly.
Among other things, the other goal is to bring your core back into balance. and that's really massively going to help the underlying cause of the problem which is torque pulling on the SI joint due to muscle imbalances such as your hip flexors and the iliopsoas. So hopefully you find that helpful.
We appreciate you here at Core Balance Training for leaning into your health and we'll see you again next week.