**Transcript**
Hey, Dr. McNamara here, and today I wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about abdominal bracing and the reason why we want to be able to brace our abdomen is so we can keep the same kind of abdominal pressure. Keep it consistent whenever we are performing different movements, because that's gonna stabilize our actual spinal cord and keep us protected.
The exercise we want to do is just start with abdominal bracing to see if you can do it, make two little L's with your hand and then put them about at the belly button. And I want you to push in a little bit, and then you're gonna try to make your stomach big, like you're pushing your stomach out, like making a little beer belly type of thing and just see if you can make your fingers move, you should be able to do this relatively easy.
This is training our transverse dominance. So once you just have that one down pretty good. You want to go down to this bony part of our pelvis. This is known as the anterior superior iliac spine, also known as the ASIS. Go just inside of that and do the same thing. You're just gonna push in with your fingertips and then you wanna make your fingers move. So just push out with your belly.
Now that one's a little bit harder. And if you're not able to do that, the exercise you're gonna do is just performing that until you're able to get a little bit of a contraction and then over time, you'll be able to build it up to the last area that we're going to focus on, in the back. Our abdomen is not just in the front and it's not just that anterior aspect where we kind of have that little pooch beer belly kind of thing. It goes all the way around to the back to the spinal cord. So we wanna be able to contract our transverse abdominis back here as well.
So for this one, you want to find those little dimples on the back. Those are the posterior superior iliac spines, and then you're just going to go inside of that and you're gonna do the same thing. Push in, and then with your core, you're going to build pressure and push out, see my fingers moving. That was a little bit harder to see, but you can feel the contraction and if you can't feel again, the exercises you're just gonna push in and you're gonna push out push in with your fingers, then push out with your abdomen to build up that core stability
All right guys. So that's abdominal bracing. Make sure you start practicing that to make sure you have full control of your abdominal cavity. And so you can protect, and brace that low back area. Please, if you haven't yet, go ahead and give us a like on YouTube as well as Facebook. Our Facebook page is upside of wellness and YouTube, you can find us at McLaughlin care. Thank you.