The best sleeping position for back pain, neck pain, and sciatica - Tips from a physical therapist

What's up guys? Hi Jared Beck here, Doctor of Physical Therapy. Calm Italian tone. Today I bring you five of my favorite

tips

to help you get the

best

sleep possible. This one will be especially relevant for those of you who might be experiencing

back

pain

. or

neck

pain

, let's do it right now guys, thank you so much for joining me today on tone and squeeze a little bit if you haven't already subscribed to our channel for more content like this. I hope you take advantage of the opportunity. To do that, you can hit the subscribe button below.

Also if you find the information I share in this video useful, do me a favor, hit the thumbs up button if you have any questions or comments while watching this video, leave them below. below and I'll address them as soon as I can. Okay, so let's get into these five of my favorite

tips

to help you sleep better at night as a

physical

therapy doctor. This is a question I get asked. A lot is that you know what the

best

sleeping

position

is. What is the best

sleeping

position

? How can I wake up in the morning without my

neck

or

back

hurting?

So I wanted to share some of those tips with you today and tip number one: The best sleeping position for you is the one that's most comfortable for you, but also one that keeps your spine in as neutral a position as possible. Now when I talk about neutral spine, here is my spine model. Here he has three main curves that were worried about that or what we are worried about right now, you are looking at him in a side view from the side that he is facing in that direction and you will see that you have a curve here at the bottom of your back, a kind of curvature. your middle back and then this is your neck right here, it curves back like this, you'll see if I turn it to face that direction, you're looking directly at its back, we're nice and straight here, so we have curves of this way, but we're nice and straight this way the best, the best sleeping position, the best sleeping posture for you is going to be anything that keeps your spine in this neutral position, so you'll see we need a little bit of support here, we need a little support here and we need something to keep it straight like this.

The other thing I will mention is that we don't want anything that will rotate you in this position, whether large for stomach sleepers, etc. That's tip number one, whatever is most comfortable and whatever can keep your spine in that neutral position. That's what I'm going to recommend. Tip number two is to adopt the correct sleeping posture, you want to have the right amount of support, so to speak. specifically your mattress and pillow in this case, so with mattresses you are supposed to replace your mattress every eight to ten years, if you haven't done so in the last decade it might be time to look into whether mattresses are they wear out. they lose their ability to support your body especially you know the technology behind mattresses these days has improved a lot in the last 10 years so you might consider looking into whether you might consider buying a new mattress and the other thing is the pillow you want. a pillow that is again going to support that neutral spinal position, you don't want it to be okay depending on your sleeping posture, whether you sleep on your back or whether you sleep on your stomach or whether you sleep in your spot, you want a pillow that's going to hold your spine in that neutral position and so I'm going to walk you through a couple of those tips and tricks today.

Now let's get into my last three tips that have to do specifically with different sleeping postures, so I'm going to go. Bring my wife, she'll demonstrate some of these to you while she explains the remaining three tips to you. Well, once again I brought my lovely assistant. You guys know my wife very well if you've seen any of my other YouTubes. videos you're such a good sport you don't pay me enough it's true okay so let's get into these three remaining tips. The first thing I'm going to have Camille do is lie on her stomach so we can take some of these. get the pillows out of the way I know you are the worst, so my advice to those of you who lie on your stomach to sleep is to stop doing it immediately, from an anatomical point of view this is the worst position, this is the worst position in which they can sleep all the time.

At night Camille always falls asleep on her side but she always wakes up on her stomach and at this point it even hurts and the reasons I hate this is because there is no way to get into that neutral spine position on her stomach first than nothing. Everything when we talk about her, her neck you have to breathe, believe it or not, when you are asleep you have to breathe, so to do it you have to turn her neck in one direction or another to fall asleep. all night in this rotated position, the other thing I hate about this is that a lot of times your stomach is not very well supported so it sinks into the bed creating this excessive Bo in your back if you wake up feeling tight or lying back and sleeping on your stomach that's why finally the last thing I hate about it is that it puts a lot of pressure on your internal organs the weight on your lungs affects breathing the weight on your gut affects digestion things like that basically tip number three you guys don't sleep on your stomach, let's adopt a slightly better posture.

I'm going to have her roll onto her right side and let's talk about sleeping on her side for a second again. The goal is to achieve as neutral a point as possible. spinal position as possible, let's look at the three areas that are going to affect that, specifically your neck hurt your back, your torso and then what's happening down here in your hips, first of all with your neck, let's say your pillow It's too full. I'm going to bend him and you can see what that does to his neck, suddenly his head is too high and it creates a pain in his neck.

On the contrary, I stole my daughter. This is my youngest daughter's pillow. This is like the flattest pillow you've ever seen in your life. If she sleeps on a pillow that is too flat, they see that her head drops too much. We have that neck pain again so the right pillow for you will be the one that again keeps your neck in a more neutral spinal position now I bought this one on purpose you guys this is actually my pillow it's one that I found, you can get it on Amazon, what I will do is leave it. the link in the description of this video also this pillow I actually love this pillow just because it keeps going and well are you comfortable sleeping just because this pillow is really customizable.

In fact, I can open it right here. It also has a lining inside. and it's actually filled with shredded memory foam and comes with extra memory foam, so you can put more padding in it or take the padding out depending on what your posture needs are if you have a smaller frame. you may need less padding if you have a larger frame, you may need more padding and then depending on whether you sleep on your side or your back the same applies, you may need more or less so the only reason why I like this The pillow is not sponsored or anything by this company.

The only reason I like this greeting is because you can customize it, you can fill it or flatten it according to your needs, so when you sleep. your side that's the first thing I'm worried about the next thing I'm worried about is here a lot of times when you go back to sleeping on your side depending on the support you get from your mattress your back your lower back can You will curl up like you fall on the mattress if you don't have that support there, so what you can do is take my flattest pillow that I have and I'm actually going to kiss it and slide it under your side, honey, there you are.

Go like this and suddenly now we have a little bit more support again, his shoulders and his hips are a little bit wider so if we need more support but I said totally wrong shoulders and hips are wider than his torso let's call it . That way, if you need a little more support under your back, that's how we'll get it done. In fact, you can get pillows designed specifically for this purpose to place under the torso so that side sleepers maintain that neutral position again. The link that I have in the description of this video for that point number three that worries us is below many times when we sleep on our side, if your knees are together, that puts a lot of pressure on the knee joint, but also the leg. upper part, when it falls towards the table, it passes through the hip and that in turn can pass through the lower back, so many times sleeping on the side like this is not very comfortable and then what we do should have more padding somewhere here what we're going to do is get one more pillow and put it right between her knees and now between those three things the right support here the right support here and the right support here I've got her back in that nice position, no totally neutral, so those are some things you can play with to find what might work for you, it could be one of these things, it could be all three.

These things play with it until you find that sweet spot again for your specific needs. Okay, let's get rid of these two and then I'll have you roll over onto your back. Alright. When we talk about sleeping on your back, I mean, nothing changes. With our goals we want to maintain that neutral spinal position and so you'll see that with this pillow, she has this one actually too full, so she has her neck in a forward flexed position because there's too much filling in that pillow. . on the contrary, I'm going to give her this little flat pillow again if we put it under her neck, maybe it's a little better position, but the fact that I don't like is that there is no support directly under her neck, she It's like in this extended position that will create pain in your neck if you stay there all night, so what we would have to do is probably something between this and that where your neck is supported but in a neutral position, not pushed too much. forward and not falling too far back and again, based on your unique individual needs, that's the first place I'll typically look when we're talking about back pain or neck pain from sleeping on your back and the last thing I like.

To look at with this, again what's happening in her lower back right now she's in what we would call an anterior pelvic tilt posture just because her legs are totally flat her hip flexors you have a particular muscle it's called the psoas major , it is a hip flexor that attaches from the front of the hip to the lower back, if it is tight and if the legs are extended, what it will do is move the hips forward creating a large space here in the lower back. Sleeping like this all night can be uncomfortable and can cause lower back pain, so how we fix it is we have to unlock it and we do that by bending your knees.

Now just doing that again has alleviated that. pressure on your hip flexor taking the tension off your back now all of a sudden your back is back in this nice more neutral position, we want there to be a little bit of arch there, but not too much, to be able to support you than what you normally would I tell people is to grab one or two pillows and put them right under her knees now as she lies down, which takes a lot of pressure off her hips and bad when we combine that with the right pillow, those are the things I look at when we recognize the recommendations for those of you who might sleep on your back, okay guys and that's it, that's all the tips I have for you again.

We talked about posture and position, we talked about proper support with pillows and mattresses, and then we gave you some tips and advice that you can hopefully use depending on what position you like to sleep in. Hopefully, it won't be upside down. I'm going to get rid of that, but if you sleep on your side or your back, these are some things that will help you relieve tension in your joints, relieve tension in your muscles, hopefully help you sleep better at night and then either. I wake up in so much pain in the morning so if you found this helpful please do me a big favor and hit the thumbs up button below and also subscribe to Totem Tight and if you haven't already if you have .

If you have questions or comments, please leave them below and I will respond as soon as I can. You can hit the share button down there to share this video with someone you care about and until next time, see you again. here in tone and tighten