Jonathan Donath on the long skinny muscle found crucial to spine health

It is always very interesting when you see a research article that comes out that is vindicating what you already know and practice as a doctor.  The multifidus muscle is a global stabilizing muscle for the back.  It is supposed to be initiated when you do anything, such as lifting your arm or walking.  It is supposed to turn on and in a lot of us it becomes inhibited.  What core strengthening exercises are doing is some of them are hitting these muscles that are not as big as the spinae erector: the big back muscles that are overused. Beyond these large muscles is a deeper layer that helps to hold everything into place. When someone says to do core exercises, the multifidus is one of the muscle that they are speaking about since it is very important in stabilizing.  So research said that 86% of back pain is reoccurrence which is obviously a very high number and if you do these proper exercising focusing on the multifidus as well as the transverse abdominus and gluteus and a couple of other core muscles that reoccurrence rate drops to 16%, so as a chiropractor this information is critical.  Iif you are not giving exercises or rehabbing the right muscle, you are basically saying to your patient, well, it’s great, I will get you out of pain, but then you have to come back six months later when you have another relapse, while if you teach them these exercises and we really stress them doing these exercises the pain really does not come back. Therefore the multifidus is an extremely important muscle and it is always nice again to see research kind of saying, hey this muscle is super duper important.