Review - Title: Back-Care-Cise: Prevent & Relieve Back Pain While Energizing Your Whole Body

Review

Another winner for Dr. Nelson! This three-tape series on trunk and spinal exercise is a terrific patient education aid. Exercise levels progress from moderate rehabilitative stretches to more demanding specific strengthening exercises. Suitable precautions and excellent demonstrations accompany each exercise routine.

Tape "A" is designed for patients who are in pain, with less exercise experience, in recovery from injury or as a warm up for successive programs. It is in this tape that Dr. Nelson's background in yoga is most notable. Exercises are slow, progressive and sustained, rather than ballistic and repetitive. The goal of this section is to increase circulation to spinal musculature and "exercise" discs. Muscle groups whose weakness may be responsible for poor spinal biomechanics (such as gluteals and abdominals) are targeting for gentle strengthening and frequently hypertonic muscle groups (quadriceps, hamstrings) are stretched in a non-injurious manner. Precautions regarding excess and pain are liberally included in the voice-over. What is probably of greatest help for the rusty or novice home exerciser is the attention Dr. Nelson pays to correction of postural and procedural faults. Throughout the course of the video, she corrects common faults in performing the exercises, utilizing her models for demonstration.

Those patients experiencing "little to no pain" or desiring a greater physical challenge may move on to Tape "B." This tape highlights more full-body stretch (pectoral girdle, thoracic spine), tips on the use of exercise for release of emotional tensions and recommendations for those who are "time-challenged." Difficulty level increases steadily but significantly from Tape "A" and muscle groups which are targeting for strengthening exercises are immediately followed by stretching routines for the same area (a very vital, but often overlooked precaution).

Tape "C" addresses maximal body stretching and toning, but again sustained action rather than ballistic movements are stressed and cautions as to pain and injury continue. Each tape finishes with a 10 minute relaxation segment, featuring both audio and visual stress-reduction cues. In all tapes the voice-over is excellent and original background music is well matched and paced to the movements being demonstrated. The only two drawbacks noted were some typographical errors in the text on the tape and a recurrence of "tinny" audio quality. Some explanations of what was occurring functionally during the exercise will also bother the purist, but for patient explanation, it was suitable.