Multifidus Muscle Back Exercises Could Fix Your Back and Knee

Saturday, March 17th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed

The multifidi are small muscles, very deep in your back up against the vertebrae and serve to stabilize your spine. The multifidus muscle can have an extraordinary impact on your body and it’s important to understand the impact multifidus muscle back exercises can have in treating back and knee pain as you’ll see in this story of my daughter’s knees.

My daughter is an avid volleyball player, but in December 2005 she developed knee problems. She could not run or squat and could barely jump. She played hurt off and on during the season and was told that she’d have to go through a lot of physiotherapy in the summer.

The summer rehab ran into fall, then winter, and we saw little progress. It was depressing.

In January of 2007, I’d had enough and told our sports doctor that we had to do something, even if it meant surgery. Fortunately she introduced us to an extraordinary sports physiotherapist, and that’s where we first heard of the multifidus.

After a very thorough examination of my daughter’s back and knees, he told us “the problem isn’t her knees. It’s your multifidus.”

“This tiny muscle is the cause of your pain” he said holding his thumb and first finger about an inch apart.

At this point I should point out that I’m not a doctor, so take what I’m saying as if a friend told you it. In other words listen, then if you think it applies go and talk to your doctor.

The multifidus is an important part of your core muscles. However, when it stops working, many other muscles which depend on it may stop working too.

In our case, the chain reaction went as follows.

The multifidus muscle at the L5 spot in the spine stopped working. The glutes stopped. The hip flexors stopped. And the IT band (which is on the outside side of your thigh from your hip to your knee) tightened, pulling the patella outwards. The patella is supposed to glide in and out of a groove in your femur.

However, if it is pulled out sideways and therefore is not gliding, then it’s rubbing. The patella gets irritated, the fat pad of the knee cap gets swollen and that shuts down an important muscle (called the “VMO”) in the inside of your leg which helps the patella stay in place.

Talk about a chain reaction.
Multifidus muscle exercises

Our physio checked the multifidi at each vertebrae, and the ones at the L5 were soft and squishy instead of being firm.

When my daughter was asked to contract her multifidi at the L5 point, she could only contract the one on the left side of her spine. The right side did nothing!

Eventually she was able to get the right side to kick in, but it required a great deal of concentration.
Fixing the knee pain and getting the multifidus to work

The corrective action for my daughter was two-fold:

Contract the multifidus muscle several hundred times per day
Tape the knees in such a way that the patella was back in the groove allowing her to move pain free. The taping is done using a special technique from the McConell Institute in Australia specifically for patello-femoral syndrome.

Believe me it’s astonishing. after the taping, she could squat and move around pain free. If any pain occurred, a retaping was all that was needed to get rid of it.

The program for the multifidus required my daughter to contract the muscles on a scale of 1 to 10 with the 10 being a full on contraction. She did about one hundred level 10s per day. On top of that, she had to hold level 2s for as long as she could several times per day.

It’s now been four weeks. The knee pain is diminishing and my daughter’s multifidus is almost on full time now.

You’re probably wondering what caused the multifidus to stop working in the first place. I asked that question and the physio reckoned a back injury of some sort was probably what caused it switch off. Nothing major that we can remember.

Anyway it’s been an extraordinary time and my daughter finally believes she will play volleyball again.

I advise anyone with knee problems, especially (patello-fermal syndorme) to have their physio examine their multifidus muscle and anyone with back pain to have their multifidus checked. One tiny muscle may be the root of your back pain.

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