(PTVideo.TV iPhone/iPad App @ http://winzi.gs/ptvideoapp) Physical Therapy Videos from http://ptvideo.tv/ - Bridge Exercise. Commonly Used For: Knee pain, hip pain and back pain. I'm going to show you how to do a bridge exercise which is a good way to strengthen your glutes and your hamstrings. What you want to do for this one is you're going to lay down flat. Your knees get to stay bent, about hip distance apart. Your feet flat on the floor. You're going to tighten your abdominal muscles first and then, you're slowly going to raise up until your pelvis is level with the top of your knees. You want to make sure that you don't go past that point and arch your low back. You want to stay right on a level position and then slowly back down. So you just slowly up, slowly down. Squeezing your glutes on the way up and relaxing on the way back down. You should not feel any low back pain with this exercise. If you do feel any pain on your back when you come up, try coming back down, tighten your stomach muscles more and don't raise up as high. If you continue to feel low back pain, then don't perform this exercise. If regular bridging is too easy for you, you can try performing a single leg bridge. What you're going to do is you're going to extend one leg straight out in front of you and then you're just going to bridge on the leg still down on the floor. Again, raising up, slowly back down. All the way up, slowly back down. So that's your single leg bridge.
