Feel better in 20 minutes a day.^✳︎

Probably, yeah. My 72-year-old mom did the whole thing with me - she took every movement slow, did 10 to 30 seconds instead of a minute depending on how each one felt, did her pushups leaning on the back of her car, and skipped the jump rope. That still counts. I started at 250 lbs with a herniated disc and I couldn't do a full minute of arm circles for the first few days.

Then do less. If you have ten minutes, do 30 seconds each. If you have five, pick five movements you like. I've had plenty of nights where I was completely beat and did a five-minute version just to keep it going. Something is better than nothing, and perfect is the enemy of progress.

Drop to 10 or 30 seconds and build up over time. Honestly some of these are sneakily harder than they look - the arm circles had me burning by 30 seconds when I started, and I couldn't finish a full minute for the first couple of days. It took me a few months to get to the speed you see in the videos. Slow is fine. Slow still counts.

No, but I'll be honest - mornings are better. I've done both and it's not close. Morning gives me energy for the whole day and the workout itself is just higher quality. That said, I've done a load of evening workouts and they're still miles better than skipping. Do it when you can actually do it.

Stop doing it. None of these should cause pain. When I put this together I tested about 30 movements and threw out roughly half because they didn't feel good on my back - and I've thrown out a couple more since, when my disc didn't like some of the twisting. Yours might be different ones from mine. Throw them out and keep the rest. I'm not a doctor, and if something hurts you should talk to yours.

No, and I want to be really clear about that. I got scanned again in March, nine weeks in and pain-free, and I still have the same large L5S1 protrusion. It's still there. I can still feel it, my right leg still gets stiff, and I still have to be careful about lifting and twisting. What changed is the pain - it went from debilitating to 0/10 and it's stayed there for seven months. That's a quality-of-life thing, not a cure. This is my experiment on my own body. I'm not a doctor, I'm not telling you to do it, and your mileage may vary.

No, except a jump rope for the last movement - and you can skip it or just hop instead. Other than that you need enough floor space to swing your arms. I do it in my garden, in my driveway, and I've done it in a hotel room.

No. For the first few months it genuinely was, but as I've gotten stronger I've layered things in. Alongside the morning routine I do a hip and core mobility flow most evenings, I eat clean, I walk at least 7,000 steps, and I try to get seven hours of sleep. If I had to rank them: the morning routine and the evening mobility routine are doing most of the work on the pain, and the eating is doing most of the work on the weight.

That's what I did for 14 months and it didn't work. Here's what I think now: your back doesn't hurt because it's inflexible, it hurts because it's weak. The muscles around it - your hips, core, glutes, hamstrings - are supposed to be taking load that's going into your spine instead. Stretching felt good for twenty minutes and then the pain came back. Strength first, stretching layered on top.

Yes. The routine, the videos, all of it. There are four PDFs you can buy if you want them written up properly, and buying one supports my family - but nothing on this page is behind a paywall and it isn't going to be.