What's up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, AthleanX.com.
Today I'm going to try to help you to get rid of that low back pain once and for all.
You see, you've got to start understanding what's causing the low back pain in the first
place to really be able to conquer it.
I think a lot of times the advice that people that suffer from back pain get is just misdirected,
and misguided. They're looking at the location of the pain without actually looking for the
source of the pain and unless you get to the source you're never going to get rid of the
pain once and for all.
So today I'm going to show you an exercise that you'll want to start doing and I'll give
you different levels of progression depending on how acute your back pain is.
Okay, first of all, if you're dealing with a really bad back that doesn't even allow
you to move at the moment, you're not supposed to be in the gym exercising.
What you're supposed to be doing is allowing that to heal, calm down, and control the inflammation.
If you're beyond that though and it's more of a chronic problem keeping you out of the
gym or making the gym training sessions uncomfortable then you've got to start with an exercise
and start training those weak spots.
99% of the time what's causing low back pain is a weakness in a joint below that. In this
case it could be the hips. It could be weak hips and glutes that are basically putting
you in the position to be compromised in your low back. So what we do is, we have a setup
here, and in this setup you see all I need is a barbell and a band.
The band I have anchored to the back of this squat rack. However you anchor it, I have
it on the back of some pins. Now I'm going to get myself in position here behind the
band and I'm not going to worry necessarily about the bar just yet, especially if this
is something that you're not in an acute stage, but you still have quite a bit of back pain
and weakness.
You get yourself into the bend and you just walk forward. It kind of blocks your progression
to the cage. Now what you want to do is, you want to position the band right across the
crease that happens right here in your hips, okay? Because the first thing it wants to
do is teach you what a hip hinge is.
Most of us that have weak backs don’t' really know how to hinge correctly. It would feel
like moving me into this position here – it's just pulling me back and when I let the resistance
take over it pulls me back into a proper hip hinge. It's taking me at the hips and bending
me right at those creases here right at the top of my hips.
If I were to put this higher, like against my stomach, and I lean forward allowing this
to take me back that actually has me fold over the band. Right now I'm pulling myself
into a flex position which is going to cause problems for us that have low back pain. First
thing, up here, now I walk forward.
Now all I do is, I allow it to hinge me and then I come back against the resistance of
the band. Squeezing my glutes as hard as I possibly can and also extending here, staying
up nice and tall, to extend to the low back. So now we're tying together the glutes and
the low back which are supposed to work together. They're both extending us.
They're both bringing up back in this direction. We need them to be able to work in concert
with each other. Most of us don’t have glutes working at all so then the low back tries
to accomplish that. The other thing you could see that would happen is, if I don’t have
the ability to extend because I don’t have strong glutes – so I can't extend – I
start to have this posture where I fall forward because I'm not extending through the hips.
The more I fall forward, the more responsibility is taken over by the low back and that's trying
to hold me up. You know what/ Doing that 24 hours a day, minus our sleeping time, is too
much work for the low back to do alone. It needs the help of the glutes. So get your
ass to start working, literally. So now what we do is, we can work out one side or the
other.
If I straddle here, one leg in front and I let it pull me back, then I drive forward.
Let it pull me back, then I squeeze forward. What you're going to find is the leg that's
dropped back is doing all the work. So if I step this way it's going to look like this.
Hinge, squeeze forward, and it will work my right side. Hinge, squeeze forward.
I love this extension because it's close chained. It's working us the way we're going to be
working all the time, which is predominantly on our feet. Okay, so down, into the hinge,
and then squeeze forward right here through the glute. Now, you want to make it a little
more difficult?
If you have a healthier back, but one that you know is weak now you can start tying in
an RDL to it. That's where our bar comes in. So we grab down, we've got the bar, we walk
forward just a little bit. Right here, against the resistance of the band, now I allow it
to hinge me down to knee height, maintaining that arch in my low back, and I drive forward.
I use my glutes here to squeeze forward. Down, drive forward. See, at the top of this exercise
we normally wouldn't have much resistance, but because the band is in place here I still
have a lot of resistance now being applied to the glutes. Now, last modification. If
you really want to start taking this to the next level you do this: come down, hinge,
bent row, here, now drive forward.
Hinge, bent row, here, now drive forward. Now we're tying everything together. We have
hips, then lumbar spine, then thoracic spine obviously because I've got to maintain extension
through there, too. They're all working to pull.
So there you have it. Now you have a weapon in your arsenal to start attacking that back
pain of yours at its source.
Remember, stop just looking for the location of the pain and start trying to find the actual
source of the pain. You'll finally be able to get rid of it once and for all. You can't
do that if you're just looking at the symptoms and trying to treat the symptoms, okay?
This is just another example, guys, of how we put the science back in strength. You've
got to peel away the layers a little bit to get to the bottom of what's really going on.
The human body is pretty complex. We've got to be smarter than it to be able to solve
its problems and back pain is one of the biggest ones we have to deal with on a daily basis.
Guys, if you're found this helpful make sure you leave your comments and thumbs up below.
In the meantime, if you want a program that trains you like and athlete, puts your feet
on the ground to train you like an athlete and helps you to get bigger, faster, and stronger
while putting the science back in what we do; I would head to AthleanX.com right now
and get our Athlean-X training programs.
In the meantime, I'll see you guys back here again real soon. Let me know what you want
to see. Leave your comments below and I'll do my best to bring them to you here in the
coming weeks.
I'll see you soon.