What's up guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM.
So maybe you've got a back injury or you've had a back injury in the past and you think
that your days of lifting are over.
Or at least your days of lifting heavy weights are over.
But I'm going to tell you today that that is not the case.
Especially if you start training your body and your back the right way.
You see, the back is extremely important for us for a lot of reasons.
If you're looking at the upper back here, alright we have one of the most important
structures in your entire body to protect and that is the Spinal Cord.
And it will do anything in it's power to be able to do that.
So we often times will get lots of muscle spasms in here, through the upper back,
because you're trying to do one thing, you're trying to create stability.
And if you don't have the stability through the strength of your mid scapular muscles
right in the upper back,
guess how you're going to get it?
You're going to get it through spasm.
And the spasm is going to create an artificial stability.
But that's not good, because spasms hurt.
When we get down to the low back we also have, obviously some really critical functions here
to protect our whole center of gravity,
and what happens is, the low back usually takes on the brunt of insufficient mobility
other places.
Usually in the joints right below that.
Most importantly in the hips.
If your hips are not mobile enough or strong enough, basically it shifts the brunt of it's
work and responsibility, one link up the kinetic chain, right here to the lumbar spine.
Not good if you don't have a back able to withstand that.
So now you injure yourself.
What's the biggest thing to helping you get back on track?
I'm going to tell you this right now, you have to make sure you remember this, it's
that you have to go for Stamina before Strength.
In the lower back If you want to recuperate from an injury and get back to lifting more
than you ever did before,
you have to focus on Stamina before Strength.
Maintaining, obtaining and maintaining the stable lumbar spine posture is critical to
every single thing you're going to do.
Whether you step over a Deadlift, whether you do a Bentover Row, whether you're even
doing a laying down Bench Press,
the stability through your Core is going to start with a stable Lumbar Spine and getting
into the natural curvature of your Spine and being able to hold it.
So the best thing you can do, before you even worry about strength, is start doing exercises
like I'm showing you here.
This is not really a hyperextension.
People will call this a hyperextension but we're not going to take it all the way up
into extension.
What we're going to do is we're going to get to a neutral position with a little bit of
extension, the natural curvature of your Lumbar Spine.
And you want to make sure that you can hold this.
And when I say hold this, I'm talking about hold it, treat it like a Plank.
Start going for durations of a minute, a minute and a half, two minutes.
When you can handle that, guess what you do next?
You weight it.
And you don't always have to weight it, like I'm doing here, equally with a weighted vest,
but you can actually do what I'm doing here, and that's asymmetrical loading.
Because you never get the luxury, especially if you're an athlete, you don't get the luxury
of always loading symmetrically across your spine.
So hold the Dumbbell a little bit out to your side or Kettlebell a little bit out to one
side and still try to maintain that non rotated stable position of your Lumbar Spine.
Now, once you've got that in place, the idea here is build up your volume.
So again, stamina.
So it's not just stamina in a single session but it's stamina over the course of multiple
sessions.
So work on getting yourself to be able to tolerate this, not just one time a week but
two times, three times, four times a week.
Build up your volume.
Do it in multiple sessions across the week
and you'll see that your muscle stamina will be right where you need it to be to move on
the phase two and that is the strengthening.
And guess what?
When you get back to doing your strengthening you have to make sure you take a baby steps
progression.
Because it's going to take a lot to overcome the hesitation that your body will have to
allow you to exert the strength that you possibly have.
Right, you may have a lot of strength but if you can't convince your back that you've
got it?
It's not going to give it to you.
So you have to make sure that even if you used to be able to Deadlift 315 pounds, 400
pounds before you hurt your back,
you've got to start way back at the beginning again.
135 pounds do it through multiple sets, multiple reps and convince yourself that you are in
complete command of each and every one of those reps.
When you've done that, baby set up to the next notch.
And I'm not talking jumping up to 185, I'm talking about going to 155 and convincing
yourself that you can do that.
And over time as you really start to command every single rep of that Deadlift, your back
will actually allow you to start using the strength that you have
and that had, maybe that you never really lost, as long as you're doing the right progression.
Now the last note here, Weightlifting Belts.
Guys will as Jeff, is it proper to use a Weightlifting Belt?
I say No.
Not if you're trying to organically build back your strength.
We all know that a Weightlifting Belt can give us the temporary feeling of safety that
we have to maybe attack a workout
but in the long run, that's the worst thing you can do because attacking the workout with
a false sense of security is the fastest way to get hurt again.
Ok, so what you want to do is avoid the Weightlifting Belt.
We know that when we have a lower leg injury and we wrap a knee brace around our knee,
our quads will tend to shut down,
they'll tend to allow the brace to do the work.
We don't want that.
We don't want our internal abdominal structures to say
Hey, you do the work, I'll just kind of let myself back out of this one.
You want to make sure that your internal stabilizers from the front to the back,
the transverse abdominus, all the muscles in through your low back, they're the ones
doing the work because guess what?
They should be doing the work after all.
Guys I hope you found this video helpful and I'm telling you, there's hope.
My own wife had a Lumbar Fusion a few years ago, on multiple levels and she's now back
not only Deadlifting but Deadlifting more than she ever has before.
She's stronger than she ever has been before because she's training the right way.
She worried in the beginning about getting stamina, she then build her strength and now
she's taken everything to an all new level and that's what you guys can do too.
If you guys are looking for a program that puts the Science back in Strength
and it's created by a Physical Therapist so we know that there's a progression to everything
we do and there's a safety behind what we do,
then head to ATHLEANX.COM right now and get our ATHLEANX Training System.
In the meantime, if you found this video helpful or if you're dealing with your own back injury,
make sure you let me know below and I'll keep making more of these videos.
You know we break out our boy here, Ray to show you guys exactly what's going on inside
of the body to help us understand more of what our bodies are capable of.
I'll see you guys back here again in just a couple days.