What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Let's face it.
The last time you probably thought about your low back was when it was hurting you.
So today what I want to do is give you four exercises that you can do in your own home,
without any weights at all to help fortify your back against all future injuries.
You see, your low back has to be strong.
But not just that.
It will never be strong enough unless it gets the help from your glutes.
The glutes are a muscle that will work in concert to extend your body.
One from below and one from up top.
But if they're not working together then you're going to be in that situation where you find
yourself hurting at some point down the line when you go to do your big lifts.
Somewhere along the way it's going to betray you.
Let's cover these four exercises though, because these are going to be four, quick things that
you can do that will help to prevent any of that from happening in the future.
Okay, let's kick this one off with one that looks – I get it – a little bit funny,
but I promise you it will really, really work.
What you want to do here is you want to get yourself down on the ground and then turn
your feet out.
This is a frog glute bridge.
What we're doing by turning our feet out is we're actually activating the glute medias,
an external rotator of the hip.
But we want to try to, again, tie all these muscles together that will influence that
extension and influence and tie into the low back and the glutes itself.
So when we get in this position now we lift up, off the ground.
The key here is we're getting full clearance of our butt off the ground and you're not
just getting off the ground if you're squeezing it as hard as you possibly can at the same
time that you're squeezing the muscles in your low back.
You hold each one of these for five seconds.
You're doing 10 reps for five seconds and then you move right on to the next exercise
here.
So now we're going to stay in this position.
We're still targeting the lower back and the glutes tougher, but now we're tying in from
– instead of below with the glute medias – now we're going to tie in a little from
the top down.
We're going to get the lats involved.
So you're going to take your elbows and drive them really close to your sides, but into
the ground.
We know that the lats feed down, and in toward the muscles of the low back into the pelvis.
So we can activate them by trying to almost do a row into the floor.
Again, drive yourself up.
Contract the low back, contract the glutes, and then to put that nail in the coffin you
want to try to extend one leg out.
So again, you focus on not allowing your hips to drop here and you do it for five seconds
on each leg.
When you transition between the right leg and the left leg it's super important not
to allow your pelvis to move, or tip.
You go to the other leg, you go five seconds, you go back and forth 10 times on each leg
and then we're going to turn over on our stomach to hit the next two exercise.
The first one here is actually one of my favorites.
It's called the angel of death because you're going to be making nice, little snow angels,
but you're going to be doing them on your stomach and you're going to wish that you
died about five, or six reps in.
What you're going to do is get flat on your stomach and a lot of us will do exercises
where we lift just the top part up because we think we're working our low back.
But that is not enough if you've been listening to what I've been saying in this video.
You need to make sure that the glutes are involved, too.
So those feet and legs have to get off the ground, too.
Not just your toes, but I'm talking about your toes, your knees, and your thighs.
As high up as you can to get that extension in through the hips, in through your glutes.
Now you're going to take a five second cadence to move your hands from this overhead position
all the way down to your sides.
You're going to go and rotate your hands as you come up, then you're going to rotate your
hands as you go down, but five seconds to go from the top to the bottom, and then five
seconds to back up to the top.
You can see, literally, every muscle in my back is contracting here to allow me to do
this, but most of all we've got this really strong, lengthened contraction in our low
back and glutes forcing them to work over the duration of the exercise, which is what
we need to keep this low back nice and strong.
Not just here, but when we're actually doing our bigger lifts that we tend to focus a lot
more on.
Finally we end with our pulsed I. With the pulse eye you're going to stay in this position
where your body looks like and "I".
Your arms are held close to your body, nice and tight.
You're still in that same position where your legs are lifted off the ground, your upper
torso and chest is lifted off the ground activating from both the top and the bottom.
Now you want to challenge yourself with these pulses.
The pulses are basically done as fast as you can handle for five seconds.
Obviously, the more pulses you get in the five seconds the more potential it is for
your body to fall down to the ground.
The more work your body is going to have to do to prevent that from happening.
So for five seconds at a time you pulse your arms as hard as you can, and then you rest
in the contracted position.
Then you start over again.
Pulse it for five seconds and you rest in the contracted position.
Remember, we're trying to accumulate time here.
Your low back is going to function much more as an endurance muscle than it is to function
as an overall one rep power muscle.
So we need to be able to have, in our training, the elements that address the longer duration
here.
So when you do all of these, that's your routine.
How often would you do it?
You do it frequently because we want to make sure that we're attending to these weaknesses
that have built up over a long period of time.
You can do this little routine here, it literally takes five to six minutes.
You can do this every single day and you'll build up the tolerance to be able to do this
for even a little bit longer.
The key is this: stop avoiding and ignoring your lower back.
I know it doesn’t get all the attention of all the beautiful muscles around it, but
it is so important to developing all those muscles in the first place.
Guys, if you don’t want to overlook any important element of your training and you
want to start training like and athlete where everything matters; head to ATHLEANX.com right
now and get our ATHLEANX training system.
In the meantime, if you've found this video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up
below.
Let me know what you want me to cover here in a future video and I'll do my best to do
that.
All right, guys.
See you soon.