Here, we don’t actually have a scenario where the low back is weak, it's actually the abdominals.
Is your back the cause of your back pain, or does it have more to do with your lifting form?
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Welcome back to Get-Fit Guy—Coach Kevin Don here. I often have to stop myself from rolling my eyes as I hear from people who have sore low backs but have demonized back exercises. So today, I want to look at back pain from lifting: if we have low back pain, should we avoid low back centric movements, or could something else be at play?
First off, I want to give a disclaimer that there are myriad potential causes of low back pain. In fact, “low back pain” itself isn’t even a diagnosis, since it's incredibly vague and tells us nothing. Is the pain single-sided? Localized? Generalized? Sharp? Dull? At rest? During flexion? Extension? Rotating?
Since low back pain is a vague term, it's quite unlikely that any articles or podcasts (including this one) will be able to fix the issue, since general and vague diagnoses will have vague and general prescriptions. That being said, between January 2015 and February 2020, I taught 253 seminars on the deadlift and squat across 18 countries and 15 U.S. states, so I have a fairly large sample size on what I saw as being the main cause of low back pain.
But before we get into that, some basic anatomy: your body is made up of opposing muscle groups, and some have a direct give and take relationship. An easy example is the arm. In order to bend the elbow, your bicep must shorten. As it does so, your tricep on the opposite side lengthens. To straighten your arm, the process reverses—your tricep shortens and your bicep lengthens. If you squeeze your bicep as hard as you can whilst your elbow is bent, it's not possible to straighten your arm. We see the same thing throughout the body. If your quads are engaged by squeezing them tight, then it's not possible to bend your knee, since the role of the quadriceps is to extend the leg at the knee.
This is called the length-tension relationship. In other words, as one muscle tenses, the opposing one lengthens. So now let's think about a movement like the deadlift. Typically what we see is people really extending at the top, with the low back looking quite arched (we call that lordosis). Then after a number of repetitions, the lifter might say they have a tight or sore lower back. If we begin to think about the length-tension relationship, we can see that the abs are a bit distended, so when coupled with a tight lower back, the abdominals have lengthened, allowing the low back muscles to shorten and become tense.
Here, we don’t actually have a scenario where the low back is weak, it's actually the abdominals. The abs are the front anchor of the spine, so if they are weak, then other muscle supporting the spine have to work harder and can become overworked.
In one of my very first episodes as Get-Fit Guy, I covered movement patterns and how there is a hierarchy of contraction and movement expression. The very first layer of the ability to express any movement or contraction types is motor control. In a totally objective overview, it seems fairly obvious that you need to train your body how to move in a particular pattern before you either speed the pattern up or load it up. But we have the issue (which I totally understand) where there aren't enough hours in the day for working people, who may have families also, to spend time at the gym developing motor control when they only have an hour to exercise. It's normal to want an “hour of power” where you leave exhausted, sore, and sweaty. Teaching your body how to move correctly typically won't satisfy sweat metrics.
Outside of contraction hierarchy, we have movement patterns: push, pull, squat, lunge, and hinge. These are all anchored to the “core” movement pattern. This is because all movements should be engaged proximal to distal—essentially, starting closer to your body before moving out to your limbs. Incidentally, this is usually how you would train: you would start with the movements closest to the center of your body and work your way outwards. You shouldn’t do wrist curls before you bench press or calf raises before you squat.
Weak abdominals aside, another problem when it comes to core and lifting is a total lack of a “bracing” strategy. I’ll dedicate a whole episode to bracing in the future, but essentially, what we want is to create as much intra-abdominal pressure as we can. Increasing the pressure in the abdomen helps to support the back because it's synergistic with the muscles supporting the spine. In fact, this is why many lifters, such as Olympic weightlifters, powerlifters, and bodybuilders, wear a specialized belt. The belt is NOT to support you, it's a tool to push your abdomen against, redirecting this force inwards and increasing the pressure inside the abdomen. The greater the external support from the belt, the more internal pressure you can create. This is also why you don't see big lifters wearing velcro belts. If you create enough pressure, the velcro will rip open. You don't want this to happen under maximum pressure at the bottom of a 500lb squat.
In terms of deadlifting, where most people “hurt” their backs, I typically see people doing a great job of increasing pressure by taking a big belly breath at the bottom, before they lift. But then they exhale at the top. If we think about that, we can see why it might be a bad idea: you are at the top, holding the entire load, and then releasing the pressure that is supporting your spine. In ALL of these big lifts, you should be inhaling and creating pressure in the abdomen to support the spine BEFORE you lift and MAINTAINING the pressure throughout the whole lift. So in the deadlift, you will inhale and pressurize while the bar is on the floor and you won’t let the pressure off until the bar is at rest on the floor again. This is one reason why I am not a fan of the tendency for functional fitness classes to do touch-and-go deadlifts. If you are lifting fast like that, you literally cannot possibly brace for the lift and it’s almost a certainty that your low back muscles will tense up because you don’t have any support from the abs.
The best way to train your abs for this type of lifting scenario is ISOMETRICS, which is where you hold a tense position. Remember: the principle of specificity tells us that we adapt to the loads, the reps, the volume, and the patterns we expose ourselves to. If you ask a typical gym goer to name an ab exercise, I would say 9 times out of 10 you will have the answer: sit ups. If we think about what is happening in a sit up though, is it a useful adaptation for lifting? It’s a short contraction in terms of time and you are shortening your abs and rounding the back. In lifting, we want to maintain a strong and consistent position throughout the lift. If we squatted using a 3-2-1-2 tempo, we have at least 6 seconds under load. No one takes 6 seconds on a sit up. So, a better outcome here is isometrics, so exercises like planks and hollow holds.
I hope that has been useful for everyone and if you have any questions about back pain when lifting, email me at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com or check out the Get-Fit Guy Facebook page! And if you’re looking for a bit of one-on-one training—which is the best way to train, after all—don’t forget that I’m called COACH Kevin Don for a reason. Shoot me an email for more information.