Lower Back Care
/Does your back fatigue or hurt right here?
Extension faults can be shortsighted stability strategies used to guard the body, or help to produce force, but at the expense of closing joint angles, poor position, prefatigue, and submaximal force.
Coaching virtually from the suburbs the last few months I’ve found myself sitting slightly more, and walking less. Though I’m training as much as I normally do, and recently added a standing desk, a change in lifestyle exposed some underlying movement faults in my lower back and pelvis, creating lower back stiffness. And in videoing some content for the topic, I realized how poorly I was moving through certain patterns. Lower back pain is one of the most common reasons for seeing a doctor and missing days of work, with 60-70% of the population experiencing some form of it in their lifetime. While it’s out of scope for coaches to address pain, it’s well within scope to identify postural dysfunction and poor movement strategies, to bridge treatment gaps, in consultation with a medical professional, and reduce recurrences.
Your core functions to absorb and transfer force between your hips and shoulders. To do this optimally, it’s important, your head, ribcage, and pelvis are aligned, facilitated the surrounding musculature. Applying theories from DNS, PRI, and the Joint by Joint Theory, it makes sense to start from the center out, beginning with breath work, then aligning and stabilizing the core, while mobilizing and loading the periphery. Train to create a subconscious and reflexive stiffening strategy in your core to produce force.
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How to train your core?
Here’s a series of some of my best core stability practices, inspired by the research of Dr Stuart McGill, and his seminal work, The Back Mechanic. The movements progress in intensity with orientation to the floor, supine to seated, static stability to dynamic stability, and increased lever lengths.
Give these a shot, to help yourself, or your clients, to not only reduce injury risk, but also build an athletic core. Share this with someone who needs it, and let me know how it goes in the comments, or reaching out here.