Best lower back strengthening exercises and the one to skip

You're listening to the Restoring Human Movement podcast, where movement experts discuss the latest evidence-based practices to help you and your clients move with mastery. Hey everyone, it's your co-host, Sebastian, with the Restoring Human Movement podcast. Thanks for joining the Movement Movement. In this podcast, we are covering the three most popular exercises for lower back pain to strengthen your lower back and how to do them well. We have a YouTube channel, if you haven't found it already. We show people how to do many of these exercises for lower back pain, including some of the ones on this list.

We have the Bird Dog, the Deadlift with Proper Form, and the Superman. I can tell you right now that I'm not going to agree with one of these ones. You have to stay tuned for the whole show to learn which one that is. By the way, if you guys are looking for help, we have virtual services that we are licensed in different states, and we have consultations available that are very affordable. Also, if you are looking for online programming, we have developed a 12-week online program for lower back pain and sciatica that works for most people. It's on our website. Link's in the description. Take advantage of it.

I made it myself. Now, the Bird Dog, the Deadlift, and the Superman. I will start with the Bird Dog here. If you haven't done a Bird Dog before, just know that it is one of the McGill Big Three exercises. If you've had lower back pain for long enough, you've encountered the McGill Big Three exercises. So, there's lots more that Dr. McGill gives to the lower back pain community, but this is what he's most known for. He calls it the non-negotiable Big Three. I would agree that the Bird Dog is a very good one to do, especially for strengthening multifidus muscles, which a lot of times becomes a little fatty and deconditioned with people with chronic lower back pain.

But I would venture to say that the McGill Big Three is not the perfect exercise set for every person with lower back pain. There's multiple variables that we need to consider. Honestly, sometimes things like the Bird Dog are a little bit too hard for people on day one, so we may have to build into something like that. Later on, we can almost do a standing version, which is almost like a single leg RDL. Now, to accomplish the Bird Dog, what most people do is go hands and knees. If you have problems with your wrist, you can go elbows and knees, but it also changes the line of the exercise itself.

The goal is to be able to create a straight line with opposing hand and feet. So, if you're doing left hand forward, you're doing right leg back. If you do it wrong or the wrong side, you'll notice you're falling over, so it usually self-corrects. But we're going to reach one hand long and create a straight line from the hand to the elbow, to the shoulder, to the pelvis or the hips, to the knee, to the foot. Now, for most people, you're going to realize that if you do this from your hands, your feet, your foot is actually going to be lower than your hands because if you form that straight line, your thighs are a little bit shorter than an extended arm would be.

So, most people actually end up with their toes about, I'd say, three inches from the floor, maybe four inches. If you look at the wall in your room right now, there's molding. If you have big, thick molding, high molding is probably going to be about five inches. If you have really crummy, older, small molding, which is probably, actually probably better material than wood versus MDF, that's going to be about one inch molding. So, it's going to be somewhere around the top of the molding for people that have newer, lower back pain, maybe adding so much lift and deforming that straight line is not the best idea.

So, we would use a variable distance from the ground. But generally speaking, what I like to have people do when they move their leg outward is I have them push their toes along the carpet like they're trying to rub a line into the carpet and then they lift up a little bit to a comfortable position. Now, if you have upper back stiffnesses, it's going to be hard to get your arm into the straight line. That's okay. Everybody's a little bit different. But I see, at least say from a lower back perspective, we need to make sure that at least there's a line from the shoulders all the way down into the heels.

Now, holding times with this are going to vary. When the McGill Big 3 was published, I believe it was about 10 seconds on, 5 seconds off, 10 seconds on, 5 seconds off with the descending pyramid schemes. Now, that's going to be like 6, 5, 4 reps. You can alternate sides. Personally, I like to actually do one side all at one time and give a little bit of a break, 3 to 5 seconds. Again, I think it's pretty standard. I had a patient that asked me the other day, so how long should I hold this? I can hold it for 30 seconds. Should I do that? You can. But I'd say for people who are looking for high reward, low risk, or it's really a cute case, we want to make sure that probably the rule of about 10 on 5 seconds is probably a little bit more appropriate, but everybody could go a little bit longer, and we can also add something like tension, which is skew the time too, which I'll mention in a moment.

But I would personally go all on one side first, all left leg, right arm, go again, go again, go again, go again, and then change sides. You can also take about 30 seconds breaks between each set if you'd like, but generally the time changing from one side to another is enough to actually create that break. The reason why I like doing all on one side one time and just finishing all the bird dogs at one time is because it gets us to the point of what we call perceived effort, higher rates of perceived effort a little bit faster, which helps out with building endurance into the core. And I think that is an easier way to solve some lower back pain versus just doing a standardized reps and sets.

But obviously, if you have acute lower back pain, then do what you can. If you did it multiple times a day, I think that'd be very helpful. And I'll go back into the wrist pain scenario here in a moment. But I know that when I was dealing with lower back pain, I actually did it twice in a day. They say there's about a two hour protective window. If you do them, if you do them once in a day, then you have what you do it at nine o'clock a.m. You have about 10 to 11 o'clock where you could feel generally good with even doing some of the same things that bother your lower back. And you just, I would extend that protective period.

I would just do it again at the end of the day. But bird dogs, I think are a gold standard for dealing with people with lower back pains and trying to strengthen lower back. Notice that there's not a lot of back bend with it. I think that is the big, one of the biggest mistakes I see people with it, especially if they drive their leg higher and they look like they're kind of like an arch or a bow and arrow, is they actually arch their lower back, which is not really what we want in this exercise. We want to keep it stable and we want to create ball and socket joint disassociation, which is the shoulder and the hip.

So thank you, Stuart McGill, for bringing that to everybody's attention. And I think it's a phenomenal exercise. It's always great to be able to do that on day one with somebody and to keep them doing it for about four to six weeks after the fact as well. Now, if you do it from the elbows, again, that line changes a little bit since the height of the upper extremity or the upper limb has actually changed now. But for some people, we actually have them go in the elbows and they would then slide their hand on the ground, pinky finger on the ground, and then their heel will go a little bit higher.

If we decide to do this with tension, high tension, we would actually put their foot onto a wall so they can actually physically push into the wall. And most people can hold this for about five seconds as they ramp up tension and then ramp down a little bit and usually the sets go a little bit faster. The deadlifting is the next one. The deadlifting I do like people to do as soon as possible because what this does is, and remember, deadlifting is going to be, it's a form of a hip hinge. And for a short period when you're dealing with lower back pain, you want to make it so your body moves in more of a hip dominant pattern, meaning bending over your back, you're not rounding quite so much, but your hips are taking the workload.

That's not to say you should do that forever, but if you're picking up a lighter weight or a pencil from the ground, sure, round your back, no big deal. But in the moment where your back is quite sensitive, maybe we do more hip dominant and then we allow more spine movement with lighter objects to continue as well. Now, when we're talking about a deadlift though, deadlift is actually, it's not really a movement category. It's actually a lift in that movement category. So other types of lifts in that category is deadlifting with a barbell, deadlifting with a hex bar, single leg deadlifting, and so on.

Even good mornings are in that category. So there is a way to strengthen the lower back with that, but also realizing the deadlift, especially under higher load, is a hip dominant pattern. And the back stiffens itself so it doesn't move in the lift. And that's what we see in the bird dog as well. We want to see ball socket or hip and shoulder movement independent of spine movement. And that's what we want to see in deadlift. You want to see hip movement without the spine moving. There was, if you read McGill's Low Back Disorders books, there is a chapter he writes in there about observing someone's spine move under load.

And then there was a pop or clunk incident. I think what it was, was maybe the catch. There was a word in there. I forget the exact word was, but that was, you don't really want to move your spine too much under higher load. And that can create an injury. So generally speaking, if you want to have a bad lift, deadlift form, like a rounded in your back and you already picked it up, I'd probably keep it rounded for the remainder of the lift and then put it down and then change your spine position. You should be able to keep good position on setup and keep that setup through the lift itself. Deadlifting, I think is a phenomenal thing to do for lower back strength, but also helps it with hip strength quite a bit.

And when you work with, when you improve on hip extension strength, you help out a lot with decreasing risk factors associated to lower back condition. So the deadlift itself is not only a lower back strengthening one. I think if you look at it that way, then you may be missing the big picture, but you want to strengthen your hips in combination with keeping the core or spine stiff, which eventually leads to those bigger spinal erector muscles that you'll see in people who lift quite a bit. If you're dealing with pain with a deadlift, know that you're probably doing it poorly and there's no need to keep it around while you're dealing with lower back pain.

If you're doing it poorly, it hurts and it's not being coached. So you may need to have it coached actually. And that's the things that we do on our telehealth and in-person sessions is we show people that there's actually a means to pick up even higher load with, while dealing with lower back pain. And if you do it in that scenario, it is actually can be very therapeutic. But if you do it poorly, it just makes the injury process go a little bit longer. The one, one thing that you can do if you are a stiffer individual and you're deadlifting and it's not really feeling good, but your form is generally good, is you can change the height of the bar.

I heard Dan John say something to this degree. He looked at Olympic plate and he said, this was not an object created by God, perfect for all individuals' height. And so what that tells me is, yeah, it might be great for a shorter lifter, but maybe not for somebody who's six foot or somebody who's stiffer. And so we need to make sure that we're actually raising the object. So it's a better way to recruit the hips versus just having the spine move because the hips have run out of rain in the lift itself. Now, the third one, Superman, I would disagree with this actually for most people, but I think more people will get away with it for a very long time.

And the reason why I included it in this is because I did a search on Dr. Google about what are the best or sorry, most popular exercises to drink the lower back and bird dog came up, deadlifting came up in the Superman. In a different search query, actually, there was a single leg bridge or a glute bridge, which I really like a lot more. That would be a better number three in my book. But I think because if we're talking about the things you guys may encounter or already be doing, if you're doing the Superman, we need to talk about like what the reason why I don't really like it and maybe substitute it for something that's even better.

Now, when you people do the supermass, when they're laying face down, if they're holding the position, that's okay. But if they're going through reps, I don't think it's really great. And it's mainly because you're bending at the lower back through extension and compression. So as the muscles are working back there to accomplish the lower back arch under repeated reps, then it tends to compress what we call the posterior elements of the spine, which is going to be like the facets of the small joints of the spine. And sometimes it gets quite a bit irritated for people. And yeah, it will give the back quite a bit of a pump.

In the short term, it may work out well, but I think in the long term, again, if we use the back for the purpose that it is for, what the core is for, it's mainly to create some stability. Yeah, it does create a little bit of movement in some scenarios, but if you use it too much in that scenario, you may end up having some groin, hip, upper glute pain, or even some leg pain that comes along because you're extending the back so much under a compressive load. And I spoke with a person the other day that they actually have long standing lower back pain. They saw the orthopedic and I hadn't seen him in a very long time.

And they said, my orthopedic said I shouldn't lift anything overhead again. I said, for your shoulders or for your back or your neck? And they said, for my back. And I said, I said, okay, so do you, do you have pain when you lift overhead? He's like, yeah, I do. Actually, I don't have any back pain when I do my lower body lifts, my deadlifts, my squats. But I do have back pain when I'm doing my upper body work. And he couldn't quite really figure it out. He said he had lower back pain with pull-ups, which is the back sometimes bends through extension with that. He had pain with dips as well at the lower point in the exercise.

Again, there's usually a back arch or a butt, kind of butt gets anterior tilty at the deeper end of that. And then when people lift overhead as well, sometimes if they don't have the shoulder motion for it, they arch their back. Again, a compressive extensive load in the spine. So Superman's kind of endorsed that. Now, for some people, it may actually work out okay, again, for the short term. But I think in the long term, I think I'd rather just have my core and ball sockets work as they're more intended to, which is going to be power and force from the balls and sockets, while the spine is mainly, the spine or the core is mainly a mechanism to like, it's an error to transfer force from one error to the other.

I think if we're looking at strengthening the back extensors in that fashion, I would rather do things like triple extension exercises or lifts. There's a whole series of core exercises called chops and lifts. I think lifts are a good one to do a similar thing, but not in the exact same way. It allows the transfer of force from the lower, from the ground to the lower body to the upper body to actually lift the cable or the object. And the spine, again, it does extend a little bit, but at least it doesn't do all the extension. And because you have to use your hands and legs to do so, there's also a little bit of support or protection in that movement as well.

So these are the three that Dr. Google comes up with. Again, I agree with two, but I don't agree with the other. If I had to pick, though, a glute bridge works a lot better. Again, it's spinal extension based or so, but you still get the hips moving. And then it's a lot, I think, more biased towards hip movement. So if you guys are looking for help with your lower back or sciatica, reach out to us. We do have endless free YouTube videos. We also have our discovery sessions or consultations online, which are, again, very affordable. And you can ask us a bunch of questions, pick our brain and make sure that you're on the right track to your recovery.

All right, guys, we'll see you next time.