Progressing past glute bridges for a stronger lower back

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 host, Sebastian, with the Restoring Human Movement podcast. Thanks for joining the Movement Movement, and I'm just one host of the show here. And so I'd love to help you guys understand better about how to manage lower back pain today. And this short audio today is going to be about a question we had from our YouTube channel. Which is about progressing single, progressing bridge exercises or corrective exercises called bridges.

And I'll get to that in a moment. Just a little housekeeping too. If you guys have listened to our other part or other shows, we have tons of shows on low back pain, hip impingement, sports hernias, adductor strains, plantar fasciitis, knee conditions, and so on. We specialize in working with people with very high activity levels, such as runners and people who are still in recreational sports into their, I don't want to say older age, 30s or 40s. So if you guys are having problems with things, feel free to reach out to us. We'd love to help you out too. Now, I'm going to have a link to the YouTube channel in the description for this podcast, because I think you guys should go over there and check out some of our videos.

They have a lot of the videos are the exercises that we show when we work with people in person or virtual. They're not too much different, but we do coach them differently. So this could be some context. We have about a thousand different videos out there at this point. Now, the question I think was a good one about progressing a bridge exercise. And they said, so I've been dealing with lower back pain and bridges really helped me. Should I continue to add weight to this double leg bridge exercise? And I think conventional wisdom would say, yes, do that. But I kind of think logically, I think we should say no or pretty much no.

And I'll tell you the reasons why conventional logic would maybe make sense with that. And also why I think it'd probably not be the best thing to do. Now, a bridge is traditionally supposed to be used as either a patterning exercise or it is a facilitating exercise, meaning making muscles become more active when they become dormant. A lot of people have been given clamshells. A clamshell is a super good example of progressing an exercise thought too far and not progressing onto something that's more helpful. And so I think people tend to use these exercises too long when they could easily progress into one that's more advanced and it'll be more sticky, we call it.

Like it'll actually retain the motor pattern better and it'll make it so that your strength will come back a little bit quicker. So I don't have a problem with people doing bridges. I like them. I suggest them. I think the next progression of load to it would be with not a weight. It would be a band and it'd be a glute resistance band that you can find some of your sporting goods stores or online and it's a cloth one. It's not one of the rubber or rubber ones that come in like five different ones in various colors. Those are too light. And so it's got to be a cloth one and it's thicker because it's really nice that it doesn't cut into your leg when you're actually stretching this thing.

Because what we're going to do with it was we're going to perform the bridges while keeping the band at a little bit of a stretch. Not so much that you're breaking it, but just keeping some tension on the band. And what this does is if we're looking at activating the glute, it helps get the glute more active in the glute bridge exercise, reasonably speaking. Now, when people have things like hip impingement, they actually fare better with this version of the exercise too because their knees don't dive in. A lot of people with hip impingement end up not liking the knee diving in type of movement.

And so you can just get them to do a different version of the exercise, which is actually physically harder because the band's there, but also their body tolerates it a lot better just by adding the resistance band. Now, I'm going to come back to this resistance band here thought in a moment, but let's just talk about how progressions may look if you decided to progress your bridge. You may add a weight onto your stomach. It can be a kettlebell or a dumbbell. Some people may progress this into a floor hip thruster, which is going to be rolling a barbell over your body. You may end up using a pad underneath the barbell because it can get heavy.

And then you would progress it further into doing a bench supported hip extension exercise, probably with a barbell or with a weight. The weights can get very high. It's just seen people do it on social media or Instagram. They're using it more for strength or muscular development. And that's just a progression again. Now, some people may say you actually would progress the exercise by going into a single leg pattern. So instead of doing two legs, you do one and then you would start adding weight. Yes, that's just a different variant. And there's nothing wrong with that either. There is more core stability or control aspects of it.

And so you won't be able to add so much weight. So that may not be the best choice for strength building or creating increase of muscular size. Those you probably use a double leg pattern more so with that, at least from the floor or bench supported version. Now, I would prefer to actually take the band and use the band to failure. And as you've seen through some of our YouTube videos, we have something called the band and bridge and butterfly series that ends up going to the point of each exercise. And there's no real break in between where you basically go to muscular failure of the glutes. Like you'll feel the glutes burning so bad, so, so bad.

And it's not a strength building exercise because it's not heavy enough. And it's not an isometric because we're moving. But for a lot of people, that low amount of load, but still extra load than the bridge itself and keeping them out of hip internal rotation can help out turn the glutes on. And then you just ride that baby out. The goal is to create more stiffness. And as I've talked about in other podcasts is we've talked about the concept of stiffness and how stiffness can be helpful. I know it has a bad connotation to it, but it can be helpful in areas where stiffness is lacking. With runners, we know that people who lack lower leg stiffness have more injury potential, especially if the stiffness is lacking in the lower leg.

So there's more ground contact time and it's not that's a problem. You need to increase some stiffness. So stiffness can help out in a variety of different ways. But also if we're talking about conventional thought, there's more glute activity, which is what we wanted from the exercise period. Patterning wise, we know if the glute is working well or if the pattern looks good, we don't need to keep the person doing that forever. We don't necessarily need to add weight. We just need to then advance it to the next exercise that they can do from a developmental perspective. So babies start on the ground.

You don't regress a baby back to the ground to crawling if they're already good at walking. They don't really crawl anymore. Like I'm sure they do, but they don't really like you don't force them to crawl more and add volume and weight to a crawl. Anything on the floor is a regressed pattern. It's a regressed exercise. Adding weight, yeah, that can be a way to progress it, but you don't always need that in all situations. Sometimes it's just easier to act like the baby and just start walking and don't look back. And so what this is going to look like is if we had a double leg hinge pattern on the ground, such as a bridge, and we've already banded bridged it to get glute activation and stiffness, we may find that that carries over better to a double leg hinge pattern standing, which is a version of a deadlift.

Now, single leg, sorry, stiff-legged or Romanian or conventional or barbell or kettlebell or hex bar, I don't really care. It's the version the person can do well. And then at that point, we can start adding some weight after the person is comfortable with the pattern and feeling confident in the exercise because some people are scared after they've had low back pain. It's completely normal. But once they start doing that, we can add weight, but we can also change range of motion or increase the height of the object to then make the corrective exercise not a banded bridge anymore or not a bridge.

Within the same day or within the same month, you can get away, certainly within the same month, you can get away from using the bridge and get the person to develop a good pattern in a standing double foot type of hinge, add load to it so it saves the motor pattern better, and you also build strength, which you don't in the banded bridge or in the bridge series because it's not heavy enough. And then we know that strength actually helps out with injury prevention. Strength of the hip is a helper of reducing the amount of work the lower back does and how much strain it gets over time. It also helps with knee conditions like patellofemoral pain syndrome and even all the way down the leg into plantar fasciitis.

So again, bridges aren't bad, but I think traditional wisdom would be to continue to do that exercise until forever and then start progressing it further to make it harder, which I think we should just maybe use it for a little bit and then start to work away from it. Now, for some of you who are still doing bridges and you've been doing them for a long time, I'll be honest with you, I did a bridge yesterday and I did it as a warm-up prior to me playing baseball and I keep a cloth glute band in my baseball bag and I do it before most games, not all. And I also do side planks and I do front planks and those are all things that I use as part of my warm-up and I use it as facilitating, but it's not something I'm doing all the time.

I don't do it every a few days a week and I don't progress it further than that. It's just, what is the intention of the exercise? Well, to take work off the back, improve stiffness of the glute muscles, and then to use that in a more advanced exercise or activity like sprinting, hitting a baseball, throwing a baseball, things like that. So if you're a runner, how may that look? Well, we don't know how long the stiffness may last. And for some people, for very trained individuals, the stiffness lasts for weeks and they say sometimes months. For untrained individuals or novice, or sorry, beginners, it may only last a couple hours and that would oftentimes explain why people, or I think explain, why people feel better after doing bridges for their lower back in an untrained individual and then a few hours later, it comes back again.

And they'll say, well, it didn't really work. Well, how come? Well, because I feel my back pain again. Well, how did you feel for a couple hours? I felt a lot better. Well, that's okay. Do more, you know, start getting stronger, which is you'll become a trained individual and it'll last a little bit longer. Now, I consider myself a novice. And so I do it about once a week and I schedule it around an activity where I'm already willing to get physically active. Now, I don't really want to take a band to the gym. I don't really want to take it. I wouldn't want to take it to a run. Like if I end up somewhere where I drive to get to a run, I don't really want to do it there, but I would if I needed to.

Fortunately for me, the time where I'm most motivated to do this is on a Sunday during a baseball game and I will totally do it then. When I play baseball sometimes on a Saturday, I don't actually do it that day all the time. So I just prioritize one day and just do it really, really well at that time. Now, for runners, what this may look like is you show up a little bit earlier to your run. If you're going with a group, then you may want to show up about 10 minutes early. Just find a patch of grass or dirt and then start hammering these babies out and get a little bit of glute activity. Make it burn real good, do your leg swings, do your dynamic warm-ups, get your blood moving, and then start to run with your buddies.

So it doesn't have to be done to death, but I do think a bridge can hold value, but I think it's less complicated than you think. It's use it in the hardest version that you can do well and then start moving. I think the real value is in moving and moving more often. And I've told many people this over the years that if we had people who just overall is a theme on planet Earth, if people moved and were more active and sat less and were more reasonable with their exercise programming, we would be out of business because that's where a lot of injuries tend to happen. And then they get stuck in this cycle where they need a little bit of help.

And professional help is always the best way to go. So if you guys need some help with this, reach out to us, 714-502-4243, or email us, info at p2sportscare.com. By the way, check the description for all the links for the free giveaways, such as the free books that we have on various different topics and the YouTube channel. We'll see you guys next time.