Rounding Your Back is Risky.

Rounding your back is risky.

What’s even more risky?

Never rounding your back!

A timeless proverb in life is use it or lose it — simply because this wisdom is true everywhere, in all facets of life. Every tissue of the body not stimulated will decay. Every mental capacity of the brain not used will slowly fade. Any skill not practiced will degrade.

If you leave any aspect of your life up to chance, you cannot be upset if you lose control over it.

That may sound simple, but many of the most widely seen injuries correlate with the most widely avoided areas of the human body.

The common thought is to avoid training these areas because they are so fragile and breakable. But perhaps in reality, areas such as the low back are so fragile and easily breakable because we are conditioned to avoid them?

The nuance that is so often lost is the gradient scale back to ability. It’s not whether to avoid spinal flexion or to jump into a heavy Jefferson curl — it’s about finding an accessible route towards gradually reintroducing movement into the injured area.

For many people, a slow progression of elephant walks is a feasible reentry into movement. This can be accomplished by slowly reducing the height of assistance until one can reach hands to feet with straight legs and passive spinal loading.

From there, we can start to use some modest weight, while giving the tissue in the back time to adapt to the stimulus.

Within the back, there is the large musculature of the spinal erectors as well as the smaller, nitty-gritty tissue.

For example, in between every segment of the spine, there’s the interspinalis muscle. “Inter-spinalis” literally means in between the spine! So there is tissue in between each spinal segment that is only trained when we open up the range at each one.

How might this look in training? It’s much easier to just say “do or don’t”. But really, most of the answers lie in “how and when”.

Unfortunately, after years — or even decades of avoiding certain movements — dysfunction can often branch out into other areas of the body.

So no longer is it an isolated issue of the back. Now there may be upper back tightness and weakness. Also common are tight and restricted hips. What follows is a “chicken or the egg” scenario.

The hips affect the back, so it’s hard to train the back. The upper back is too stiff, so it can’t help in the process of restoring the lower back.

Therefore, we need to take every related structure of the low back and work at the same gradual, patient scale.

Again, what will that actually look like? For the upper back, we start with gentle pullovers to regain thoracic extension.

Then we build strength in the same motion with the Trap-3 raise.

For both of these movements, you can start with just bodyweight. Then gradually add one pound, then two, five, ten pounds and so on.

This is the gradient scale back to ability. I’ve yet to see someone who can’t find progress if they’re patient enough.

Now what about below the low back? Hip mobility can become so problematic that you could develop legitimate, diagnosable issues such as FAI, labrum tears, etc.

These are certainly legitimate issues that I’m not unaware of nor am I ignoring. However, the same principles apply.

There is tremendous benefit to beginning by opening up the hips. We can start simply — with a gradual couch stretch.

Next, a very elevated ATG split squat.

This will start to open up the front of the hip gradually — as we can handle more range and more load. In turn, this can also ease the chronic tightness that often contributes to conditions like anterior pelvic tilt.

I want to reiterate that I’m not ignoring the fact that these problems are very real. It’s very difficult to train ability as you accumulate more and more problems.

However, doing nothing will make it almost impossible for the low back to improve. When I was stuck in my chronic pain cycle, the most empowering perspective that I found is the following:

There is no level too small and no stimulus too little to be productive.

Improved hip mobility paired with better access to the upper back makes it far more rewarding and far less painful to train low back ability directly.

There are many other factors that may contribute to the deterioration of low back ability such as accidents, modern lifestyle, work demands, etc. However, taking movement into our own hands — in the amount that makes sense individually — is our best route to positive results.

I hope this gives more clarity about whether a particular exercise is right for you.

It is not about what you can or cannot do.

It’s about what route you are willing to embrace for the long term.

We all only have one body to take care of for our entire lifetime. There is no benefit in rushing the process. The body did not deviate overnight, and it won’t be fixed overnight.

These three basic components are a great place to start:

1.) Hip mobility

2.) Upper back strength

3.) Direct low back ability.

I’m rooting for you and for your progress — wherever you currently are on your route to healing.

Brendan Backstrom

Low Back Ability

PS. To work closely with me towards improving your low back ability, the Back Breakthrough Blueprint is now live! This done-with-you online coaching experience is meant to save you all of the time & pain that I spent for years, trying to improve my back while lacking a route. Message me if you need, I’m here.