7 Best Lower Back Exercises Gym With Full Guide
How to Get a Strong Lower Back: Do This Every Day!
Deep down along your lower back, you have a group of muscles known collectively as the erector spinae, which assist with everyday functions like extending and stabilizing the spine. On top of that is a large, fan-shaped layer of muscle known as the lats. And on top of that, we have the trapezius, which is a diamond-shaped muscle that runs from behind your head all the way down to your midback. By building up these muscles that run along your back, as well as other muscles that support your lower back, like your glutes and your core, not only will you develop a more aesthetic looking back, but you’ll also reduce the chances of developing lower back pain, which is one of the most common areas that people experience. Nagging injuries and pain So today I want to go over seven of the best exercises that you can use to strengthen and build up your lower back and the supporting muscle groups.
Before we begin, I want to warn you that if you recently injured your back and you’re currently in pain, you need to give your body the time it needs to recover. If that’s the case, the best thing you can do is rest and wait until you’re fully healed before working on strengthening your lower back with these exercises from this video. With that said, let’s start with the first exercise. Hyper extensions This exercise is usually the most common go-to exercise for people trying to strengthen their lower backs.
The problem is that most people who use the hyperextension machine or the GHR machine perform hyperextensions incorrectly. And rather than strengthening the lower backs, they place their lower backs directly at risk of injury. Whether you’re using a GHR or a hyper extension bench, the set up will be similar. You’ll lie face forward on the bench. The front of your thighs will end up resting on a pad, and you’re going to be hooking your Achilles under the pads at the base.
Keep in mind that these machines are adjustable, so before beginning, you want to adjust the height so that the area right around your hip bones is making contact with the edge of the pad. You don’t want to be so low that your stomach makes contact, and you don’t want to be so high that your upper thighs don’t even make contact. Once you’ve adjusted the machine and you’re in position to begin, you can cross your arms in front of your body. Or you can also go behind your head if you want a tougher challenge. From there, lower your upper body down slowly by bending at your waist until you feel stretching tension building up in your hamstrings and your lower back.
Even though this exercise can be performed for partial reps, ideally you want to lower yourself until your upper body is almost vertical. Then hold that position for a second and slowly return your body back to the upright position. Now here’s where you want to be careful not to make the most common and dangerous mistake with this exercise. Do not continue extending past the point of a neutral spine. So once you extend your back back into a straight line, don’t keep going further back into a hyperextended position.
Instead, stop it neutral and lower yourself back down for the next rep. Now, if you want to make this exercise even more challenging, you can hold a weight against your chest with your arms crossed over on top, but only add weight. After you’ve mastered the movement and you have solid form, let’s move on to the next one. Kettlebell Swings When done correctly, kettlebell swings are very effective at strengthening and protecting your lower back. They’re specifically good at working your lumbar extensors.
But just like with all the other backbuilding exercises, if you do them incorrectly, they can cause lower back pain rather than help to fix it. So to begin, start with your feet a little wider than shoulder width, and the kettlebell should be out in front of you. Bend your knees, grab the kettlebell with both hands, and remember to keep your arms straight and relaxed throughout this entire exercise. It’s not meant to be an arm exercise, guys, but rather a hip-hinging exercise. So first stand up straight with the kettlebell, and then you’re going to relax your knees, shift your body weight back into your heels, and lower your butt backwards and down as you swing the kettlebell behind you in between your legs, then drive through your heels and explode through your hips.
This explosive hip-hinging motion should send the kettlebell swinging upward. It’s very important that as you pop your hips forward, you stop them and don’t allow them to go past the point of a neutral spine. Pushing your hips forward too much will hyperextend your spine and will more than likely lead to a back injury. So pop your hips, then squeeze your core and your glutes to stop at neutral and aim for the kettlebell to come up to about chest height with your arms still extended. Then allow the kettlebell to come back down as you shift your weight back onto your heels.
Hinge your hips and catch the weight of the kettlebell as you use the momentum to go straight into your next rep. Now keep in mind that many beginners make the mistake of performing squats with frontal raises instead of kettlebell swings. If you’re not hinging your hips and you feel like your shoulders are doing all the work, then you’re doing the exercise incorrectly. Make sure you lighten the weight and work on your form if it feels more like a shoulder workout than anything else. Next, we have the deadlift.
This is by far one of the best exercises to strengthen your entire back, including your lower back. Keep in mind that this is a hip hinge movement. Many doobies think that you just muscle the weight up with your lower back, but doing deadlifts that way is a recipe for disaster. So, to begin, step up to a loaded barbell with your shins close to the bar and plant your feet a little wider than hip width apart. Hinge your hips and bend down to the bar to hinge your hips properly.
You’ll want to push your hips back towards the wall behind you while you hinge forward at the hips. I almost imagine that you’re trying to stick your butt out back behind you. Then grip the bar slightly wider than where your shins meet the bar, stick your chest out and drop your hips down while squeezing your shoulder blades together to pull all the slack out of the bar. Make sure you don’t lean too far forward; you want your shoulders to be in line with your hands. Then take a deep breath, hold it and lift the weight up.
When lifting the weight, don’t pull with your lower back. Instead, lift the weight by squeezing your ABS, pushing your feet into the ground, and hinging your hips by driving them forward until you’re standing upright. Then repeat that for reps. Remember to not go past the point of a neutral spine, and remember to take a deep breath and hold it on every rep, exhaling at the top. This is something known as the Valsalva maneuver, and it helps protect your spine in a similar way to a lifting belt.
Another excellent compound exercise that not only develops your lower back but is also one of the best exercises for your legs is, of course, the back squat. The squat will also help you strengthen your glutes, and weak glutes are actually a common cause of lower back pain. So for these, you’ll begin by setting up a barbell so that it’s positioned a little lower than the height of your shoulders. Then stand in front of the barbell and grab it with both hands. Dip your head under and press your upper traps against the barbell.
Do not position the barbell on your neck. It should be lower on your traps. From there, unrack the bar and take one or two steps backward. Then spread your feet a little wider than shoulder width apart and slightly rotate your feet outward. Before beginning, make sure that your chest is up, pointing straight ahead, and that you’re maintaining a nice neutral curve in your lower back.
Then drive your hips back, bend your knees and lower yourself down nice and slowly. As you do that, you want to make sure that you’re not too far up on your toes, because that will put a lot of pressure on your knees, and you shouldn’t be too far back on your heels, either. Squat down until your hips are either parallel with your knees or you can go under parallel for deep squats. If it doesn’t bother your knees and your hips to go that low, then from there, drive through the middle of your foot, extend your knees and your back simultaneously as you stand up straight and then repeat for reps. Now that you know that having strong glutes helps support the lower back, it’ll make a lot of sense that for our next exercise, we do bridges.
Bridges can be done on the floor at home, and they can also be done loaded with weights at the gym. To perform bodyweight bridges on the floor, lie down on your back with your knees bent and your heels on the floor. From there, you’re going to push your heels into the floor. Squeeze your glutes and lift your hips up until your shoulders, hips, and knees are all in a straight line. Do not go any further past that point, and do not allow your lower back to hyperextend.
To prevent that from happening, flex your ABS and keep your core tight. Hold that top position and squeeze your glutes for a second, and then slowly lower your hips back down to the floor before repeating for reps. If you want to add weight to this exercise, you’ll need to place a barbell across your hips on top of a pad or a towel. You’ll also want your body facing perpendicular to a bench, and you’ll want your traps resting on the edge of that bench. From there, you would bridge up in the same way, making sure to keep your core tight and to not go any higher than a straight line between your shoulders, hips, and knees.
Then lower yourself back down and repeat for a total of 10 reps.Next, we’re going to move on to a great core exercise that will help you improve your ability to maintain a neutral spine. With the other exercises that we’ve already gone over, I’m talking about the plank. To begin, you’re going to get on all fours and plant your elbows directly under your shoulders, a little wider than shoulder width. Then, squeezing your glutes and ABS, extend your knees and plant your toes into the floor.
To stabilize your body, you should be in a relatively straight line from your heels to your hips to your head. Concentrate on one spot on the floor and make sure that you don’t extend your neck and look up, because that increases the chances of you hyper-extending your spine. Then you’re going to hold that position for 60 seconds. Now, it’s very important that you release the plank if your form starts to break down as soon as your hips start sinking down and your lower back starts hyperextending. This can go from a core-strengthening exercise to an exercise that irritates your lower back, so make sure you maintain that straight line the whole time.
If you can only do that for 20 seconds at first before your form starts getting worse, then that’s fine. Stop at 20 seconds and work your way up to being able to do it for 60 seconds. Also, once you master this exercise, you can try adding a weight that you’ll place between your glutes and your midback, but don’t increase the weight until you can hold a regular plank for at least 60 seconds. Finally, last but not least, is the side plank. This is going to help you focus on other parts of your core, like your obliques.
7 BEST Exercises for a More Powerful Lower Back
What’s up, guys?Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.Today I think this is going to be an incredibly helpful video because I’m going to show you what you need to do every day to start building a stronger lower back. Right away, bells are probably going off saying “Every day? For your lower back?That’s probably not a good idea for your low back. ” There’s a reason why it is because you don’t do the same thing every day. But there’s one thing that’s missing from most people’s training.That is any concentrically focused lower back work.What I mean by that is, you need to take a muscle through its range of motion and strengthen it through its range of motion, not just rely on isometrics. Isometrics alone won’t do it. When we do a lot of our bigger lifts, isometrics are mostly what is happening here. Deadlifts A lot of guys will say, “Deadlifts should do it all.” We can meet all of our low back needs by deadlifting.I agree, in a way, but not for most people.Why?because they’re not deadlifting heavy enough. When we do a deadlift, which should be a staple of everybody’s training and should occur on a weekly basis, At least once a week, you should be doing your deadlifts.
What you want to see in a properly performed deadlift is that you get into this position ready for your initial pull, and your low back is in a certain position. It should protect your lumbar spine. So, you should have a slight arch there.When we pull up, we’re using our legs to get off the ground.We’re stabilizing, getting tight up top, and we’re using that straight arm scapular strength to get into this position here, and as we pull, we’re using our legs. Now, from this position here, this is hip drive.This is coming from the glutes.From there, drive through the extension. If you start lifting your low back from there, first of all, your legs are going to lag.They’re not going to drive with the movement. They’re lagging behind.But second, you’re loading your spine in a way that this lift was never intended to do in the first place. It’s putting more stress on your spine that way.What you’re looking at is more of an isometric hold of the lumbar spine throughout the lift.There is a little bit of concentric shortening that happens from the very top.I am not talking about overextending. I’m talking about just at the very top.
So, a portion of the weight that you’re lifting here is going toward the concentric shortening of the lumbar paraspinals. However, it’s not a high amount.Let’s call it 10%, to slap an arbitrary number on it. It’s very little.So, unless you’re deadlifting 500 lbs, you’re not getting enough weight applied to the lumbar spine or applied to those paraspinals to help strengthen them. Again, if you’re doing that, that’s a good start, but it’s not enough because it’s not frequent enough. You’re not going to be deadlifting every day.So, we need some other options.So, what we do is, we have some other options.We have a kettle bell swing.
It’s a great conditioning exercise.One of the best ways to condition It also helps us to build not just stamina but endurance in our lumbar paraspinals (again, for the same idea). We’re basically coming down, right hip hiking, and then as we come through, it’s an extension through the glutes. I’m not lifting here with my back.I’m not coming down with my leg and lifting with my back.That’s not a swing.A swing is a hinge, and a hinge through Hinge, and then back through.So, the same thing is happening here, in that we’re not getting this active, concentricshortening here, but more of a stability that we’re holding, and getting a small percentage that gets carried over. But now, with an 80lb kettle bell, you’re using far less than you were over here.So, the trade off is volume.Your volume would have to be higher here.Thank God, it does fit in well as a conditioning exercise that will allow you to program it more often in volume. But again, that works as an option that could fall into your conditioning days.So, we’ve got our heavy deadlifts occurring on a pull day, or a leg day, or a back day.
Then we’ve got to fill in the gaps. Now, some people would say, “What about good morning, Jeff? You’ve talked about Good Morning before. Is that a good option?Are you getting any more concentric shortening there? ” There’s a big problem with “Good Morning, guys.” Not the exercise itself, but that most bodies aren’t capable of doing it properly.I, for one, am not capable of doing it properly.So I don’t do it. What you do is get into position here and you have to hinge. You’ve got to try and keep this bar, like with a deadlift, as close to your center of gravity as possible. Most people begin by leaving forward in this manner.All that distance between my center of gravity, which is my hips, and this bar out in front of my body places an enormous amount of stress on your low back. Most of which we can’t handle. So, you need to be able to have a great hip hinge to sit backward as we drive down.Then we come out of that. Now, because the low back must be slightly arched here, and we go back and sit back; you must have tremendous hamstring flexibility, which is where my limitation is.I can’t get any further here without allowing myself to roll forward and create some damage.So that is not one of the best exercises.
Let’s move onto the other option. The other option is one of my favorites.This is a hyperextension.It gets a bad title because it’s not a hyperextension if it’s done properly.This is what you can work on more on your push days, in addition to your leg days. So, you’re filling in the gaps to build out a more comprehensive volume for your lowback.So, you get into the position here on the glute-ham, and what we’re looking at is going into a flexed position here. allowing my low back to flex. People say these are not good. Don’t ever extend if you have stenosis in your low back.That’s horrible advice.
This actually opens you up.And because we’re going to do what I’m going to say next, it doesn’t place additional stress on the lower back because we’re not going from here to a hyperextended position. You never do this on this exercise.That is creating too much narrowing of the space in your low back, which is something you don’t want. What you do is go from a flexed position to neutral.That is to extend That is concentrically shortening these muscles when they don’t get the opportunity to do this at any other point. This is your opportunity. This is your best time to be able to do this and use your deadliftingto complement this, to create the ultimate plan for having a more stable and strong back.
You do your hyperextension without the “hyper” part. Only to the extension and down.What’s cool about this is that we can load it with a plate. I talked about building up with a 500lb deadlift, let’s say 50 lbs of concentric action there. Now we’ve got 35 pounds up, and down, up, down, and up. So, we’ve got that option.As I’ve shown before, we can also lift weights. Row down, up, and even here at the top.Get the spine to work together at all levels.Up, row.Up, row.It will light you up like a Christmas tree, but it’s what you need.You haven’t done enough of this.You’ve been throwing away the opportunity to concentrically shorten the lumbar paraspinals.
The last thing you can do – because you’re not always lifting weights – On the days that we’re off and doing our corrective exercises, the low-key stuff. Get on the ground.Bridging.Ascend to a high position in this game.When I go to the bridge, don’t just push through the heels. If we’re trying to work on our lower back a little more, you can see we’re posteriorly rotated right now. We have our low back in flexion.We’re going to drive into extension with the low back.And down, in line with the low.The nice thing here is that you’re getting your glutes to work with you. So, they’re complementing the entire posterior chain extension.Like that.You do a set of two, just to continue to keep the activity and awake the muscles in the low back that haven’t been used for so long. You have another option here with the Supermans.
Hands down, legs down, lift up, hold in the low back, to the glutes, and down. Up, hold for a couple seconds, then down.Again, a couple sets on those non-training days, more as corrective, and when you put it all together, you’ve got a game plan that allows your muscles in your low back to be used, maybe for the first time in a long time, and to be trained completely. Not just isometrically, but now adding some concentric forces and stretches to complete their development and help take the stress off your lower back right now. Guys, I hope you’ve found the video helpful.If you’re looking for a program that maps out different opportunities for when the best time to do this heavy stage stuff and what the volume should be, we work them all into our training approach. I believe when you’re training like an athlete, you can’t afford to overlook things like this. We worked them all in. All our programs are available over at ATHLEANX.com.In the meantime, if you’ve found the video helpful, leave your comments and thumbs up below. Let me know when you start to incorporate these, if they really start to help your lowback pain go away, and your lower back itself feel a lot stronger.
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