Low Back Pain Relief

Low back pain is one of the most common and debilitating injuries that can crush your workouts and progress. Anyone that has ever had a bad back can tell you just how quickly it can prevent you from working out at all, let alone with enough intensity to see gains. In this video, I show you a single exercise that you can use to start getting low back pain relief in the weeks ahead.

The key to this movement sequence is that it attacks the back pain at its source rather than at its location. Too often, people feel the pain in their back and look for treatments that treat that pain. This is not a good long term approach for beating the lumbar pain once and for all. All you are doing is temporarily treating symptoms when you do this. If you want to get rid of the pain in your back once and for all you have to figure out what is causing it in the first place.

Most of the time, all pain can be sourced to a joint either immediately above or below the site of the pain. In the case of the lower back, you would want to look at either the hips below or the thoracic spine above. In my experience as a sports physical therapist, I can tell you it’s almost always the hips (and glutes specifically) that aren’t doing their job and aren’t trained to work in concert with the muscles of the lower back that tends to lead to the breakdowns and resulting low back pain.

The muscles of the lower back just aren’t strong enough to handle the responsibility of the glutes as well. If you can get your glutes to start contributing in the way they are supposed to, you’ll see just how fast you can actually start treating your low back pain and get rid of it by strengthening the source of the problem.

Here I show you three individual exercises that you can use to progress through your lower back pain treatment. First, if you are not acutely injured but are dealing with a chronic low back issue and have pretty significant weakness in your lumbar paraspinals you would use just a band. As I demonstrate in the video, walk yourself into a squat rack with the band anchored across your path. Allow the band to push you back into a normal hip hinge. Overcome the resistance of the band by contracting your glutes and standing as straight up as you can to tie in thoracic extension as well.