The first, and most important thing, you should be thinking about when you’re doing exercises, is maintain your lordosis in your lower back. If you’re not sure what exactly a lordosis is, it’s the natural arc or curve that should be present in your lower back. Sometimes we have patients come into the clinic, who are worried their doctor has told them they have a lordosis – but it’s definitely nothing to worry about. It would be like a doctor making an observation that you have two legs.
Lordosis should be maintained when doing your back pain exercises.
When a lordosis is present in your spine, it prevents excess stress from affecting a single area of your spine – instead the weight is distributed evenly through the lower back and all the structures: the discs, the facet joints, the muscles, the ligaments etc. So it’s very much a good thing to still have a lordosis. When you’re going through preliminary stages of rehabilitation for your lower back, you need to remember to keep that lordotic position when you’re performing exercises. Whether that’s something like a side plank, or abdominal rotations, in order to strengthen your core, you’ll want to be keeping the lordotic position to keep it neutral.
Modifying Gym Exercises For Back Pain
The next thing you’ll need to bear in mind, will be the position you’re in if you choose to use machines at the gym for back and core strengthening. For example, seated rows can be great where you have the pad in front of your chest as support, not to be confused at all with rowing machines where you would have your feet on the machine and your back is taking some of the load. If you’re using that seated row machine with the pad supporting your chest, you should be able to go through that rowing motion without any stress going through the lower back. Remember to maintain that lordotic posture at all times, and focus on larger muscles taking the load, like the lats, to strengthen that section of your back as well.
How To Perform Weighted Exercises
Once you’ve got the hang of other exercises, you may want to move on to some more complicated ones. You should be focusing on maintaining the neutral lordosis in the lower back, especially when moving onto exercises that involve bearing weight on just one side – such as lunges with a weight being held on one side. With lunges, if you did used to perform them weighted, we do encourage patients who are getting more advanced with their exercises to hold a kettlebell up onto one shoulder, to keep the same nice and neutral as you’re performing the exercise.
Lunges aren’t something that will explicitly train your lower back, but it will train your core, and your lower back will stabilise in order to deal with an asymmetrical load in a dynamic movement like a lunge. The final step will be moving on to performing squats and deadlifts. If you’ve been through the rehabilitation stages properly when you’re doing your strengthening exercises, you will actually be able to develop habits that mean when you go into squats and deadlifts you can be more thorough with your technique. Starting on lower weights, focusing on form and a higher amount of weights, you should be more aware of when you may start to deviate from a good form and stop yourself before re-injuring yourself.
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Increasing Weight Gradually
With these types of riskier exercises, it’s vital you’re not jumping to put up the weight too fast. Your spine needs to effectively learn to deal with the increased amount of load bearing it’s having to go through in the gym. You will be able to adapt slowly in due course, and being patient with this step will mean that you’re going to be much more efficient with dealing with any daily load bearing you’re putting your spine through outside of the gym. Effectively strengthening your spine will make it more resistant to injury in your everyday life, to prevent relapsing in the long-run.
What’s the best exercises for back pain for you?
It’s important to know what options you have and when you should be doing what type of exercise, quite equally also when should you seek treatment for back pain. If you have the time and the money, then we would always say that visiting a professional for that bespoke level of expert guidance and support is definitely worthwhile even at first instance.
Unfortunately that isn’t always possible, for a variety of reasons. So below is a brief outline of what you should be doing to help make sure that you’re supported appropriately in your journey to get your back in shape.
Basic Approach
For anyone suffering from back pain right now, looking fo the right exercises to do to help relieve the pain and deal with the problem, our Basic membership will really help you and it’s free. For those that would like to get additional benefits to help them a little more, joining the Premium membership will give you access to more support as well as Exclusive access to our closed Facebook groups where our clinical team can support members. For just £15/month it is very affordable for everyone.
Progress Approach
If you’re in the position where your back pain is ok, but you want the right exercises to strengthen your lower back effectively then joining the Premium membership will be most helpful for you as you’ll get access to everything within our membership site & can start from the right point for you. Comfortable in the knowledge that you’ve got some support, a community and the correct routines to follow in order to really get you back in shape for the long term
Start doing the right back pain exercises!
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