I have had the great honor of working with a wide variety of clients. Some have just been cleared from spinal surgery, others were born with some congenital issues that caused certain irregularities and others simply had generalized lower back pain.
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There is a weakness somewhere
This past summer I was able to work with a professional hockey player for his entire offseason. When performing his movement assessment, he had a lot of highs and a couple unexpected lows.
Hockey players spend most of their time hunched over on a stick in a fixed position. They rarely go overhead and shoulder pads limit their overhead involvement as well. Culminate that with getting hit and your shoulders are going to take a beating.
Any work that involved controlling your back into extension, this athlete seemed to suffer. Flexion seemed to be fine and I attribute that to being apart of their every day lives on the ice.
The big thing I did with him was re-teach him how to move through his hips and not his lower back. A common mechanism for injury is loaded lumbar flexion with a degree of rotation...so, we need to make sure we are strengthening this area before he hits the ice again.
To reiterate, you have to reverse engineer how you train certain athletes. We had to take what he did well, expose the opposite and train it so we do not have issues further down the road.
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Isometrics and Strength Training
Stuart Mcgill is the man in spinal research. I have stolen a lot from him over the years and ever since then, dead bugs and planks have been a staple of ours for years.
These exercises may seem simple but they can benefit more advanced lifters as well. Deadbug and plank variations provide ease of use, no equipment needed and they are very easy to teach.
Endurance vs Strength
Most of the time, you see planks performed for large amounts of time. Not that endurance training is wrong, but when attempting to strengthen someone’s lower back, I prefer to have individuals produce short bouts of high threshold contractions. In my opinion, this yields better protection for the spine.
I posed this question to you: what is safer, 30 pounds lifted 30 times or 100lbs lifted 3 times? If you are a novice lifter, and do not know how to leverage your body, the 30 repetitions will most likely lead to a bigger chance of injury.
Best way to program your planks is 15 seconds of squeezing your entire body as hard as you, rest for 10 seconds and then do it again!
3 sets of 3 minutes planks may challenge you, but it will not allow you to produce the force necessary to truly strengthen your mid-section. Long bouts of a particular exercise may lead to mis grooves/increase your injury risk as well.
Closing
Training the lower back is easy. Often it boils down to doing simple exercises often to ensure you move as optimally as possible. After things are fixed, make sure you are doing direct core work to stay on top of things so your issues do not return!
