The lower back is one of the most injured area of the body in fitness athletes. If you’re tired of back tweaks, or simply want to get ahead of them in the first place, then the following video will show you three of the best lower back prehab exercises.
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Prehab Your Lower Back
Video Transcript
Hey everyone, Zach and Pamela from performanceplusprogramming.com, and today, we’re talking about my three favorite lower back prehab exercises.
GHD Hip Extensions
Pamela’s going to jump up on a Glute Ham Developer in the first exercise we will do, which will be GHD hip extensions. We’ve got the pad positioned on her upper thigh. She’s going to maintain a flat back position and hold some dumbbells, barbells, kettle, some weight in her hands,
And she’s simply going to extend her hip and go back down. We’re working on maintaining a neutral spine position as she does that.
This exercise is going to really work in our ability to lock in lumbar spine positioning for our deadlifts, our cleans, and our squats.
Reverse Hyperextensions
One important thing for us to understand when we’re talking about lifting weights is that we are not always going to be in perfect position and sometimes we’re going to get out of position.
For that, I like doing reverse hyperextensions. I would love to do this on a reverse hyperextension machine, but most gyms don’t have that, so the way I typically program this will be off a glute ham developer instead.
Pamela is lying across the rounded surface of her GHD and holding her footplate. And we’re started in this red rounded back position. I actively want her to think of allowing her back to round here.
Depending on your height, you might need to bend your knees a bit in the bottom to let that round or even elevate this end of the GHD by throwing some bumper plates underneath the legs.
But we go from that rounded position into global extension of the spine. Notice that she’s extending her hips and back and her part of also coming up at the same point.
As she goes down, she lets everything flex down, and we’re going to go up and down repeatedly so that we’re getting stronger through the entire kind of range of motion of the back in terms of flexion and extension, which is really important long term for us.
Jefferson Curls – Lower Back Prehab
The third lower back prehab exercise is going to be Jefferson curls. With Jefferson curls, Pamela is going to think of tucking her chin to her chest and slowly rounding her spine forward. I’m almost thinking of moving one segment of a time moving all the way down and then reversing that slowly all the way up.
So we’re getting the segmental control of the back, and we’re doing this for a couple of reasons. Number one, it builds a lot of awareness when you slowly move segment by segment of where your back is in space. And number two, it does a great job of building total mobility of the entire posterior chain.
I think many people underestimate how much mobility the low back needs for certain movements, especially the CrossFit population where we’re doing things like deadlifts and kettlebell swings.
We need to be able to flex our spine for those movements and individuals with a stiff low back, that stiffness can often become irritable.
So I like opening that up with the Jefferson curl as a lower back prehab exercise, as well as those GHD exercises to build more strength and isolate the low back musculature.
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