4 Effective Lower Back Exercises to Prevent Injury and Back Pain

This excellent video from Jeremy Ethier demonstrates why and how you can use these lower back exercises to prevent injury and back pain.

Improving the strength and coordination of the Lower Back is a great way to help prevent lower back pain and injury further down the line.

Lower Back Exercises to Prevent Injury

1. Back Squat
2. Deadlift
3. Back Extension
4. Bird Dog

The Back Squat and the Deadlift

These two compound lifts should be a central part of everyone’s training.

They are highly effective for building muscle, strength, stability, confidence and a much stronger lower back.

Despite all their positives, Jeremy points out a few negatives, “However, there are problems. First, not everyone does them.

Secondly, a lot of people don’t perform these relatively heavy enough to actually provide enough stimulus to their lower back.

And lastly, multiple studies have also indicated that without proper stabilization of the pelvis, the much larger and stronger hamstring and glutes often tend to take over and do most of the back extension work instead.”

The second two exercises are used slightly less.

Back Extension and Bird Dog

Jeremy explains his reasoning, “Back extensions fill in the gap perfectly by stabilizing the pelvis such that the lower back can be better activated and strengthened to a much greater degree than other exercises, which it’s been consistently shown to do so.

And although high loading of the back extensors as we’ve previously done is an ideal way to strengthen them, research shows that an additional exercise that demands more stability is required to selectively recruit individual muscles that play a greater role in stabilizing the lower back.

That’s the bird dog; it also manages to elicit greater activation of the lower back stabilizer muscles with minimal spinal compression.”

Video

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