How to Prevent Back Pain from Lifting Weights
Back pain is one of the most common things that people experience after working out. In this article we will learn, what we can do to minimize the discomfort and avoid lower back injuries.
I have experienced back pain numerous times after working out and a little bit of discomfort in my opinion is expected. After performing some heavy deadlifts, my back remains sore for a few days. There are a lot of people who say that your back should not be sore after deadlifts and I simply don’t understand their logic. Deadlift is a lower back exercise, it engages your lower back, and so your lower back is going to be sore. Just as your chest is sore after you bench press, your back will be sore after you perform deadlifts. If it is not sore then you are not putting in enough effort in your deadlifts. This soreness however disappears after a few days. If you feel discomfort in your back all the time then you need to evaluate what you might be doing wrong that is causing it. Here I will discuss some of the things that you can do to minimize back discomfort. Before we go there though, we must understand the source of back discomfort.
Biomechanics of Back Injury
Our spine is made of 24 vertebras. All these vertebras are connected to each other through a disc.
Each disk consists of a soft inner part and a hard outer part. When we perform heavy squats and deadlifts, these disks compress under the load. During this compression, if a certain disk is compressed beyond a certain level the soft part of the disk might protrude out.
This generally happens when you try to lift something in a clumsy posture or you bend your back and try to lift something heavy. These positions put a lot of stress on one side of the disc, pinching it and causing protrusion. Such a protrusion compresses the nerves traveling through your spine, resulting in pain and discomfort.
The discomfort cannot only be limited to your back, but also to your leg and toes. The situation is known as herniated slip disk. Even when there is no slip disk, the soft inner part can get moderately pinched putting pressure on the nerves and causing discomfort.
Avoiding Back Injury
To avoid back injury, you need to make sure that while performing all your exercises you keep your spine neutral. This way the stress on your discs will be evenly distributed and the pinching of the disc will not occur.
The well-known technique for keeping your spine neutral while exercising is to keep your core tight and engaged. This way you will be able to stabilize your foundation and minimize the stress on your back. The trick for keeping the core tight is to pull your belly inwards during the movement, popularly known as bracing your core. Exercises to improve your core brace include performing plank, Ab Rollout, Farmer’s carry and Curl up.
Back Pain While Strength Training
While performing lifts such as Squats and Deadlifts, it is extremely important that you keep your spine neutral while performing them. This way you can avoid pinching your disc. However keep in mind that your spine is going to feel the compression even when you are performing the exercise with correct form. Just like how a spring compresses if your put some weight on it, when you put 100 Kilos on your back, your spine is going to compress. As you go down and up, this compression is going to further increase. Similarly when you deadlift your pull a heavy weight from the ground. Now matter how neutral you keep your spine, there will be some compression in your spine just because you are lifting the weight up and then holding that weight in your arms at the top. If your back muscles and core muscles are not strong or not well engaged this compression is going to be even more pronounced.
So understand this that there is no avoiding your back compression when you do these exercises. Even if you execute your exercises with perfect form, there will be some compression. So under such a situation what can we do to minimize the discomfort and minimize our chances of injury?
Well first of all if you have an injured back then refrain from performing these exercises until you have fully recovered from your injury. How to recover from a back injury is beyond the scope of this article. Please consult your doctor and physiotherapist for that, I am not an expert on that. For those of you who have a healthy back, there are certain things you can do to minimize the discomfort.
Best Practices for Preventing Back Pain
Most of the people who go to the gym are usually in a hurry. They want to complete their workout in the shortest amount of time possible and then just get out of the gym and get on with their life. All they have in their mind is to build muscle and therefore what do they do? They go to gym and directly go on to perform their exercise at their max weight. Then as soon as they have completed their strength exercises, they pack their bags and leave. Moreover many a times people are just concerned about building up certain muscles and therefore they ignore the others. You all must have seen guys in your gym who just perform bench press or bicep curls. The result of all this is that they get plagued by injuries and back pain.
Such practices are futile; if you want to prolong your strength-training career and avoid injuries, avoid such mistakes. To avoid injuries make sure that your workout includes following three things:
1.Proper Warm Up
Through warm up you prepare your lower back for all the assaults it will have to take when you do squats and deadlifts. Warming up involves performing dynamic stretches and light warm up lifts. Performing dynamic stretches not only stretches your joints and muscles but also increases the temperature and blood flow in your muscles. Higher blood flow and temperature allow for higher contractile force been generated in your muscles. For the back the best dynamic stretches are standing dynamic twists and dynamic side-bends they are very simple and easy to. Perform 10 or more reps for each side.
After completing the dynamic stretches do not move directly to lifting your max weights instead start out with lighter weights to gently introduce your joints to the loads they will be subjected to. When we put moderate pressure on our joints, these joints absorb water. This reduces the friction in the joints and improves their ability to absorb shocks.
2.Proper Cool Down
After you have completed your workout, your disks have been compressed due to the heavy loads you have lifted. You now need to stretch out your back to decrease this compression and reduce pressure on your nerves. One of the easiest ways to stretch out the back is to just hang from a pull up bar for half a minute 2–3 times and let gravity do the work.
Another good way to reduce the compression is by performing child’s pose stretch. You can also stretch your back on foam roller. It is a lot of fun to perform these stretches, believe me you feel great after doing them. After completing your workout you can also decompress your spine by taking hot water baths.
3. Balanced Workout
Many of the guys who go to the gym are only interested in building their chest, arms and abs and therefore only perform exercises for these muscles. By only working on chest, arms and abs exercises their abs and chest become strong but their back still remains weak. This causes their back to round up and shoulders to slouch, giving them a poor posture. This bad posture and muscle imbalance negatively affect their biomechanics and many often complain of back pain. To avoid this always make sure that your workout is well balanced, in other words, it targets all the major muscle groups in our body equally, so that there are no muscle imbalances.
Bonus suggestions for avoiding back pain
4. Take De-Load Weeks
Performing compound lifts at your maximal effort can be very hard on the body. If you perform such workouts week after week, eventually fatigue will set in and your body will just give up. Therefore it is a very good idea to give your body some break every 3–6 weeks. This will give your body a chance to recover from all that fatigue. Your chances of injury will go down and your overall performance will improve.
By just following these simple techniques, you will be able to perform your workouts injury free.
To summarize, in order to minimize you chances of injury, your workout programs should not be just limited to strength training exercises but should also include a section for warm up exercises and cool down exercises. Also make sure that you are targeting all you muscle groups equally so that you do not have muscle imbalances. I hope I have answered your question Arun. If you have more questions or if there was something you wanted me to address that I did not address, you can leave a comment below and I will respond.
Originally published at www.kaa-yaa.com.
