Tl;dr

Your spine needs two types of stability to stay healthy: static stability, which holds the vertebrae in place and dynamic stability, which allows smooth movement while keeping your core and hips working correctly.

Rebuilding both is key for managing low back pain, improving posture, and moving more effectively. And it’s not just about strengthening the lower back muscles.

What is static stability and why does my spine need it?

Static stability is your spine’s ability to stay in place.

The five lumbar vertebrae have no bony structures holding them together, so the muscles and fascia around them have to do that job.

Key contributors to static stability include quadratus lumborum (QL) and psoas, the thoracolumbar fascia, which connects to spinal processes and other muscles, bringing in the longissimus, iliocostalis, and latissimus dorsi. Plus the glute muscles, which stabilise the pelvis from underneath.

These muscles hold your spine steady even when you’re not moving, ...

Is spinal flexion really causing low back pain? | The truth about bending your back

Tl:dr Is bending bad for my back?

Spinal flexion (bending forward) on its own isn’t inherently harmful.

The risk of low back pain flares when flexion is combined with heavy loads, high repetition, or a history of back pain. If flexion triggers your pain, it’s helpful to minimize it and modify posture or movement.

Individual assessment is key to understanding your limits and moving safely.

If you’ve ever been told that bending your spine is inherently bad for your back, it’s time to set the record straight. In the tutorial above, I broke down what spine flexion really does, when it matters, and how it relates to low back pain. All based on current research and expert guidance.

Spine flexion on its own isn’t the problem

There’s a lot of controversy around spine flexion. Bending your spine forward naturally changes how the spine and surrounding tissues are loaded, but the good news is that flex...

tl;dr Is twisting bad for your spine?

Twisting, in itself, isn’t necessarily a problem. But frequent exposure to flexed and rotated spinal positions will increase your risk, particularly under load. Especially when posture, duration, and lifting forces aren’t managed well.

Understanding your own movement patterns - through assessment rather than guesswork, gives you the information you need to make smarter decisions about how you move, work and train.

How does twisting impact your lower back?

Spinal rotation, or twisting, is a natural movement – if we think about it we probably do it numerous times during the day. And usually without incident.

But under load, twisting can become one of the most damaging mechanisms for the lower back. That’s why, in the video tutorial above I wanted to get into the science behind rotational stress and how it affects the discs, ligaments, and joints of the spine.

Drawing on research by Lehman (2019) and Coenen et al. (2013) I discuss how different ...

The McGill Big 3 exercises are often recommended for people with low back pain, but there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about what they actually do. Some people try them expecting immediate pain relief and then feel frustrated when that doesn’t happen.

That doesn’t mean, however, that they’re not working.

That’s why, in this tutorial I spent some time talking about the real purpose of McGill’s Big 3.

What do the McGill Big 3 actually do?  

McGill’s Big 3 core exercises set out to do two essential things – I’ll talk about the first here and the second later on in the article.

The first is to activate the muscles around the core, including the posterior muscles (back of the body), the lateral muscles (sides of the torso) and the anterior muscles (front of the body)

These muscles attach to and support the five lumbar vertebrae. Unlike the upper spine, the lower back doesn’t have a rib cage to help hold everything in place, so it’s the muscles of the core that provide the sta...

When most people think about fixing their back pain, they jump straight to stretches or core exercises. But there’s one overlooked area that can make a huge difference - your hips.

That’s where an exercise called the hip aeroplane comes in. It’s perfect for improving hip mobility, stability, and balance, all of which directly affect how your lower back feels.

Why your hips matter for a healthy back

Your hips and lower back are very much connected. When your hips move well and stay strong, your lower back doesn’t have to overcompensate. But when your hips are stiff or unstable, your back ends up doing more work than it should.

And this can lead to pain.

The hip aeroplane works three key muscles that protect your back:

• Glute Max – your main powerhouse muscle in the buttocks.
• Glute Medius & Minimus – smaller muscles around the sides of your hips, that control stability and side-to-side movement.

When these muscles are strong and active, they take pressure off your spine during...

When most people think about back pain, they think about muscles, maybe their core, maybe their posture. But there’s another major player that often gets ignored, and that’s the bones.

That might sound surprising, but if you’re struggling with long-term back discomfort, understanding how your bones work, and how they change as you age, can be a game-changer for managing pain and protecting your spine in the future.

Let’s dive into how your bones develop, what happens to them over time, and how simple lifestyle changes (like the right kind of exercise) can help prevent bone loss and promote lifelong skeletal health

The life cycle of bones: how bones grow

Believe it or not, you weren’t born with "real" bones. At birth, your skeleton was mostly made of cartilage, the soft, flexible stuff you find in your nose and ears. Over time, minerals like calcium and phosphorus get laid into that cartilage, slowly turning it into hard, strong bone.

As a child and teenager, your bones were consta...

When I was a teenager, I injured my lower back.

Not in the gym. Not lifting something heavy. But playing skittles - a game, here in the UK, that’s similar to ten pin bowling.

My job was to reset the pins at the end of the alley - a repetitive task that involved bending down, again and again.

The load wasn’t heavy, but the repetitive flexion of my spine several nights a week eventually led to injury. I didn’t know what was wrong. The pain would come and go.

I wasn’t training, I didn’t have a strong back, and gym culture for teenagers wasn’t really a thing at the time.

Would having a stronger back have helped prevent this injury?

People all over social media will tell you, "Strengthen your lower back and it will fix your pain."

They’ll tell you back extensions, deadlifts, core work will all work to solve your problem.

But I’m not so sure.

I’m here to explore the idea that low back strength is not the answer. At least, not the full answer.

Let’s look at another example - this t...

There’s a long held myth that our levels of low back pain are directly attributable to western culture and sitting at a desk for eight hours a day. Suggesting manual workers, farmers for example, are better off. Even medics, tend to assume that staying active in this way – bending, lifting, carrying - is better for muscular skeletal or low back health. But is it? I’m not so sure.

In this video I’m taking a look at some of the studies done of people in Africa and Asia, who carry huge loads on their back or perform work bending over from the hip in the paddy fields for hours a day. And the impact this has on their spinal health and the incidence of low back pain. After all, they don’t have ergonomic advice given to them, they just stand or lift how they’ve been taught by the generations before them.

So are they really better off, simply because they’re moving all day and not sedentary?

Published research into manual labour in lower socio-economic countries

The first study¹ I’ll discu...

Have you been told you should be doing strengthening exercises for your weak lower back?

Before you do, read on to find out why strengthening lower back muscles in the traditional way should be avoided, and why there’s a better way when it comes to choosing exercises for low back strength.

Often when we talk about rehabilitation and muscle strength, we look at individual muscles and what we can do to put force through them to build them up. But it’s time we took a wider perspective on it.

I came across this quote from Gray Cook’s book, Movement:

“It's common to seek stabilisation programs that attempt to train stabilisers like prime movers, using concentric and eccentric movements. This assumes that strengthening the stabilisers will cause them to stabilise more effectively.  Common strengthening programs are applied to muscles with a stabilisation role which will increase the concentric strength but have little impact on the timing and recruitment which are the essence of stabilis...

Do you worry that your lower back is in pain simply because you're getting older? While this is partly true because more time has passed, there will still be specific reasons causing the discomfort.

We’ve talked, previously, about sciatica, disk bulging and herniation and various other conditions or disorders that can affect the lower back. Now, in this tutorial, I talk about how these injuries can occur. So you can understand better, and identify quicker, any movements or postures that might be causing damage to your low back. Making it easier to rehabilitate.

What causes lower back injury?

Firstly, it’s important to note there may be genetic factors at play here. Things that have impacted parents or other relatives could give you a clue as to what’s going on. Alternatively, there might have been one traumatic event or injury that has taken place. Something like a car accident or fall from a height that’s created a crack in a vertebra, or a disk bulge.

But as a general rule, thes...