Your glutes are the big muscles of your hip, bottom and lower back - they’re the ones
you feel when you do a deep squat. And they are really important when it comes to
keeping your spine healthy. When working to their full potential, your glutes can
carry a lot of the load that would otherwise fall to your lower back meaning less risk
of injury to your spine or damage to the smaller back muscles.

The relationship between glutes and back pain
By making sure your glutes are working hard you can reduce stress and tension on
your lower back.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? It’s not necessarily!
Many people have something called gluteal amnesia meaning the glutes shut off
allowing other muscles to do all the work instead. This means that your spine may
not getting the protection it needs from the surrounding muscles day to day as you
move around. But worse than this, for many people, even when they are using the
correct exercise to build core strength and stability and reduce back pain, if the
glutes are no...

People often don’t appreciate how important exercise is for the spine both in terms of building strength and increasing resilience. Incorporating simple stretches and movements into your day is a great habit to get into whether you currently suffer with lower back pain, you have in the past or you just want to protect yourself against future problems.

But the methods I show you in the video above don’t concentrate on the traditional fitness exercises you might normally expect. Instead we’ll look at three ways in which exercise can help to support your spine both now and in the future:

1. Transferable skills
2. Building resilience
3. Activating the glute muscles

Back and spine strengthening exercises

If you suffer from a weakness in your spine, traditional exercise can cause stress to build up, creating pain or discomfort when undertaking certain movements. By instead concentrating on specific exercises that have been designed to support the spine you’ll be able to release this tens...

Exercise for low back pain should be therapeutic rather than for fitness, this stage comes next. As your back becomes painful your body will tighten muscles to protect the spine but this creates a muscle imbalance.

Why does your body create a muscle imbalance?

The quick answer, to protect the spine short term but this creates a long-term problem. The psoas muscle becomes tight because it’s closest to the spine and offers short-term stability to spine. If this tightness stays long term it can put unnecessary stress on the spine and trigger back pain.

If one muscle tightens its opposite muscle relaxes

If your psoas becomes tight your gluteal muscles (buttocks) become relaxed. The goal of exercise is to readdress this balance, it means relaxing the tight muscles (psoas) with stretches and activating the relaxed muscle (gluteals) with exercise.

What stretches loosen the psoas muscle?

The psoas starts each side of your lumbar spine and up to the mid-back and diaphragm. It ends on the ...

Your low back

 There are two main parts to your low back, your pelvis and spine. The aim of Exercise for low back pain is to protect your spine using your muscles, tendons and fascia. To protect it they should stiffen, creating a structure to hold it in place. The better is can stiffen the more protection your muscles, tendons and fascia can offer.

Your muscles, tendons and fascia

 Your core muscles are the ones that protect your spine, tendons attach your muscles to bone and fascia hold all your muscles in position. Your core muscles should all work together, so exercises that try to isolate single muscles (like sit-ups and crunches) don’t protect your spine.

 Your Core

 It’s one unit and the sum of your muscles, tendons and fascia. If you can learn to activate all the muscles of your core you’ll increase the protection around your spine. One such way to activate all this muscles is described in the tutorial above.

Low back pain is a condition that can be so crippling you’re afraid to move. This however, is a bad idea. Of course there is a time when rest is essential but when pain allows movement is essential to your recovery.

Exercise for low back pain

By exercise for low back pain I don’t traditional fitness exercise, I mean exercise for low back pain. They are 2 different forms of exercise, traditional fitness exercise aim to fatigue the body and isn’t pain when pain and injury is involved. Exercise for low back pain challenges muscles but doesn’t fatigue them.

Movement for Rehabilitation

It also includes movement and in many cases the movement that triggered your pain. These movements should include everyday postures and positions that you’re already doing but doing them correctly. Moving better can reduce pressure on your low back and therefore reduce risk of low back pain.

Movements to improve include:

1. Lifting
2. Carrying
3. Pushing
4. Pulling
5. Rotating
6. Getting Up
7. Walking Running

Cor...

Lower back pain causes can be numerous and how to treat low back pain can be confusing. What is becoming clear however, is the importance of exercise for low back pain. It’s important for me to say, I don’t mean traditional fitness exercise that you see in gyms. I mean exercise for low back pain, many of the principles are the same, even some of the exercises are the same but you’re not trying to fatigue yourself to within an inch of your life.

What is exercise for low back pain?

Once the pain has reduced, it bridges the gap from injury or pain to full health and/or fitness. When I coach people with a bad back they are generally nervous or anxious about exercise and want to avoid the problem area. They think exercise is going to make their back worse and this is only true if they start with traditional fitness exercise or the wrong exercises for low back pain.

What is the right exercise for lower back pain?

The first thing to get right is your exercise and recovery balance. This id...

Non-specific low-back pain is defined as not attributed to a recognizable, known specific pathology (e.g. infection, tumor, osteoporosis, lumbar spine fracture, structure deformity, inflammatory disorder, radicular syndrome or cauda equine syndrome). Most cases of low-back pain are regarded as non-specific (a staggering 96%). A third type of low-back pain cause is a traumatic injury, such as a fall or sudden jarring of the back.

A muscle associated with the non-specific low-back pain is the psoas. It attaches to five lumbar vertebrae and the top femur. Muscle pain in the psoas is often related to tension, overuse or muscle injury from exercise or physically demanding work. You tend to experience pain either side of your lower back, during or just after activity. If muscle tension remains injuries can occur because of stress building up adding pressure to the spine and vertebrae attached to the psoas muscle.

With cases of psoas muscle tension, releasing the fatigue built up through ma...