In society, within the health and wellness bracket, we are taught moderation is key and excessive amounts of one thing is perceived as somewhat harmful. Processed meats, alcohol, refined carbohydrates, even chia seeds!
However, when it comes to lower back extension. I mean it is like people can’t get enough of it! The word ‘excessive’ just wouldn’t do this concept any justice – whatsoever!
It’s like.. “I’m arching hard through my lower back when I work, walk, run, stand-up, lie-down, or even shower. I know.. I’m going to go to the gym and arch it even harder for the entire session, whilst I lift heavy weights.”
It is just madness!
Let’s break this down:
Next time you are in the gym, exercise class or maybe scrolling through the fitness algorithms on instagram – just observe people arching through their lower back.
Chest pressing, shoulder pressing, rowing, squatting, lunging, etc, you name it.
This isn’t natural lordotic curvature of the spine, this is someone with little to virtually zero hip extension – arching through their lower back in a desperate attempt to produce force.
The vast majority of humans will not own zero degrees of hip extension. Zero degrees is super easy to understand. It is simply the leg angle of a human when they are standing or laid down flat on their back (corpse pose).
If you lay down on your back, legs long and your lower back is arching off the floor – you have run out of hip extension and you’re now compensating by anteriorly orienting (dumping as a unit) the pelvis whilst arching through the lower back. Exactly the same if you stand up and there are creases in your t-shirt around the lower back area or there’s a visible lower back arch or hyperextended knees.
Continuing on, it is important to note that hip extension is a joint movement throughout the whole chain the allows us to produce force into the ground. It requires the space between our sacrum and sit-bone to open. It is associated with muscles such as the VMO, anterior glute med, glute max, medial hamstrings. (All those muscles that may have been labelled “weak”. They are not weak ha ha – but that is another discussion).
So if most humans have very limited hip extension, it is fair to say that the majority of their daily lives are spent in extension. Making muscles very concentric and squeezed, restricting blood flow and nutrients to key structures like spinal discs.
Ever wondered how your reoccurring bulged or herniated disks began? It was blood flow restriction due to repetitive lower back extension (lack of internal rotation/hip extension).
So it makes little sense when people visit the gym, and they:
- Chest presses with their feet on the ground and their back arched.
- Overhead press with their back in horrific amounts of extension.
- Squat or lunge with huge amounts of lower back compression.
- Even sit on machines and perform back rows with their lower back arched, etc, etc!
That’s why it feels incredible for people to curl up into a child’s pose and breath at the end of the day. They gave their lower back some expansion and blood flow, they yielded and relaxed the chronically squeezed tissue – it felt great!
So surely we should be working on improving hip extension by perhaps lifting weights without extending hard through the lower back?
Next time you exercise, have a little look in the mirror. Are your chest/shoulder/glute/quad/
I have literally changed people’s lives by improving their hip extension. Decades of chronic pain – gone! Sometimes in a matter of weeks.