How to Avoid Lower Back Pain From Squats | Men’s Health Muscle
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00:00 Whenever you program squats into your workout, you are expecting a world of pain.
00:04 The thing is we want that pain in certain areas.
00:07 We want it in our quads, glutes, and hamstrings.
00:09 That's why we're training the squat in the first place.
00:11 When that pain progresses into our lower back, that's when you potentially have problems.
00:16 Lower back pain after squats can feel horrible and it can get worse than that too.
00:21 It can take you out of sync from your training period and keep you out of the gym.
00:24 It can wreck your everyday life and it's just not going to make squatting fun.
00:28 It's just not going to make squatting an exercise that you're looking forward to.
00:31 The thing with lower back pain is we can usually get in front of it.
00:35 If we prepare the right way and if we dial in our form properly, we're going to avoid that issue.
00:40 So let's look at the four most common reasons why you might be getting lower back pain from your squats
00:45 and exactly how we can fix them in just a couple minutes.
00:48 Before we dive into our four specific issues that might be causing lower back pain,
00:52 we've got to understand the difference between good lower back pain and bad lower back pain.
00:56 Because yes, there is sometimes a situation where our lower back is going to feel it the day after squats.
01:02 You've got to keep in mind that no matter whether you're doing your squat well or not,
01:07 your spinal erectors, these thick muscles that kind of support our spine and help pull us into spinal extension,
01:13 they are active during the squat and they're helping us straighten up as we stand up on every single rep.
01:19 That means they're getting work and if you go heavy enough, if you pile up enough reps,
01:23 your spinal erectors might feel it the day after.
01:25 If they're a little bit sore, that's okay.
01:27 The point where this becomes bad back pain though is when that erector soreness is different from side to side.
01:33 If you have a strain on one of your spinal erectors, say on the left side, but the right side feels fine,
01:38 that's when we might have an issue.
01:39 The other point where you might have an issue is when you're not really feeling it in the muscle at all
01:44 and we're feeling it in the spine, we're feeling it in our discs, that's the other time when we have an issue.
01:49 So make sure you understand the difference.
01:51 It's okay to be sore in your lower back after you're done squatting.
01:55 What you want to avoid is that uneven soreness or soreness that is not coming from your spinal erectors
02:00 and is coming from your spine instead.
02:02 Now we're going to run through the four main reasons that are going to cause lower back pain during your squat.
02:07 The first of these is really very simple.
02:09 It's you're not warming up enough.
02:11 Your spinal erectors, especially if you spend your entire day sitting, they're not a muscle that is generally tight.
02:17 In fact, they're very lax when we're just sitting at our job.
02:20 So what we actually really need to do is get them ready to train.
02:23 And if we don't really prepare them properly, and if we don't understand the movement that our spine is really capable of during the squat,
02:29 then we're just not going to have the awareness and we're going to drop down into that first heavy rep
02:33 and it's very, very easy for one of them to get tight or for one of them to strain.
02:37 So what we want to think about is how we warm up for the squat.
02:40 We're not just going to step under, say, 225, 225 pounds and immediately back squat it.
02:44 But we want to go through a little bit of a warm up.
02:46 And we can keep this pretty simple.
02:48 It doesn't need to take a lot of time, but you want to spend, one, a little bit of time just mobilizing your spine
02:54 and moving your erectors through a full range of motion.
02:57 And we can do that with a simple move called the cat cow.
02:59 Now, this is a very common warm up exercise.
03:01 It's a very easy warm up exercise.
03:03 And the benefit of doing the cat cow specifically for the squat is that we're taking our spinal erectors through that full range of motion.
03:10 When we are in the arch position, our spinal erectors are flexed.
03:14 And you want to think about that, especially if you're using this as a warm up to your squat.
03:18 And once we round our back into that hollow position, our spinal erectors are getting really, really good stretch.
03:24 So we're preparing our erectors for work, and we're starting to create a little bit of blood flow there.
03:28 You're also starting to create a lot of awareness for yourself personally about what your spine is capable of.
03:34 When we are generally doing a squat, we want to think about having our spine in neutral.
03:38 You're going to be able to find neutral because you have rounded your back and you have arched your back aggressively.
03:43 So we're going to start with that.
03:45 You want to do, say, two rounds of that.
03:47 You don't need to spend a whole ton of time here.
03:49 40 seconds on, 20 off.
03:51 Once you're done with that, we can do other warm up exercises.
03:54 And it never hurts to get a couple of Spiderman lunges in there.
03:56 If you're in a rush, though, you can immediately jump into squatting, but you're not going to start with your work weight.
04:02 Instead, what we want to do is we want to start with the bar.
04:06 And you're literally just going to perform squats with the bar.
04:09 Get your warm up down that way.
04:11 Understand how your erectors feel.
04:13 Understand how your lower back feels and understand your squat form.
04:16 With that, this is also going to help you, too, in the long run.
04:19 If you warm up like this, you're going to be a lot more powerful in your squat long term.
04:23 From there, think about getting 33% of your training weight on the bar.
04:27 Whatever you really want to train at.
04:29 And let's do another five reps.
04:31 Then you'll put 66% of your training weight on the bar.
04:34 Get another three to five reps.
04:36 And then you're into your work set.
04:38 And then with that warm up, your erectors will be ready for action.
04:41 So the next three mistakes we're going to look at are not about what you're doing before you're squatting.
04:45 They're something you're doing as you're squatting.
04:47 And the first of these is easily the most common and the one you're going to hear about the most in the gym.
04:52 That is you're rounding your back as you lower into the bottom of the squat.
04:56 This is essentially the dreaded butt wing, where we're really not in control of our hips as we're lowering into the squat.
05:01 And as a result, we wind up rounding our back in that bottom position.
05:05 Some people can get by with this and they're not going to have back pain either because they've built up a lot of tolerance
05:10 or they have a certain level of resiliency just to start.
05:13 But for most of us, this is not a great position to squat from.
05:16 And here's why.
05:18 When we're lowering into that rounded back position, very similar to us rounding our back during cat-cow,
05:24 our spinal erectors are in a relaxed position.
05:27 And that is not a position that can really support our spine, especially when we have a load on our back.
05:33 Then when we try to instantly get those muscles to go from that relaxed position at the bottom of our squat rep
05:39 into a contracted position so that we can get our back in neutral and drive up from the squat,
05:44 that doesn't necessarily work well.
05:46 So how do we get around that?
05:48 There are two things that we can do to solve this.
05:50 The first of these is when you're starting all your squat reps, make sure to start by pushing your butt back.
05:57 That's going to, in theory, help us to maintain a little bit more of a neutral spine as we lower and avoid rounding.
06:04 Think of your butt being the body part that goes the farthest back when you squat
06:08 and keep everything else ever so slightly in front.
06:11 This will help you maintain a neutral spine as you're squatting,
06:14 and it's one way that we can fix this butt wink issue.
06:17 The other thing that we can do, very often if that's not working for you,
06:21 the simple fix is don't go quite that deep.
06:24 You want to actually take video of yourself when you're squatting.
06:26 Take it from a profile angle, that way you can see how you're lowering into your squats,
06:30 and do this while you're warming up.
06:33 If you're rounding, then you're going to very quickly see that you get to a certain point in your depth
06:38 and you just run out of space for your hips to go backwards,
06:41 and you run out of space for your knees to translate forward,
06:44 and your body is simply compensating by rounding your back.
06:47 That means you're going a little deep at this point for your mobility.
06:50 Yes, you want to be able to get deep into a squat at some point.
06:54 You want to have the capacity to squat, has to grasp,
06:57 but that doesn't mean you're ready for it now.
06:59 So you just need to cut your squat depth a little bit.
07:01 That should very quickly solve this butt wink issue.
07:04 The second issue we're going to run into every so often
07:07 is the exact opposite of rounding our back as we lower,
07:10 and that is excessively arching your back as you lower.
07:14 And essentially, this is an overcorrection for rounding our back.
07:18 We're taught and we learn very quickly that we shouldn't round our back in the gym.
07:22 Any gym bro will tell you that.
07:24 And so as a result, we try to arch our back excessively to compensate for that,
07:28 and we think it's a nice safe position.
07:30 And the truth is it is a relatively safe position for the discs of our spine when we're squatting,
07:36 but because we're in that very, very shortened position for our erectors
07:40 and they're staying in that position, they can eventually get very sore,
07:44 and you can wind up feeling this.
07:45 So how do we avoid this excessively arched back position when we're squatting?
07:50 What we're really playing for on all of our squats,
07:52 whether we're doing a front squat or a back squat or a goblet squat,
07:56 is we want to keep our spine neutral.
07:58 So the two things we can do, the easiest form fix is,
08:01 one, we're going to think about not letting our ribcage flare when we're squatting,
08:05 and I'm going to think about keeping my abs nice and tight.
08:08 What that's going to do is instantly when I'm not flaring my ribcage,
08:12 pulling my abs downwards is going to get my lumbar spine a lot more organized,
08:16 and it's going to help me maintain a neutral position.
08:19 That is your first fix.
08:21 If that doesn't work or if that's not really comfortable for you while you're squatting,
08:25 then the other thing we're going to do is we're going to switch the squat variation that we're doing.
08:29 Instead of doing back squats, which really, really invite us into that excessively arched back position,
08:35 we're going to switch to a goblet squat,
08:37 and this is a nice, safe squat that you can still load.
08:39 It's a very underestimated squat in that regard, and to be honest,
08:42 if you have not maxed out the dumbbells in your gym on the goblet squat,
08:47 you really don't need to be back squatting in the first place.
08:49 But when we switch to the goblet squat, it's going to help us organize ourselves a little bit,
08:53 organize our form a little bit, and that's going to help get us out of that horrible habit of excessively arching our back.
08:59 It's going to save us a little bit of back soreness the day after.
09:02 And perhaps the most advanced issue we're going to see in the squat that can lead to lower back pain
09:07 is something called the good morning fall.
09:09 And essentially what's happening here when we do this good morning fall,
09:13 essentially what happens is we try to straighten at the knees first,
09:18 and then we try to straighten at the hips after that.
09:21 That leaves us in a really, really vulnerable position a lot of times with a lot of load,
09:26 if we're doing a very heavy back squat, where our chest is tipped forward,
09:30 and our lower back has to take all the strain.
09:33 We've offloaded the squat from our quads and our hamstrings and our glutes,
09:38 and we've placed it in our glutes a little bit, but mostly on those erectors,
09:42 and we then have to really, really flex hard in order to get us to stand up.
09:46 That is a recipe for something to pull.
09:49 It is also not the best way to really get a good leg burn out of our squats.
09:53 So how do we avoid this mistake?
09:55 Once again, what we're going to do is we're going to switch squat styles
09:59 so that we can perfect our form with something else.
10:02 And in this case, we're going to go to a squat that's going to allow us to still move some load,
10:07 but it's really, really going to instantly indicate if we are shifting our hips forward
10:12 or if we're out of balance in our squat.
10:14 We're going to go to something called the Frankenstein squat.
10:16 And essentially on this squat, instead of holding the weight with our hands
10:19 and instead of placing any pressure on our rectors,
10:21 all we're going to do is we're going to essentially rest the weights on our shoulders with our hands out.
10:27 And in this position, if our torso tips forward at all, if we get even close to that good morning fall,
10:33 essentially the entire bar is going to roll off of us.
10:36 We don't want that to happen.
10:38 So simply because of that, it's going to gradually clean up your squat form.
10:41 And if you stick with that for say three to four weeks,
10:44 you'll gradually start to understand how your spine is supposed to move in the squat
10:48 and how to avoid that good morning fall, and you'll get out of that bad pattern.
10:52 So those are four of the most common reasons that you might be dealing with lower back pain when squatting.
10:58 And the great thing about these four issues is they're super correctable.
11:02 As soon as you implement these changes and gradually gain more mastery over your form,
11:06 you're going to avoid lower back pain in your squat.
11:08 And that means that we can keep the burn exactly where we want it on our quads, hamstrings, and glutes,
11:13 and we're going to see those muscles grow, and we can do that and keep loading and keep getting stronger.
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