With the rising popularity of Dr. Stuart McGill and his work on the lumbar spine in the health and fitness community, people have started to understand that excessive lumbar motion leads to injuries.  The extent of his research (which he has been leading for years) have given all of us a better understanding of the spine, how it works, how it should move, and what leads to injuries.

This is a MUST read. Period.

Like many other things in the fitness business, it caused an overreaction.  We started avoiding movement at the lumbar spine at any cost.  We started to focus on the hips and the thoracic spine as the places to improve mobility, which I’m not going to say it’s a bad thing because that is exactly what most people need; more mobility in the t-spine and the hips.

This overreaction, though, caused us to ignore that there is a certain degree of movement that is normal to have at the lumbar spine.

As you can see in the chart, although the biggest potential for rotation is at the thoracic spine, the lumbar spine still have a couple of degrees of rotation.  The same thing applies for flexion and extension.

To better understand the reason to why we actually need range of motion at the lumbar spine I’ll refer to the pendulum theory that Charlie Weingroff introduced a little while ago.  To quote Charlie:

“So every joint has a core and it has a neutral that is decided just like a pendulum.  It has to know that the stiffness properties allows it to go all the way to the left, right, front, back, etc., so it can rest with no effort in the middle, the position of optimal force transfer.

The clinical application is that the spine’s neutral is a function of full flexion, full extension, full side bending, and full rotation. Then and only then does the core have it’s premiere chance to do as little work as possible for segmental stabilization, and the phasic lumbar muscles can pick up the bracing slack to handle huge loads and force transfers.

If you don’t have yoga-ish mobility, the middle is always off-center, and the local stabilizers (of any joint system) aren’t triggered ideally via the brain getting “wrong” feedback from the joint receptors (…)”

What this means is simply that if your body doesn’t have a proper “neutral”, everything is going to be affected, compensation takes over, and injuries eventually happen.

Even if the goal should always be to lift weights and reinforce proper movement pattern with a perfectly neutral spine, it doesn’t mean that you’re body shouldn’t “own” that range of motion at the lumbar spine.

My personal story is a pretty interesting one in this regard.  Since reading the work of Dr. McGill years ago I became a strong advocate in limiting motion at the lumbar spine.  When I say I was doing everything with a neutral spine, I mean everything: sitting, brushing my teeth, tying my shoes, and even putting socks on in the morning!  Have you ever tried putting socks on in the morning without allowing any sort of lumbar flexion? Trust me it’s not that easy!  But I was doing it!

Not quite like this, but that far off!

I was also getting pretty strong for my height and my body structure, I was deadlifting a decent amount of weight and I never allowed myself to have anything less than perfect form on every single rep I was doing.

About 2 years ago, I started to get a little less zealous about the whole neutral spine thing in my everyday life.  A couple of months later, I was brushing my teeth in the morning and as I was bending over to spit in the sink I felt a sharp pain go through my right lower back just above my right SI joint.  A couple hours later, I couldn’t bend over at all, and I mean not at all.  Even breaking at the hips slightly to grab a glass from the kitchen table was impossible.  The pain started to go away after 3-4 days, but my back bothered me for a couple of weeks.  And weirdly enough, a similar event happened about 8 months later.

It’s only when I learned about the SFMA, the pendulum theory and other philosophies along the same line that I realized that my lumbar spine wasn’t flexing at all, which was later confirmed to me by a good friend of mine who’s an enlightened physical therapist.

I’ve been working on my lumbar flexion more recently and making sure my toe touch, as per the SFMA, stays intact and turns out my back has been feeling much better.

That doesn’t mean I’m doing silly stuff like stiff-legged deadlift with a rounded back, or crunches and sit-ups, but I’m doing isolated mobility exercises that don’t involve any type of loading to make sure that my pendulum is in the right “neutral” position.

Do you ever assess for lumbar range of motion?  You might be surprised at what you’ll find.

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Everyone who’s been lifting for a while knows there should be some ground rules about the way we should behave in a gym, some sort of etiquette.  You know, the kind of rules that will help you be considered a normal human being even under heavy lifting conditions and more than aything else that won’t make you look like a douchebag in the gym.  So that being said, I decided to put a list of my own.  Here it is in no particular order.

1. Sleeveless shirt are not acceptable.  I don’t care what your excuse is and if it is because you feel more comfortable with it, if you’re wearing sleeveless shirts to lift, you’re really just showing off.

2. On a related note, it’s not called an UNDERshirt for nothing.

I don’t care how jacked you are, you shouldn’t wear this to lift.

3. If you’re talking during a set, it’s not heavy enough.  Females included.  Period.

4. This is nothing new, but worth reiterating: doing curls in the squat rack is totally unacceptable.  Bodybuilding enthusiasts need to understand this.  I’m this close to exercising my vengeance and doing like this kid in every single commercial gym in America:

You think it’s ridiculous? So next time, stay away from the squat rack when you do curls, Johnny Baloney!

5. Speaking of curls, it seems to be every beginner’s favorite exercise.  But honestly, if you can’t do 5 bodyweight chin ups, I don’t even know why you’re wasting your time doing curls. 

6. Your cellphone should be turned off and put in your locker as you walk in the gym.  It amazes me how it’s becoming such a plague among exercise enthusiasts to send text messages in between sets when they lift.  How are you supposed to be focused and ready to lift heavy weights with such a distraction!  Time between sets should be better spent doing stretches, corrective exercises and other “filler exercises” that are going to make your time in the gym more effecient and really help you in the long run.  Plus, recent studies have clearly demonstrated that sending text messages between sets decreases your testosterone levels and makes you less attractive to members of the opposite sex. 

7. You should be able to squat and deadlift wayyyy more than you can bench press.  If that’s not the case, you know what you need to start doing more than once a week, right?

8. No crunches.  I mean EVER!  There is a time and a place for doing crunches; that time is never and that place is nowhere.  Seriously, it’s 2010, and we know by now that there are far better options to work your core muscles other than doing crunches, which let’s face it are as useless as Kim Kardashian. 

And no, crunches won’t shed off the fat around your midsection.  Add to the fact that a hgh volume of crunches will make your posture significantly worse because of the attachement point of the rectus abdominis on the lower ribs.  Also, crunches are really just a flexion of your lumbar spine, which according to the most knowledgeable researcher in the world on lower back, Dr. Stuart McGill, is one of the most common injury mechanism on the lumbar spine.

9. Unless you’re hitting a PR, there is no reason why you would grunt and moan on every single rep of an 8 rep set of DB chest press. Yes I’m talking about you Matt!

Granted on the video he’s hitting a PR (405 x 5, which is more than I can do!).  But now imagine him, doing every rep of a scap wall slide making the same noise!  Nothing will get you demoted faster at Endeavor. (Kidding Mat…not really!)

10. Proven fact, you need to include one or more of the following on your workout playlist if you want to make substantial gains: Slipknot, Rise Against, Marilyn Manson, Busta Rhymes, Eminem, DMX, Lil Wayne, Linkin Park, Rage Against the Machine, System of a Down and Phil Collins (I might have forgotten a few acceptable options…)