Break All the Rules to Save Your Back From Chronic Pain!

We have all grown up and lived our entire lives hearing some variant of the well-meaning advice “lift with your legs, not with your back”; but it may be that following this advice is exactly why so many people have back pain every day. A simple rule of thumb like this can be incredibly powerful at helping people avoid injury in certain settings, but when it’s extrapolated to become an unyielding law of human movement - it often has unintended negative consequences.

Many people have been led to believe that the purpose of our core muscles is to prevent the spine from moving. Thanks to the popularity and influence of powerlifting, and the way they utilise their core to brace and prevent spinal flexion under load, many people think that’s the ultimate goal. Then there are all sorts of exercises like the plank which also resists flexion, the Pallof Press which resists rotation, and the Suitcase Carry which resists lateral flexion.

All of these exercises are great, but when you begin to think that keeping your spine completely rigid is the goal, and not simply one of its functions, you completely lose sight of the bigger picture. 

Our spine comprises an enormous amount of JOINTS, each one built to move and exert force. There’s a reason we don’t have one long contiguous vertebra.

This is a very difficult concept for many people to be convinced of, but your back genuinely evolved to move in a wide range of motions, and to exert force and endure load.

I first started clueing in on this when I realized how easy it was to help most of my clients who suffered back pain! 

There are joint issues which are complex, and others that are simple; but that doesn’t always correlate with easy solutions and hard solutions. Epicondylitis, also known as tennis elbow or golfer’s elbow, is a relatively simple and straightforward problem. There is inflammation in a tendon which leads to pain. The solution is quite difficult, can take months or even years, and affects how you go about training the rest of your body for as long as it persists. But to my surprise, while “back pain” can be incredibly complex, and the result of many different types of issues with many different types of tissues - the solution, in my experience, is often quite easy. Train all your muscles adequately.

It was utterly shocking how many people’s issues went away just from doing deadlifts, squats, lunges and planks. People who started training with me because their doctor asked them to prepare for upcoming hernia surgeries canceled their surgeries after a few months because all of their symptoms went away.

But I wasn’t done learning yet. Every year, at least one or two of my clients would have to cancel a training session because they “tweaked” their back shoveling snow. These were people with strong deadlifts, but they hurt themselves twisting a little bit?? This puzzled me, but I tried solving it by getting all my clients to do a few sets of hay-bailers once in a while. The cancellations stopped in their tracks. No one who was doing hay-bailers semi-regularly was hurting their backs shoveling snow any more.

The next thing I learned was that sometimes a small dull ache in the corner of the base of my client’s spine was easily, almost instantly solvable by having them do a set of deadbugs. I don’t even consider this an exercise, merely a stretch for the quadratus lomborum. An effective stretch. If the problem persists, I learned how rolling their glutes with a lacrosse ball was also a powerful tool.

At this point I considered myself pretty well versed at helping to resolve back pain. None of my clients had chronic back pain any more, but they would occasionally have a small but manageable flare-up. But then the real revelation came years later. The biggest, most surprising thing I learned was: the Zercher Deadlift. This was the exercise that flew directly against all the common wisdom I’d ever been taught. In this movement, you round your back as much as it’ll go, and you pick up something very heavy - straightening your back as you do it. The you put it down by bending your back again. Surely this was the most dangerous and incorrect thing one could ever do, right? I only started doing it because of my BJJ clients, who regularly found themselves in compromised positions and needed to be strong there. If they sound themselves in this precarious position, I reasoned we should at least have some exposure to it in strength training.

So I began implementing it with them, and on myself. The goal was humble - gain exposure in this position to hopefully not injure ourselves in specific situations in a chaotic sport. But the results far exceeded that. After a few weeks of training the ZDL, my back felt stronger and more flexible than it ever had in my life. My clients reported the same thing. I had grown muscles I’d never seen before, and picking up heavy deadlifts off the floor felt like cheating now. I noticed positive carryover in all my other lifts, and more importantly: my clients all felt amazing.

So I began implementing it with some of my other, non-BJJ clients, and sure enough everyone felt great. The final test was when I had a brand new client who was recovering from a serious back surgery after having fallen off a horse. She had nerve damage, and was still in pain almost daily. Despite her fears, she trusted me when I suggested the Zercher Deadlift. Ever since her surgery she had try to maintain perfect posture at all times, thinking that rounding her back was what caused her pain. I thought maybe the fact she wasn’t rounding her back might be why she was in so much pain, despite a successful surgery. She trusted me, and we tried it, very, very light at first. The results were almost immediate. After one session she felt less pain. Within a month, the pain was almost entirely gone. And within six months we were deadlifting and doing power cleans with weights she had never lifted before her surgery.

We need strength to function at full capacity, and we only become strong in motions we move in. If you’d like to gain this strength, message me to do a free fitness consultation, and maybe I can guide you in the safe and effective progression of strength exercises to solve back pain, and get you the strongest back of your life.