Never Hurt Your Back Exercises!

How DVRT Ultimate Sandbag Fitness Exercises Save Your Low Back!

I have to tell you, I kinda laughed yesterday. It wasn’t a laugh because something was funny, but it was so frustrating that I had to laugh! Have you ever had that happen? When you have tried to help people in a better way and they fight you on it only to be worse off?

Trust me, I don’t get any enjoyment out of saying, “I told you I was right!” Unless maybe it was towards Jessica;)

DVRT Ultimate Sandbag Fitness is our passion because we have designed it to help people train hard, get results, and minimize their risk of injury in the process. So, you could imagine my frustration when a colleague of mine went to teach at a major gym and found out that the majority of the trainers couldn’t participate because they were hurt!

Do I believe “stuff” happens? Sure, but when you start seeing a trend among a staff you have to ask, “are we doing the RIGHT things?” Before you scoff at this gym just not knowing what to do I will tell you that you shouldn’t be so quick to judge.

If I showed you the typical program from this gym you would PROBABLY say it is pretty good. They got their deadlifts, pull-ups, back squats, turkish get-ups, swings, much of the stuff that many fitness professionals would say it great. So why are so many getting  hurt?!

It Isn’t About Sandbag Fitness

Assuming you are one of the many cynics in today’s world, you might think I am going to say DVRT Ultimate Sandbag fitness to the rescue! Well, yes and no. Just adding Ultimate Sandbag fitness drills to your routine won’t necessarily make you better. What and WHY you do so might!

One of the things that still confuses me to this day is the realization that so many people experience low back issues and yet we put our backs at risk in training ALL the time!

There are really two reasons this keeps happening.

You aren’t ready!

Deadlifts can be good, it depends on a lot of things. How heavy are you going, do you know how to brace the trunk, are you engaging the upper body properly, can you use your hamstrings and glutes?

Most people honestly can’t say yes or answer appropriately to all these questions. That is a problem because it not only impacts how we perform a lift like the deadlift, but it prevents us from knowing if this is a GOOD exercise for you or the individual.

Are deadlifts good? Sure, are they good for everyone? Not really! So, how in the world are you suppose to know and figure all this out?

One answer is to simply understand what makes up and exercise and see how we can set good standards to knowing if the exercise is good for YOU!

A key to understanding a good exercise for your low back and what isn’t is that of compression and shear. These are actually a bit of complex terms, but what is key to know is that most of us are never tested or know how to test if our low backs can tolerate high levels of compression and shear. These two concepts happen to be the major causes of injury of most people’s low backs. The fact that most of us don’t know what we can tolerate is an issue and means we need to establish good foundations. What to do?

Use Exercises That You Can’t Cheat with Your Low Back

It is a pretty complex topic to get into shear and compression, but we can simply be smart about deciding how to form our training. For one, we can use exercises that we HAVE to use our glutes and hamstrings and are impossible to cheat with our low back. Like what?

One of my favorite are our Ultimate Sandbag fitness Up Downs. We talked about the incredible value of these variations last week (you can read HERE). Yet, there are WAY more! One of my personal favorites is something that seems so simple in Ultimate Sandbag fitness Step-up variations. Why?

For one, even if you do them wrong your risk of injury is very low! More importantly though, they give us great insight into your ability to use the RIGHT muscles during many of our strength based drills. Most people can’t help but make many of these mistakes….

Ultimate Sandbag Fitness Step-Up Compensations:

-Lean forward into the movement

-Use the bottom foot to push off

-Lower themselves too fast

-Are off balance when they drive up

While most would think that adding the Ultimate Sandbag is just a form of load, it is more than that. Depending upon WHERE we position the Ultimate Sandbag on the body, we stress the core and the right chains of the body differently. You might be strong in Front Load, but weak in the Shoulder position. That is important stuff to know!

Physical therapist, Mike O’Hara, does a great job showing a more advanced version of the step-up that takes this Ultimate Sandbag fitness exercise to the next level by adding tons of work by the core and lats.

You will also see Mr. O’Hara does other movements that show synergy among the core, lats, and glutes. The chains we MUST have in place to do anything heavy or powerful. However, what I love most is that he using our Ultimate Sandbag to force you in the right position where if your body wants to cheat you know right off the bat!

Sometimes these Ultimate Sandbag fitness exercise aren’t seen as “sexy” because you don’t hear weights crashing, or people bragging about personal bests. You know what they do really well? They make you stronger, more resilient, and move better. The idea of training is to make you good at anything you want, not to make you good at any singular exercise. Using these strategies teaches your body functional fitness concepts that do all of that and guess what? Keep you healthy at the same time.

There is nothing cooler than achieving your fitness results!

If you love training information like this don’t miss our new DVRT Restoration course HERE