Video:How to Protect Your Back During Exercise

Transcript:How to Protect Your Back During Exercise

Hi I’m Daniel Lucas from Nimble Fitness in New York City, and this is for About.com. I’m going to talk to you about how to protect your back during exercise.

Practice Breathing to Protect Your Back

The secret to protecting your back during exercise is that your deeper core musculature is working. That starts with your diaphragm. You can do a simple exercise just to check and make sure you can get air into your stomach, being able to breathe into your belly, and then exhaling and contracting through. Seems very simple but you want to make sure that muscle is working.

Stabilize Your Spine

Next you can go into what I call a toe-tap. Start by stabilizing your spine on the ground. Take your pelvis slightly posterior, you would bring your breath into your hands, exhale find your navel to your spine and slowly lift one leg. Then return back to the floor. The goal is that your lower spine doesn’t move at all. And right now you’re just trying to gain some awareness of being able to stabilize your spine and move your femur. And this is a very simple progression that helps with gaining some awareness to your torso.

Progress with Exercises for the Back

Also one of the best ways to protect your back while exercising or training is to progress properly. To make sure you are making smart moves, from simple to complex, and that you can really stabilize, whether you are doing a stabilize through move, or stabilizing through movement, and just making sure that you are listening to your body and that you can perform with proper form.

Stretch Your Back

So we’re going to do an easy twist on the floor, to make it safe for the back, we’re going to keep our knees and hips aligned. We’re going to do the same stretch on the other side, it’s important to keep the hips aligned and the knees. It’s a great opener for the front part of the body and it’s a nice stretch for the muscles around the spine.

So now Antonio is going to demonstrate how to progress relatively easier exercise into something that’s a little more challenging. So we’re starting with a bridge. And after a series of these we can progress into some single-leg work. And again it’s important to keep a strong, neutral lower spine as your moving your legs through this range of motion. Thanks for watching, to learn more visit About.com