DO YOU GET LOW BACK PAIN WITH DEADLIFTS OR KETTLEBELL SWINGS?

Perhaps you are compromising your back as a result of poor hip movement...

Studies done on low back pain show that the pain is often caused by losing the ability to move through the hips. I see this all the time in clients and always have to re-pattern their hip movement to save their backs!

Dr Stuart McGill strikes again: “This is why the hip hinge is known to be a superior movement pattern for low back pain clients. Learning to hip hinge is paramount for both injury prevention and optimal performance.”

Too right Stuart! 
Learn how to move before you learn how to be strong!

If you'd like to learn how to hip hinge correctly, check this out.

If you feel like you need to work on your hip mobility then follow one of our hip mobility videos here.

Don't sacrifice your lower back for Deadlifts or Kettlebell Swings unless the movement has been broken down and taught to you effectively and you can carry it out extremely well.

JUST MONKEYING AROUND

Here is a modified hanging version where your feet are on the ground. If you have the strength to do it from a bar with feet off ground, go for that version.

Hanging is a great way to achieve healthy shoulders, I've noticed a massive improvement in my own shoulder/neck region where I have a history of injury.  Over the past few months I have incorporated a mixture of passive; active and dynamic hanging into my training along with spending a lot more time on the rings working pullups; front & back lever regressions and lat activations.  Not only has my once often rigid neck/shoulder region softened up but my grip strength has become symmetrical and increased in strength.  My grip strength used to be about 36kg on my Right and 32kg on my Left (side of old injury and non-dominant side) and now is an equal 40kg each side.

You don't always have to do endless amounts of traditional external and internal rotator resisted exercises to achieve strong shoulders...in fact, if this is all you are doing you may need to find yourself another practitioner.  Your shoulders need to be ready for life and in life we move in many ways and put our shoulders under all sorts of stresses and loads.  You need to ensure you have optimum mobility and back this up with a good foundation of reactive stability in order to keep your shoulders healthy in the long term.

My training has also included plenty handstand practice (working my line against the wall); Turkish Get Ups - these too have improved massively, 6 months ago 8kg was the max I felt comfortable with on my Left and now I am an equal 14kg for at least 1-2reps comfortably and the Left feels just as strong as the RIght.  Various other cable & kettlebell stabilisation and strength exercises have also formed part of my training.

For a more in depth read about hanging click on this link to Ido Portal's blog on hanging.

Of course, if you have a shoulder injury or have limitations in your shoulders please get assessed first before jumping into anything new.

The Turkish Get-Up

The Turkish Get-Up (TGU), one of my favourite movements as it requires & improves mobility; stability; strength; cross lateralisation (right brain communicating with left brain); proprioception; balance AND it feels great to do!

A client of mine who had previously been training in a group setting elsewhere had been told that she couldn’t partake in the TGU portion of the class as she was unable to do them properly. The TGU was one of her goals working with me so we started by breaking down the separate components of the TGU and teaching her brain to learn each phase of the movement using only her bodyweight.  At the start she struggled with the initial phase of the TGU (going from lying on your back to propped up on your elbow).  This phase requires good reflexive stability through both the Anterior Oblique Sling & Posterior Oblique Sling (Anterior - adductors; same side internal oblique; opposite external oblique & pec minor. Posterior - Lat; Thoracolumbar fascia; opposite side Glut Max).

The TGU predominantly utilises the transverse plane (rotation), taking my client back to basics by retraining rolling patterns significantly improved her initial phase of the Get-Up within the same session.  We spent  as long as we needed, dedicating about 5-10 minutes of each session, practising the Get-Up until I was happy she was moving smoothly enough to progress onto the next phase.  All the other movements chosen for our workout session were geared at feeding the Get-Up.

Now she is able to power through the whole TGU from ground to standing with more fluidity and ease of movement.  This is a great milestone for her progression! It also translates over to life, as she has been feeling a lot more flexible and stronger in her day to day life, which for us at moov pt, is more important than anything else! 

Being able to assess WHY someone is struggling through a certain phase of any movement and having the ABILITY to apply movement correctives to ENABLE that person to access that phase more efficiently is what we are about at moov pt.  Tapping into someone's motor control system to make positive change takes KNOWLEDGE and EXPERIENCE along with an extensive library of corrective exercises.  

If you are trying to achieve a complex movement, make sure you break it down into it's individual parts and spend as much time needed on each component to give your brain a chance to learn what you are trying to achieve.