It’s amazing how necessity bears invention.  Unfortunately it usually happens as a last resort.  It’s  not until I found out I had a back injury that I looked more closely at my gym programs, they way I design them and what exercises I am doing.

The advantage of having an injury is that you can feel the effects that an exercise has long before a healthy person can feel it.  What I mean is the way, for example, that bent barbell rows stresses the lower back or the way seated cable rows can affect the back.

Some of the pressures that I feel in the lower spine a healthy person would not necessarily feel, but they are still subjected to the same stresses.  It’s not until they use incorrect technique over a long period of time that an injury would surface.

By the way, I didn’t get my injury from poor technique.  It was from martial arts, which I used to do in my younger days.  Turns out I have carried the injury for a long time before I felt any pain and had it checked out.

I’ve always focused on perfect form in the gym so I haven’t had any major problems.   I’m 40 now, so maybe age is catching up a little?  Anyway, good news is that the doctor said I should continue training as I have a strong, healthy spine but I just need to be careful of a bulging disc in the lower back.  It’s not bad and proper training has protected me.

Getting back to my post, what I feel now has really enlightened me about program design and evenly balancing workloads on the body at each training session.

Here’s a few pointers I have discovered:

• don’t do deadlifts and rows on the same day

• keep you back flat when deadlifting – don’t ever round it…. ever

• perform deadlifts one rep at a time – don’t bounce off the floor, take a breath between each rep

• use your stomach muscles to stabilise your torso – if you don’t know what I mean, go and learn pilates

• don’t round your back when doing bicep preacher curls

• unlock your knees when performing standing upper body work

• bulgarian split squats take heaps of pressure off the lower back

• stretching does amazing things for back health – flexibility is important

Some of these points might seem stupid or obvious to you if you are injury free.  But, believe me, you would be amazed at the pressure you are putting on your lower back when you don’t need to.  Learn perfect form and learn to design your programs so that workloads are spread evenly on the whole body.