Welcome back to Get Fit Guy, Coach Kevin Donne here. I often have to stop myself from rolling my eyes

as I hear from people who have sore low backs but have demonized back exercises. So today I want to look at

back pain from lifting. If we have low back

pain, should we be avoiding low back centric movements or could something else be at play?

First off, I have to give a disclaimer that there are myriad potential causes of low back pain.

In fact, low back pain itself isn't even a diagnosis.

It's incredibly vague and tells us nothing. Is the pain single-sided, localized, generalized,

sharp, dull when you're at rest, during movement, when you're flexing, when you're extending, when you're rotating.

Since low back pain is such a vague term, it's quite unlikely that any articles or podcasts,

including this one, will be able to fix the issue, since general and vague diagnoses will

have general and vague prescriptions.

That being said, between January 2015 and February 2020,

I taught 253 seminars on the deadlift and the squat across 18 countries and 15 US states.

So my sample size is fairly large, and I can talk about what I saw as the main

cause of low back pain in those experiences. But before we get into that, some basic anatomy.

Your body is made up of opposing muscle groups. Some have direct give-and-take relationship an easy example is your arm in order to bend your elbow your bicep has to shorten and as it does so the tricep on the opposite side lengthens to straighten your arm the process reverses your tricep shortens and your bicep lengthens. To straighten your arm, the process reverses. Your tricep shortens and your

bicep shortens. If you squeeze your bicep as hard as you possibly can whilst your elbows bent,

it's not possible to straighten your arm. We see the same thing throughout the body. If your

quads are engaged by squeezing them tight, it's not possible to

bend your knee, since the role of the quadriceps is to extend the leg at the knee. This is called

the length tension relationship. In other words, when one muscle tensies, the opposing one

lengthens. So now let's think about a movement like the deadlift. Typically what we see

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