Back pain—leading cause of inactivity among men

Lower-back pain has the same effect on 19- to 45-year-old men that Lifetime movies have on middle-aged women. It’s their leading cause of inactivity. And as if these guys don’t suffer enough, they want to scream every time they hear the same lame advice: Strengthen and stretch your lower-back and abdominal muscles. But if that’s such a good prescription, why do so many backs still ache? Simple. Because strength and suppleness won’t help you avoid back pain. But endurance will.  “Spine health isn’t about making your back muscles stronger or more flexible,” says Stuart McGill, a professor of spine biomechanics at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, and author of Low Back Disorders. “It’s about training them to maintain the strength they have over long periods of time.” The other critical factor, says McGill, is to “groove optimal muscle-activation patterns.” That is, teach the muscles that stabilise your spine to support your back during any activity, for maximum protection.

 

 

Researchers in Finland found that men who lacked lower-back muscular endurance were 3.4 times more likely to develop lower-back problems than those who had fair or good endurance. That’s because poor endurance in your deep-back and abdominal muscles—the spine stabilisers with exotic-sounding names such as multifidus, quadratus lumborum, longissimus, iliocostalis, latissimus dorsi, and transverse abdominis—along with poor muscle-activation patterns, leaves you unable to sit or stand with good posture for extended periods. And poor posture increases stress on your vertebrae, turning your spine into a compacted-disk turntable, playing endless reprises of Twist and Shout. We asked McGill for a back-saving programme, both to relieve current back pain and to reduce your chances of a future back attack. His plan: Increase the endurance of your forgotten deep-back and abdominal muscles, to increase spine stability and ultimately reduce lower-back stress.

 

 

And, in case you’re wondering, this is more than theoretical. What McGill learns in his research—he’s the author of more than 200 studies on lower-back injury and rehabilitation—he uses on real-life, active men. In fact, he’s often the guy who gets the call when a rich and famous athlete takes one on the multifidus. But now you can jump the line in his waiting room for just the price of this magazine. We’re watching your back, friend.

 

 

The Workout

You don’t need rest days between lower-back workouts, since the idea is to build endurance, rather than strength. Plus, by performing these lower-back exercises daily, you’ll strengthen your spine-stabilising muscles—which can become deranged following a bout of lower-back pain. Perform the exercises as a circuit, doing them consecutively without rest in between. At the same time, you can begin following McGill’s strategies—at the office and the gym—for a lifetime of optimal back health.

 

Read more at Men’s Health: www.menshealth.com