Few things in life are worse than low back pain. There are a lot of things that can help your back feel better, and stay better and exercise is one of them.
However, if you do the exercise incorrectly, or sub-optimally, you’ll get suboptimal results, or make the pain even worse.
The Bird Dog
The bird dog exercise is one of the best exercises for helping you get out of back pain, but also helping bullet-proof it.
It’s also one of the most butchered exercises we see. There are a lot of nuances that go into getting the most out of this exercise.
While some may call it being nit-picky, it’s been our experience time and time again that these little adjustments make ALL the difference in how you feel and move.
5 Upgrades to the Bird Dog to Downgrade Low Back Pain
- The first mistake is just doing fast reps.
- The second issue is with this bending and extending of the spine.
- The third issue is, even if you do a hold, you see people alternating sides.
- Fourth issue is focusing on the height of the limbs. Usually, when you focus on trying to get the limbs as high as you can your hips open up, you don’t keep them parallel to the ground, and you end up arching your back.
- Fifth upgrade that you can make to this exercise is by bracing. Most people just passively hold. Instead, have the stance leg’s pulling in floating limbs, reaching out.
Remember, the purpose of this exercise is to stabilize the spine and work these fatigue-resistant stabilizing muscles.
This is best done by doing a hold usually for about 10 seconds, and then repeating all of the same side before switching sides.