Pain

Strength Training for Lower-Back Pain

Lower-back pain is miserable and all too common: roughly 80 percent of Americans experience it at some point in their lives. But widely accepted methods of coping with that discomfort, like avoiding exercise, might actually make things worse.

“Your body is designed around short-term survival instincts, so when you have pain, you try to avoid it,” says Samuel Spinelli, a British Columbia–based physical therapist, trainer, and cofounder of E3 Rehab. It might seem logical to avoid exercise-related discomfort by eliminating certain movements altogether. But this can propel you into a cycle of inactivity, leading to weaker muscles and more soreness and pain over time, he explains. To break the cycle, you have to train, even if it hurts a little—it’s one of the best things you can do for the lower back.

If you’ve sworn off deadlifts and bent-over rows, it’s time to get reacquainted. There are plenty of variations that can help you ease into these exercises without aggravating your back. Below, Spinelli shares a weighted full-body routine designed to build strength, boost confidence, and help you progress to other exercises over time.

Spinelli recommends doing this routine three times per week. Start with one set of each of the following moves. As you get stronger and your discomfort decreases, gradually increase the number of sets, capping it off at four. Shoot for six to twelve reps in each set, but choose your volume (and your weight) based on form: stop when you still have three to four good reps in the tank. As you get more comfortable with the exercises, you can experiment with stopping one or two reps short of failure.

The key to this workout is paying attention to your body. Try evaluating your pain on a scale of one to ten, Spinelli recommends, and keep it below a three while you work out. If a certain exercise hurts, decrease the range of motion, perform fewer sets or reps, or reduce the weight. If your pain worsens (to a level five or above), increases as you work through your reps, is heightened after your workout, or continues after a 24-hour period, you should back off. If you’re rehabbing an acute injury, check in with a physical therapist before beginning this routine.

The Moves

Bird Dog

What it does: Gently builds control and strength in the lower back by challenging your trunk to resist rotation and arching at the lumbar spine. Slowly moving your arms and legs between reps strengthens the glutes and rear shoulder muscles, which help lessen the load on your lower back.

How to do it: Begin on all fours, with your hands directly under your shoulders and your knees under your hips. Brace your core, and lift your opposite arm and leg off the floor until they’re straight and level with your torso. Hold there briefly (three to five seconds) before returning your hand and knee to the floor. Repeat with the opposite arm and leg, keeping your hips and shoulders square. Maintain a neutral spine from the crown of your head to your tailbone; avoid sagging or arching your back. If this variation is too easy, do the move from a plank position.

Volume: One to four sets of six to twelve reps on each side.

Deadbug

What it does: Strengthens the abdominals with your pelvis tucked, which can help relieve lower-back stress.

How to do it: Lie on your back, with your knees bent and your feet flat on the floor. Press your lower back into the floor to fire up your abdominals. Then lift both knees until your shins are parallel to the floor. Extend both arms toward the ceiling. Keeping your lower back pressed into the floor, slowly lower one arm backward and straighten the opposite leg. Only lower as far as you can without allowing your lower back to lift off the floor. Return to the starting position, making sure your knees don’t creep toward your chest. Repeat with the opposite arm and leg. If pressing your lower back into the floor is uncomfortable, allow a small arch, but keep it consistent throughout the move. Gradually work your way down to the floor as you get stronger.

Volume: One to four sets of six to twelve reps on each side.

Romanian Deadlift

What it does: Builds strength in the glutes and hamstrings. This variation offers similar benefits to other deadlift variations, but it’s gentler on the back because you’re not pulling the weight off the floor with every rep. Starting this exercise from the top helps you build strength without stressing your lower back and will help you eventually progress to traditional deadlifts.

How to do it: Stand in an athletic stance, with your feet hip-width apart, holding two kettlebells or dumbbells in front of your thighs, with your palms facing your body and your arms straight. Choose your weight according to your rep scheme. Start lighter than you think you need, and work your way up. To get into the starting position, consider moving your weights to a bench first and then lifting them into position rather than lifting them directly from the floor. This will help protect your back.

Bend your knees slightly, sit back into your hips, and hinge forward at the waist to slowly lower the weights. Let them skim against your thighs, and stop when you feel a slight pull in your hamstrings. Choose your depth based on what feels approachable for your body. Return to a standing position, and squeeze your glutes at the top. Repeat. You should feel your glutes and hamstrings light up during this move.

Volume: One to four sets of six to twelve reps.

Three-Point Dumbbell Row

What it does: Strengthens the back, shoulders, and arms. This variation on the more traditional bent-over row puts less stress on the lower back, Spinelli explains, by using three points of contact to provide more support. This allows you to better isolate your middle and upper back muscles without loading your lower back.

How to do it: Start in a three-point stance, with your right knee and hand on a bench. Your right hand should be positioned directly under your right shoulder, and your right knee directly under the right hip. Your left leg should be extended, with your foot flat on the floor. Grip a dumbbell or kettlebell in your left hand, with your left arm fully extended toward the floor. (Choose your weight according to your rep scheme, as explained above.) Keeping your chin tucked and your back flat, pull the weight toward your rib cage, keeping your arm tight against your body. Then lower the weight with control until your arm is fully extended. Keep your core engaged and your spine neutral throughout the entire movement. Repeat.

Volume: One to four sets of six to twelve reps on each side.

Goblet Stationary Lunge

What it does: Builds strength through the legs’ major muscle groups. Many other lunge variations involve moving your feet between reps, which places stress on your back as you stabilize through various positions. Plus, for people with lower-back pain, holding weight in front of your body tends to be more comfortable than holding it behind your body or on your shoulders (as in back squats).

How to do it: Begin standing with your feet hip-width apart, holding a kettlebell or dumbbells against your chest with both hands in a goblet position. Slowly take a big step back with one foot, and lower your back knee to just an inch or two off the floor. Your legs should both be at 90-degree angles. Make sure your front knee is directly above and laterally in line with your front ankle. Allow your weight to be more heavily distributed on your front leg. Then drive through the midfoot of your front foot, and push yourself back up to standing, with both legs extended. Without moving your feet, bend your front knee to drop into your next rep.

Volume: One to four sets of six to twelve reps on each side.

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Camping Tips, Tricks and Adventures

This Unorthodox Pillow Eased My Neck Pain

The world of wellness products is vast and confusing. In our new series, Well Spent, Outside staffers recommend the hidden gems that they’re unabashedly obsessed with.

Whenever I make a purchase, a trail of spreadsheets, notes, and bookmarks usually leads to that moment. Last summer the object of my fixation was pillows. I had upgraded my mattress the year before because of nagging neck pain, ditching my $ 80 hard-as-brick mattress in a box for a “proper” $ 400 model. This provided some relief, but I was still waking up with unexplainable stiffness. After a bit of Googling, I learned that the lingering aches could also be caused by my pillow.

For months I waded through reviews from Sleepopolis and Wirecutter, saving dozens of options to online shopping carts. I even asked my mom about my childhood pillows after deducing that the pain didn’t start until after I moved out. (They were some variety of Macy’s down alternative.) But the decision fatigue was paralyzing—as was the idea of dropping a hundred bucks on an item I wasn’t convinced about.

Then a friend suggested I visit a local store in Santa Fe called Sachi Organics, a family-run company that specializes in mattresses, bedding, and pillows created with natural fibers, which they also sell online. I walked in the next day, and after telling the woman at the counter what I was looking for, I laid down on a “rejuvenation” pillow she prescribed. It featured two fillings—a layer of soft, comfortable wool on top of beanbag-like buckwheat hulls—encased in smooth sateen made from organic cotton. After about six minutes of being cradled in the pillow’s slight sink, I threw down $ 90 to take it home, sold on its instant proof of comfort and solid neck support.

In the ten months since, my daily neck pain has completely dissipated. The buckwheat hulls provide better ventilation than other materials, meaning no head sweats—even in the dead of summer. The company recommends removing some of the hulls to get the loft that’s perfect for you (and to save those you don’t use at first to give your pillow some new life down the line). It took me some time to get used to fluffing my pillow, but once I found the perfect distribution of hulls, it felt like the pillow was custom-fitted to my head and spine. (Of course, while this pillow helped ease my discomfort, it’s certainly not a cure-all for more serious afflictions—see your doctor if you have chronic neck pain.)

At the end of my quest for the best pillow, it turned out my pile of research amounted to nothing more than too many options. While that probably won’t change my ways, it was a reminder that sometimes a personal recommendation trumps weeks of online research.

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Camping Tips, Tricks and Adventures

Steve Fassbinder Can Take the Pain

One of the toughest nights of Steve Fassbinder’s life was spent stuck in an emergency bivy on the 19,000-foot Sim La pass in northern Pakistan, waiting out a midnight storm while his fat bike hung from an ice screw two pitches below his tent. Fassbinder and his expedition partner, Andrew Burr, had traveled there in 2017 to ride fat bikes around the Latok mountains. But at that point in their trip, they hadn’t pedaled a single stroke. After spending a week acclimatizing and getting sick at a 15,000-foot base camp, he and Burr spent a full day pushing their bikes through an ice field booby-trapped with deadly crevasses. Then it got too steep to push, so they pulled out their axes and crampons and climbed ten pitches to reach the pass, tugging their bikes on ropes behind them. At midnight, they set up camp and passed out, exhausted. The following morning, they pushed on for four miles, over glaciers topped with a thick layer of slush, a safety rope connecting them in case one of them fell into a crevasse. “It clearly wasn’t a bike loop,” Fassbinder says. He and Burr completed the 110-mile expedition in five grueling days, most of that spent walking instead of pedaling.

Locals tried to tell him that they’d never seen a bicycle in those mountains. But Fassbinder has pulled off the impossible before, earning himself the nickname Doom. The 45-year-old is a former professional mountain biker who dominated 24-hour solo races in the early 2000s, racing his singlespeed through the night on technical looped courses. He won three 24-hour solo world championships during his racing career and was eventually inducted into the 24-Hour Solo Mountain Bike Racer Hall of Fame. And he did this all while holding down a full-time job, working either as a bike messenger or in construction during the years he raced professionally.

After leaving the racing scene behind in 2009, Fassbinder carved out a niche for himself as an adventurer, with a talent for multisport expeditions that combine mountain biking with pack rafting and climbing. On one trip, he took a small plane deep into Utah’s desert to bike through slot canyons, nab the first ascent of a steep crack called the Pinnacle, then pack raft down the Dirty Devil River. In 2018, he biked and rafted a collective 1,000 miles across Tajikistan. Most recently, he and a few friends traversed the San Juan Mountains by bike, llama, and raft, covering 300 miles in nine days, including 65 miles of floating the Rio Grande.

From his racing days to his latest expedition, one thing remains constant with Fassbinder: the man knows how to suffer. Which explains how he was able to push through the absolute crap conditions in Pakistan. It explains why he and Burr continued, trudging through misery and uncertainty, until the morning of day three, when they woke up to bluebird skies and a landscape that had refrozen overnight to reveal endless miles of grippy ice, frozen in waves and berms, now spread out before their fat tires. “It was like the biggest skate park you could imagine,” Fassbinder says. “We hauled ass, pedaling our bikes and descending from 17,000 feet in elevation to 13,000 feet.” After crawling over 12 miles in the first two days, the duo covered 60 miles in a day and proved one of Fassbinder’s guiding principles in life: if you’re willing to put up with some pain, you’ll probably get rewarded.

“That trip was horrible, with some of the lowest points I’ve ever had on any adventure, but the highs were super high,” he says from his home in Durango, Colorado. “I know that there’s always going to be a bad spot on my trips. That bad spot might last for an hour or it might last for three days. But I also know there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe it’s a good piece of trail or a remote lake. There’s always that carrot that keeps me moving.”

Fassbinder typically knocks out one large international expedition a year; he’s currently planning a big trip to Canada’s Baffin Island, which will include bikepacking, pack rafting, and—a twist—conducting some climate research. But he spends most of his time exploring the American West, where the terrain is particularly well suited to his skills in biking, rafting, and climbing. The development of pack rafts over the past decade has opened up landscapes that were previously off-limits to Fassbinder by bike. “A pack raft is like a giant key that gets you into places,” he says. “When the road ends, you blow up your boat and continue down that river or lake, seeing things you’d never see if you only stuck to the trails and roads.”

Unlike most professional expeditioners, Fassbinder completes his adventures “off the couch,” without any focused training. It’s a mentality he’s had since his earliest days of racing mountain bikes. “I was never a training guy,” he says. “I never tracked mileage, never had a peaking calendar. When I worked as a bike messenger, I just rode my bike all the time. If I was working construction, I’d ride my bike to the job site every day.”

Although Fassbinder doesn’t ride as much these days, he still takes an off-the-cuff approach to his adventures, focusing more on learning the destination’s terrain or culture than increasing mileage in the saddle. He insists that anybody who’s reasonably fit can take a similar approach to big, multi-day trips—the key is to change your expectations. “You just won’t be fast,” he says. “But it doesn’t matter. You’re not racing. For these expeditions, you don’t have to have this go-to-the-gym kind of attitude.”

The right mindset helps, too. Fassbinder thinks that being able to power through adversity is a skill anyone can learn, the same as pedaling a bike or paddling a raft. In fact, he’s banking on it and has started a new guide business with his girlfriend, Lizzy Scully, that will take clients on multi-day day trips biking, canyoneering, and pack rafting through central Utah. “I won’t make my clients suffer the way I like to suffer, but it’ll be super exciting stuff,” Fassbinder says.

His goal, both for his clients and anyone watching, is to show that his favorite kind of adventures—riveting, lengthy, and sometimes grueling—are attainable for almost anyone. “It’s a mental thing,” he says. “True, people have different abilities to ignore pain, but if you set your mind to something, you can do it.”

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