Is Your Arch in the Right Place?

One of the most common mis-cues that are used in performance training when performing variatons of some of the bigger lifts like squats, deadlifts or even the bench press is to “arch your back.” The same mis-cues are given by sport coaches when they want for their athletes to get into a dominant posture while maintaing a good base.

The problem is not the concept, but how the cues are communicated to athletes.  Even though the cues are given with good intentions, it is important to understand that you should NEVER arch (hyper-extend) your lower back during strength training or sport play.

Maintaining both good posture and a good base cannot be safely and effectively done with an arch (hyper-extension)  in the lower back (Lumbar spine).  The lower back was never meant to be a moveable object, it was meant to be stable along with the Sacrum and the pelvis. Take a look at the picture to the right.  As you can see there are five different partitions of the spine.  All parts of the spinal column are meant to be stable, with the exception of the Thoracic spine (T-Spine).

The T-Spine is the portion of the vertebral column that should have the highest degree of mobility (movement) in all three planes of motion which include:

1. Flexion
2. Extension
3. Lateral Flexion
4. Rotation

This is what the T-Spine was built for, it was meant to be mobile. What tends to happen is that when muscles around the hips get tight (i.e. the rectus abdominus, external obliques, internal obliques, hip flexors and hamstrings) this will begin to compromise the stability around the lumbar spine.

As a result of the lumbar spine having an abnormal increase in mobility, due to the altered length of certain muscles, the T-Spine then develops an abnormal decrease in mobility. The decrease in T-Spine mobility then leads to a lot of excess stress being placed on the lumbar spine, which can result in low back pain or in worse cases, injury to the disks and vertebrae which could lead to bulging disks or even disk herniation.

Now I know some may ask about exercises like reverse-hypers that were popularized by Louie Simmons. Louie Simmons’ reverse-hypers are a GREAT exercise, but you have to understand the purpose behind them. When you look at reverse-hypers the way the Westside and the Elite FTS guys do them, the lumbar spine is NOT being hyperextended, it’s actually just returning back to neutral. Check out the video below to see what I mean:

With this being the case the reverse hypers are helping to increase the Stabalization Strength of the erectors to provide more stability and protection from injury to the entire spine, especially the lumbar.

So in short, if you hear the cue ”arch your back”, make sure you cue them correctly so that the arch is in their T-Spine and not in their lumbar spine.

Train hard, help somebody and recover fast.

“10 Laws Strong!”

-Rob

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