Better Posture — Lifting

Post in collaboration with How to Bulk Muscle

Even if you don’t typically do the motions described in our previous posts, you can still experience back and shoulder discomfort, pain or even run into serious problems with your muscles and joints.

As we’ll be exploring throughout much of the rest of this article, many of your back muscles are postural muscles. That means that misalignments in your body can cause discomforts in your back muscles and that mismanaging your back muscles can cause severe problems with your bones.

If you are a weightlifter who targets some muscle groups more than others, or a frontline worker that does the same sort of motion day in and day out you may be developing some muscle groups more than others. This can pull your bones out of alignment and damage your joints.

One solution can be making sure to work out muscle groups that you may have been ignoring or that might not be as activated while you work. You may also want to consider incorporating more full-body exercises that work out multiple muscle groups at the same time. These exercises can prevent back and shoulder problems, but they’re also the best at fat burning.

Depending on the problem, wearing a back support while you work or work out can also help to protect your posture so that your muscles and joints don’t take so much wear-and-tear.

Power Squats are another way to work on strengthening your lower back muscles. Proper Squat form is key to avoid back pain.

Here is proper Squatting posture technique we learned from Stronglifts:

– Stand with the bar on your upper-back, and your feet shoulder-width apart.

– Squat down by pushing your knees to the side while moving the hips back.

– Break parallel by Squatting down until your hips are lower than your knees.

– Squat back up while keeping your knees out and chest up.

– Stand with your hips and knees locked at the top.

Taking care of your back while you train. 

If you have a 9-5 job which involves any physically activity, there is no doubt you are going to experience exhaustion with a certain level of back pain and fatigue. Back pain can drive you nuts, since it makes it difficult to perform daily chores. Therefore, you need to take ample care of your back so that you can seamlessly enjoy doing your work. Being physically fit boosts your mental health and can save you from mental disorders like add treatment and anxiety.

In the next few posts we’ll cover the 5 best training exercises to strengthen your back muscles to avoid pain and be more productive at work:

Deadlifts:

There is no doubt that deadlifts are an amazing workout technique that helps increase your muscle endurance and strengthens your entire body. If you look at the posture, and ergonomic motion of deadlifts exercises, you’ll notice that it is highly beneficial for people needing to lift heavy items or patients at work; jobs requiring repetitive squatting and lifting such as firefighters, warehouse workers, and package handlers, etc. It is also an easy workout to perform but the key is maintaining a straight back to keep your spine aligned correctly.

To perform the  basic technique:

Start by picking up a barbell from the floor, lift the bar to your knees, hold, then lower the bar and return it to the floor maintaining proper posture all the way through.

Proper posture in this position means:

• planting your feet flat on the floor,
• keeping a straight back,
• pushing off to lift with your legs,
• putting your weight on your heels,
• maintaining this posture all the way through.

Safely try the deadlifts next time you are at the gym or working out from home.