Full Body Lower Back Pain Friendly Barbell Workout

Finding an effective yet safe lower back pain friendly workout can be tough. Odds are you have tried just about everything and no matter how “back pain friendly” you think your workout still seems to leave you in pain working through a flare up for the next two weeks.

Let’s change that! 

In today’s video, I want to show you an example of what I think is a lower back pain friendly workout using nothing but barbells. 

I know what you’re thinking…barbells cause me back pain. This is true for a lot of people but let’s look at these exercises from a back pain perspective and really dial in what you’re probably doing wrong. 

What Exercises Can I Do In The Gym With Lower Back Pain?

This is such a great question and something that needs more context since we are talking about one individual person. 

lower back pain friendly workout

What I mean by this is that one person with lower back pain may be able to do walking lunges while someone else with similar issues can’t do a single set of them without going into a full-blown flare-up. 

So are walking lunges bad? 

No, but they become bad if they are pain triggers. This is why I always suggest you make sure you are doing each exercise in question with perfect form and slowing way down during each rep. 

This will ensure that your form is spot on and there is no momentum being used which could be a trigger.

The best thing you could do for yourself is to stop looking at exercises as either good or bad but to approach each exercise with a clear understanding of what triggers your pain and whether or not the pain you are experiencing during the exercise is coming from poor execution or simply because your body is not ready for this type of exercise. 

What Makes A Workout Back Pain Friendly?

At first glance, you can’t simply look at an exercise and be able to accurately label it as good for bad. 

You need context but over the past 12 years of working with all sorts of people, you learn what exercises seem to be more technical than others and what exercises tend to have the most difficulty with certain populations. 

Take the lower back pain population. It’s not uncommon for barbell squats and deadlifts to cause lower back pain. 

There are tons of things we can look at for fixing common issues in these two lifts but we can also swap exercises out to take some of the stress, fear, and room for error out of the question so we can focus on form and safety while still getting an effective workout in. 

So if I can get someone out from under the bar to allow a desensitization effect to happen over time with less compressive loads while still sneaking in some less complex ower body exercises to maintain or build strength in the legs that is a solid trade-off.

It’s far better than simply pushing through the pain or stop training legs altogether!

 

lower back pain friendly workout

What Are The Exercises In This Lower Back Pain Friendly Full Body Barbell Workout?

Here is the complete list of Barbell Exercises in this week’s lower back pain friendly barbell workout. 

  • Exercises ONE: Barbell Floor Press
  • Exercise TWO: Barbell Uneven Holds
  • Exercises THREE: Kneeling Strict Shoulder Press
  • Exercise FOUR: Landmine Lunge
  • Exercise FIVE: Barbell Curls
back pain friendly workout