If we are taught to never lift with our backs, why are there popular exercises like Romanian deadlifts and good mornings which has you specifically lifting with your back?
In: Biology
Lifting with your back is perfectly safe if you’re used to doing it and you know how to brace your lower back. The lower spine is supposed to stay locked in position and the whole upper body hinges forward at the hips. Training this safely makes your whole core stronger and makes your lower back more resistant to injury but if you’re someone who never lifts things unless you have to it’s safer to lift with your quads and keep your back upright.
The same safety guidelines that say to never lift with your back also say that anything heavier than 50 pounds needs more than one person to lift it, the average person is weak and doesn’t know how to deadlift safely. There are some other old fashioned exercises that are now considered too dangerous to be worth doing like the neck bridge but deadlifts are a good compound lift. Romanian deadlifts especially use relatively light weight and long range of motion to load the hamstrings in a stretched position. The hamstrings and spinal erectors are some of the strongest muscles in the body, they need to be loaded pretty heavy to get stronger.
Doing deadlifts makes your spine strong and resilient but most people don’t do them so now the advice people get to avoid injuries is basically don’t lift anything heavy ever.
With Romanian deadlifts you’re able to control the weight so you can lift an amount that will strengthen your muscles without hurting you. If you’re just randomly picking up boxes of stuff you’re rolling the dice about whether will hurt yourself or not.
You can throw out your back by turning the wrong way holding no weight at all. Lifting weights is a trained skill and you can improve back strength with a series of exercises.
Those exercises do NOT have you lifting with your back. When done correctly, they are leg and glute engagement. I’m very confused by how you think these exercises go?
To strengthen your back and reduce the risk of injury in the other situations you mentioned!
For Fitness:
When lifting weights for fitness, the load is concentrated, controlled, and secured. Body Positioning is often focused on optimizing power and doing things safely to avoid injury.
You don’t do a Romanian deadlift with a weight you know you can’t lift, so gradually increasing the weight builds strength without causing injury. You have control over the magnitude of the load, which is also critically important. You can also stop or deload when you get tired.
For Work/Other:
When lifting something like furniture, a heavy box, a patient, or unloading a vehicle, you have little control over how heavy it is, positioning can be awkward, and whatever’s in the box can shift.
If it’s for a job, you can’t necessarily just stop because you’re tired.
TL;DR – you can still hurt yourself when doing Romanian deadlifts, it’s just more the cause of your own ego and less the cause of external factors.
Physio here. There’s some good answers in here about muscle recruitment, practicing proper technique and bracing. One thing that no one’s touched upon that we’re taught in uni is government legislation.
So back in the day they had a simplified understanding of biomechanics and muscle injuries. So their best guess was that you need a proper technique and you’ll be fine. So they LEGISLATED it into law. All companies have to provide proper occupational health and safety training for their employees. Rather than coming up with your own, you use the stock standard one the government gave you… Well damn.
How do you change legislation? What do you replace it with? What do you do when the training that was mandated has been shown to be ineffective?
And here we are today, teaching old and outdated things because modernizing it is too hard.
As for back injuries, what I’ll say is, they’re incredibly complicated and multifaceted. You can’t simply break em down to “not having a perfect lifting technique”
To strengthen your back, to prevent injuries that might be sustained from lifting with it or simply from natural age-related deterioration.
The fact that lifting with a rounded back is sub-optimal or dangerous and might lead to injury doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still work your back out.
There is lifting with your back, then there is lifting with your back.
Your lower back along with your abs support your spine. You can lift with your back, but lifting with your legs supported by your core muscles (abs and lower back) is much stronger and safer.
If you want to strengthen your lower back, RDLs and Good Mornings help isolate that muscle group, but the hamstrings are still involved; hamstrings being part of your legs. This helps train the “hip hinge” that can help make one stronger in lifting with their legs and not their back.
When you do dead lifts, you shouldn’t be lifting with your back, you should be pushing into the floor with your legs with prompts you to stand straight.
So imagine the weights are stuck into the ground, you’re trying to push the earth away from you/the weights, not you pulling the weights off the floor.
Doing dead lifts by lifting with your back is the quickest way to a injury.
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