You might be wondering, “What does a strong lower back help with? Why is it so important that I focus on strengthening my back?”
You’d be amazed by just how important your lower back muscles are.
They play a role in quite literally every activity you engage in, the majority of your movement, and overall balance and stability.
Your lower back is absolutely crucial for healthy, pain-free mobility, so it’s always worth the effort training your muscles.
Below, we’ll answer the question, “What does a strong lower back help with?” and look at all of the things your back muscles enable you to do.
By the time you get to the end of this page, you’ll know exactly why your lower back muscles need extra attention and training!
What Does a Strong Lower Back Help With?
Your back plays a role in:
Posture – Every time you sit or stand, your lower back muscles have to work to support your spinal column and keep your upper body in the proper upright position.
Test it for yourself: relax your lower back muscles completely, and you’ll find that your body begins to tip forward, your shoulders slump, your head falls, and your posture suffers. However, when you engage your lower back, it helps to keep your spine erect from the bottom up, which in turn leads to better overall posture. The simple act of straightening your lower back (using your muscles) will actually help you sit or stand straighter, which improves your posture overall.
Balance – You don’t typically notice how much work is required to maintain your balance until the muscles involved are no longer functioning properly. Your lower back, abs, and obliques (side muscles) all work together to keep your midsection balanced, maintaining a stable center of gravity and keeping your torso directly over your base (legs) to prevent over-balancing or tipping.
Your spinal muscles make millions of micro-adjustments to your upper body position and posture every day, all of which work to maintain your balance. Without a strong lower back, your balance suffers—especially if you have to bend forward to lift or do anything that could potentially over-balance yourself. In these situations—say, picking up a heavy box or pushing something heavy—your lower back and hips compensate for the imbalance by adjusting their position to maintain proper equilibrium.
Movement – Your legs do most of the work of propelling you forward, but your lower back works with your hips and leg muscles to enable smooth, easy movement. Your core muscles also help to maintain stability in your upper body while your lower body is moving.
Your back muscles also help you to maintain proper posture and balance while you move. Without their support, your spinal column would be unable to keep your upper body stable.
Athletic Activity – You typically won’t notice how important strong back muscles are for efficient athletic activity until you try and play sports or work out with a sore or injured back.
Think about it: you have to bend/lean forward to dribble a basketball, twist side to side to catch a football, twist your lower body to kick a soccer ball, and swivel to swing a baseball bat. Your lower back is involved in every single one of those movements to varying degrees.
Having a strong lower back means you’ll be able to safely engage in athletic activity without worrying about injury. You also generate more power for each one of those movements, making you a better athlete overall.
Load-Bearing Activities – You can’t carry buckets, lift your kids, heft boxes, or lift the shopping out of your trunk without your lower back. Your lower back does so much of the work of lifting, and it supports your spine and upper body while you move forward under the tension of whatever heavy load you’re carrying.
But strong lower back muscles do more than just help you lift heavy things; they also prevent injuries while lifting and carrying heavy things. You see, when your back muscles aren’t strong enough to bear the load, your spinal column engages and there is pressure placed on the bones and joints directly. This is directly responsible for A LOT of back injuries every year.
This is probably the #1 reason for having strong lower back muscles, because those strong muscles help to protect you from injury to your spine.
As you can see, your lower back muscles are involved in pretty much everything you do in some capacity or another. In reality, the only time of day when your back muscles aren’t engaged is when you are lying in bed—and your back muscles do have to engage to shift position or turn over.
Having strong lower back muscles is absolutely crucial for good posture, stable balance, healthy movement, effective athletic activity, and safe load-bearing activities. It’s always a good idea to follow the experts’ advice and incorporate muscle-building and mobility exercises aimed specifically at your lower back into every training regimen.
What Does a Strong Lower Back Help With? Change Your Life with Back on Track!
If you’re concerned about your lower back or have been wrestling with lower back pain, you need to take active steps to strengthen those spinal supporter muscles and increase your mobility. But that’s just the first step. You’ve got to learn more about what’s causing your problems, not just on the surface-level, but the deep underlying issues.
That’s exactly what you’ll do with Back on Track! Our program will teach you about a dangerous but ignored syndrome behind not just back pains, but also the body aches that so many Westerners suffer from on a daily basis.
I guarantee that if you try Back on Track, you’ll gain a wealth of knowledge that will change the way you see your back health. You’ll know exactly what does a strong lower back help with and what you can do to improve it exponentially.
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