The Best Workouts for Back Pain

If you have yet to experience back pain, the odds are sadly stacked against you. According to World Health Organization data, most people will experience low back pain at some point in their lives. Fortunately, when it comes to mitigating back pain (or avoiding it altogether), fitness is your friend. With a little expert guidance, a simple workout regimen can help you shore up any weaknesses that might be causing back pain, and bolster your back’s natural support system to help prevent future injuries. We spoke to experts about how it originates, and the best workouts for back pain.

Why do so many people have back pain?

One of the reasons why back pain is so common is that it can stem from pretty much anywhere. “Back pain is so multi-factorial,” says Nicholas Hershfield, PT, DPT, OCS, physical therapist at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City. “Anything from diet to stress levels to activity or inactivity can really affect low back pain.”

Oftentimes, however, back pain is simply the result of us neglecting to maintain these muscles—and ignoring the fact that something as seemingly unrelated as ankle mobility can burden your back with more than its fair share of strain.

”The reason why most back pain or injuries tend to happen is not because certain positions are necessarily wrong or dangerous, but because you don’t have the tissue capacity to go about your day-to-day life,” says Alex Corbett, PT, DPT, physical therapist at BreakThrough Physical Therapy in Cary, North Carolina. “If you never load a tissue in a certain direction, then you’re more likely to have that happen. But if you’re exposing that back to load and volume, your tissue capacity and tolerance is going to be much higher. So you can handle day-to-day stuff much better than somebody else.”

How to reduce back pain at the gym

A lot of guys, when faced with back pain, will try to take matters into their own hands by stacking their workouts with back exercises like rows, lat pulldowns, and reverse flyes. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these exercises, but you’re basically throwing spaghetti at the wall in the hope that something will stick.

The key to improving back pain through exercises—and not accidentally injuring yourself further—begins with a fundamental understanding of how the spine works, and then selecting the specific exercises that will provide holistic coverage of all the relevant muscles involved.

“The spine moves in four different planes,” says Dr. Corbett. “It’s going to flex, which would be any kind of crunch movement or bending forward. It’s going to extend backwards, so any type of deadlift movement would train that. It’s also going to rotate, and it’s going to side bend. So if somebody wants a truly comprehensive back and core program, they’d have to touch on all four of those.”

The best exercises for back pain

Here, Dr. Hershfield and Dr. Corbett share their top exercises to help reduce back pain—and prevent it from showing up in the first place.

Bird Dog

Sets: 2–3

Reps: 15 each side

Frequency: daily

The first plane of spinal movement to focus on is flexion, and that means your abs. However, rather than focusing on your mirror muscles, you’re going to want to take aim at the transverse abdominus, a deeper layer of core musculature that provides support.