BackFix Tips from Dr. Jeff Keysar, DC

Rehab Lesson #10:  How to Exercise Properly

Exercising is one of the best things you can do to keep your back healthy your entire life. However, exercising with poor form or overloading your back too much can have devastating effects that can stay with you for decades. If you’re working out with weights or plan to, the exercises you should be extremely cautious with (or avoid altogether) are squats and deadlifts. If you decide to do these exercises, make sure you pay strict attention to your form and use a weight that you can absolutely handle that doesn’t cause your back or legs to shake when performing the exercise. 

And don’t feel as though you’re cheating yourself out of a good workout if you decide to skip squats or deadlifts. There are several other good back and leg workouts that don’t carry the same risk of injury but will still give you a good workout “burn” that will last for days. Examples include leg curls, lunges, box jumps, and others. Talk to a personal trainer for exercise substitutions as needed.

A few additional exercise tips:

• When doing back hyperextensions, avoid bending too far backwards at the end of the motion. Stop when your back is in line with your pelvis and legs.

• If you perform leg presses, keep your head back against the back pad when pushing and lowering the weight.

• Breathe out in one slow, steady continuous breath when lifting and lowering weight.

• Make sure you’re working each body part one time per week.

• Get adequate rest, water, and nutrition to support your body’s recovery from weight or cardio training.

Another factor to consider when weight training is reaching a maximum limit. I routinely see patients who work out regularly but come in with back injuries because they are always trying to push heavier and heavier weights and hit “new goals.” The problem with this philosophy is that we, as human beings, can only eat so much nutrition in a day. We can only drink so much fluid. We can only sleep so many hours each day. If all these factors are finite but we continue to push heavier and heavier weight in an attempt to reach new personal weight lifting goals, we are simply begging for an injury, and a possibly devastating one at that.

You need to determine what amount of weight (within reason) you want to bench press, or squat, or curl, or whatever, and once you hit that goal, you stay within that general range and maintain your fitness level using that amount of weight. Doing so will prevent unnecessary injuries, allowing your workouts to be more productive and less damaging.

As far as the best kind of workouts, nothing beats swimming for cardio. Swimming is the perfect, low impact cardio workout that anyone with access to a pool can do. A good alternative to cardio is the elliptical machine, which also provides a great workout with minimal stress to the major joints of the body. If the elliptical machine is too boring or doesn’t seem to fit you, another option is a mountain climber machine, which is what I use for my cardio workout. It works the entire body instead of simply the lower body, and it gets your heart rate up in a hurry so you’re not killing extra time. Plus, it’s safe and fairly easy on the joints, but people with knee injuries may not be able to go at a very hard pace due to the nature of the motion performed on the machine.