Hip-hinges: 4 exercises in 1. Time spent: 0 seconds
I sometimes tell my students that if you bend well you are unlikely to have a back problem, and if you bend poorly you are almost certainly going to have a back problem. It’s almost that simple. Of course there are other important techniques to learn, like how to sit, stand, sleep, and walk, but bending is a particularly important technique, and learning to bend well constitutes a major milestone in our Gokhale Method Foundations course.
Most of us do many bends a day — each bend is an opportunity to benefit your structure, or destroy it. Turn each bend into a hip-hinge! You will preserve your discs, spinal ligaments, and knees instead of wearing and tearing them. You also get the following exercises taken care of:
Stretch your hamstrings
Stretch your external hip rotators
Strengthen your rhomboids
Strengthen your erector spinae muscles.
Time spent: 0! It doesn’t take a second longer to bend well than it does to bend poorly!
I've been in physical therapy
I've been in physical therapy for a couple of months to treat my lower-back pain, which was most intense when bending forward. Early on, my therapist said one goal of the therapy was to develop the strength and stability to bend over, with a round back, without pain; but he acknowledged that the goal is about range of motion and not for heavy lifting, etc. In light of your teachings, I've been wondering what you think of forward bending with a round back as a means to evaluate range of motion, strength, and stability. (For what it's worth, I now can bend forward with minimal pain—no pain if I do my PT exercises daily.)
I'm wondering what you think about this. And do you advise hip-hinging because rounding forward is a bad thing to do? Or do you advise hip-hinging because of its positive benefits (e.g., those listed in the post above)?
Both. Round-back bending
Both. Round-back bending loads the discs (edited) anteriorly, pushing the nucleosus pulposum (or filling) posteriorly - a particularly risky direction since the nerve roots lie just behind the discs.
Range of motion can be maintained better ways than habitual round-back bending.
I took the Foundations course
I took the Foundations course and the teacher said I did the hip hinging really well. However, I find that when I do it, I experience a tugging/ uncomfortable sensation in my lumbo/sacral region. It seems as though that region is taking the weight of my whole torso. What is causing this and how do I remedy it?