Avoiding Back Injury in Deadlifts With Neurological Priming

Avoiding Back injury in deadlifts and Olympic Lifts

The spine alone is a flexible stack of blocks that is vulnerable to buckling under compressive load. With the surrounding musculature removed, the ligamentous support has been demonstrated to buckle under as little as 20 pounds of compressive load. (first noted in 1961 in cadaver studies by Lucas and Bresler.) We are very good at fixing those injuries here at SMNW, but prevention is king.

There is no single muscle that stabilizes this osteoligamentous structure so forget about targeting the multifidus or transverse abdominis. The system that supports the spine is the collective tension of all of the intrinsic and extrinsic muscles firing with equal tension from all sides. It is a guy wire system.

image from Low Back Disorders 2nd Edition.

The guy wire system only functions when all “wires” in our case muscles, fire equally. This is why I see athletes vulnerable to back injury in deadlifts during light weight (warm-up) weight pulls. They lack the ability to engage all of the tissues necessary for stability at lighter loads and their spines buckle. At higher weights they are less vulnerable as all of the tissues fire necessarily just to move the bar. The key to avoiding this warm-up weight movement fault is priming the tissues to fully engage by firing first with speed, then with load.

I use a lot of corrective exercises in practice but what I’m demonstrating today is more of what I’d call Joint Prep Movements. These are to be performed immediately before a loaded lift to prime your neurologic sequencing and set the table for for successful and coordinated firing patterns.

Here are two good examples: