Lower Back Strength: Segmental Lumbar Rollback for BJJ

And this one is just going to look at spinal flexion. I call it a segmental rollback or an inversion. But it's really important here that we try to do this in a very controlled manner. You know, and again, the segmental part is where we're looking at each little vertebra is going to come off the mat and each little vertebra is going to come back down.

And it's all done with proper breathing and proper control of our core. So what we're going to start with here is laying on our back with our hands down by our side. This exercise is definitely easier if we can bring our knees up towards our chest. It just sort of dumps all our weight up towards our shoulders.

So it's way, way, way easier. So if you can and your back pain is not too sore, make sure you bring your knees right up to your chest. And you might even find that your hips come right off the mat as you do that. That's perfect, because that's actually what we're going to try and do.

So in any case, what we're going to do is have our hands down by our bum. This would be for beginners or someone who's just coming fresh off a back injury and your core is essentially shot. The first thing we do hands down by our hips and we're going to use our tummy muscles to tighten as we exhale. And we want to exhale to create a space for our pelvis to rotate posteriorly or backwards upon, not just try to lift up everything like this.

And I see that all the time when people are trying to get up on their shoulders. They're really not trusting the fact that they can bend their knees, create a space here and get their knees up towards their shoulders. So hands down here, we're going to tighten our tummy just a little bit and exhale to make a space through here. And the first exercise we push with our hands a bit, bringing our hips up and slowly back down.

Hips up and slowly back down. It's really important that you go slow and feel each level with this one because it's going to get exponentially harder as we go. And we want to make sure that you can get this low lumbar flexion happening first, not just only up in the shoulders or neck. There's sort of an argument of whether or not it's better to have your head flexed or down.

I honestly like to keep my head down, but I think for some people they'll have their head up. My issue with it is it feels like it tightens up my core so much that it's really hard to get my hips up. And yes, we do that in jiu-jitsu, but you've got to remember that if my head is up and I'm playing bottom, the second someone presses on my knees, I'm going to be inverted. If I put my head down, I can possibly slow down the rate of that.

So the second portion of this, after we start to get our low lumbar flexion happening with help of our hands down here, is we're going to try and bring your knees right up to your shoulders, but I'm going to help out with my hands underneath my hips. And I find this is one of the hardest things that I have to overcome when I have a back flare up. But once I get it, then everything becomes a lot smoother. So I'm going to push with my hands a little bit, lifting my hips up and catch my hips here.

Then I'm going to put my hands down on the ground and again, slowly and segmentally roll my hips back down. I push with my hands a little bit as I tighten my core, come underneath, base down again, and down I go. All right, nice and slow and controlled. Now the next stage, stage three, that's a three, is we're going to do the same thing, but I want to try and get my feet and knees over top of my head.

So I can still push with my hands as I need to. So I come up all the way and then I'm going to try and relax in this position and then slowly lower my spine down, segment by segment and back up. Now you'll notice that I didn't really do a lot of a kick. You'll see some people do a fairly large kick where they kind of kick their legs up and over.

That's not very controlled. My goal is to gently push with my hands if I need to, lift my hips up using my core to get my knees over my head, and then slowly back down. And it doesn't matter whether or not my knees are straight at this point. This is a low back thing.

So for me, like my back injury necessitates that my knees are bent because it takes pressure off the sciatic nerve. And back down. So don't worry if your knees are bent. That is OK.

Now the fourth and final one of this is we actually want to have our hands elevated above our head. Now if you've never done this before, I encourage you to hang onto something with your hands to start out. If you've been using your hands down here to push, you're going to need your hands up here to kind of help pull in essence. And you can grab a table leg or a good partner drill is to grab shins.

And you're going to then do the same kind of thing, lifting your legs up and over and back down. It's important, though, just to be kind of clear is that we want to try and do this without our hands pushing on something or pulling on something. Because when we're wrestling or rolling, we want to make sure that we're not tying up a hand to need that to be able to lift our hips. So if we can encourage strong core with segmental movement of our low back, then we're in a better controlled position.

And what we want it to look like. Notice I'm not grabbing onto anything. I'm going to tighten my core, come all the way up as far as I can. And again, notice I'm not going all the way down to the ground because that's not the exercise.

I'm not trying to touch my toes to the ground. I am balanced right on my shoulders right now, not on my neck. So it's very safe. I don't want to create a neck injury to solve a back injury.

And so I'm based on my shoulders and nice and relaxed. And then I do a nice, slow, controlled movement. Down. OK, so that's how we want to think about these inversions as a warm up or as a strengthening exercise.

And that's one half of the lumbar spinal flexion series. The other half, which I'm going to get to next, is looking at going from a flex position into an extended position. Whereas this last one was an extended position into a flex position. So we're going to hit the front and the back, really get this nice strength going around your back.

And I hope you enjoyed it. And I'll see you on the mat soon. Have a good one.