Over 90% of us will suffer a low back injury of some kind at some point in our lives. 
95% of the time that injury will be the result of poor deceleration control. What can we do to protect and decrease the chance of injuring our low back?? Well first let me tell you what won’t work.
Doing 1000′s of sit-ups every week
Doing leg raises with our low back coming off the ground on every rep
Do those silly side crunches a hundred miles a minute
Grabbing a hold of some pulley system and horsing down doing kneeling crunches
Doing the latest ab machine shown on the latest info commercial
Doing only floor planks
I can pretty much guarantee if you do the above listed training techniques or exercises, you are all but assured of suffering if not creating a low back injury.
The ab’s like any other muscles are reactors. They respond to driver of primarily gravity, ground reaction and momentum. If you do not train the ab’s to be reactors, when called upon to protect your low back from venturing to far in the ROM, they will not respond effectively or quick enough to prevent a low back injury.
It is very easy to tweak an exercise to become a trunk reaction exercise. You can create ground reaction or increase momentum or both. Gravity can also be increased by adjusting the resistance or direction of the resistance. Here are 5 easy ways to make most exercises a trunk reaction exercise.
1. Overload the body to one side by doing unilateral training. Especially with vertical or horizontal force vectors
2. Create multiple force vectors. Bands in conjunction with any dead weight objects can accomplish this
3. Add a step with the exercise which immediately brings in ground reaction forces and additional momentum for your trunk to deal with.
4. Adding in the a rotational plane will immediately activate the trunk since the obliques and transverse abdominus have strong rotational biases
5. Performing the step and lift movement in an integrated fashion with an emphasis on getting off the loading phase as fast as possible.
Is your head spinning yet??
Well what if told you I could incorporate all five of these training options with 1 exercise??
Now realize this exercise is not for the person who has not incorporated some low level trunk stabilization first. However, if you have done your pre-trunk training, than I have a great trunk blasting, delt building, heart pumping workout that will teach your trunk how to react with power.
Give it a try and let me know what you think.
Enjoy this week’s RBT Live… Building a powerful 6 pack
Training beyond the Contraction
Dave Schmitz
PS.. Looking for other great trunk reaction ideas?? Resistance bands Unleashed DVD Series will show you how to unleash the power of Reactive Trunk Training.
