 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Goyke and today I want to talk about back tightness and how to make sure it never comes back. So first disclaimer, medical advice, don't take that on the internet. If your back hurts, go see a doctor. Now second though, back tightness happens when you try really hard. So if you're doing the 10 by 10 squat program, like you're signing up for back tightness. You're also signing up for a bigger squat and to practice, you got to work on the periodization. We're going to talk about that later though. The first thing that I did want to mention is you got to make sure that technique is a thing. If you're a new lifter, I'm pretty sure that your back tightness is because you don't know how to do the lift correctly. Big things are you want to keep the core nice and steady and you want to drive through the hips. Now this plays into our next point or second point, which is mobility and the execution of the rep. So let's take a squat for example. If I squat down and my back rounds at the bottom and then it arches as I come up at the top, what I'm doing there is I'm teaching the spine to move and I'm taking the movement away from the hips in general. And here's a rule that I talk about in a bunch of my videos, but you want to learn to dissociate the hips from the spine. So in something really heavy, we generally want the spine to be really rigid. And we want the hips to be really mobile because the hips, the glutes, the hamstrings, the quads, that stuff is our prime movers in this movement. So we want to place the load on those. So first, make sure you're doing the technique well. And second, if you don't have the hip mobility, we've probably got to loosen that up. We don't want to promote spinal mobility here. And that's a common misconception is sometimes if the back is tight, it's not because the back isn't mobile. It's because the back is too mobile during the exercise. We're promoting too much activity of the erector spinae. This should not be, in my opinion, no exercise should really be a low back exercise. That should come as a byproduct, a stabilization in my heavy lifts. So the squats are hip exercises. The deadlifts are hip exercises, leg exercises, right? So place the emphasis where it needs to go. So we talked about technique. We talked about hip mobility versus spine mobility, that dissociation of movement. The third thing that I want to talk about is using an appropriate range of motion. Now, with something like a squat, let's take, for example, Olympic weightlifting. So if I'm going to catch a clean with a squat clean, I need to catch with a weight on the front of my shoulders all the way down to the ground. And it's possible. We've seen a lot of people do it. Most of the time, especially in American lifters, people will compensate to catch the weight by shifting their weight forward onto their toes. You need some sort of heel elevation to have the ankle mobility to actually do a rep, like a full squat like that. So first, you've got to make sure you're set up there. And that will open up your maximum mobility availability. Now, I said before, if I'm trying really hard, that's promoting tightness in the back. So I've got to keep that in check here. It's easy to let the back muscles, or let the back arch, let the back muscles turn on, and they will push you forward onto your toes. We want to prevent that from happening as best we can, because we don't want to mis-lifts forward in the example of a clean, right? Snatch is the same thing. So we need to find an appropriate range of motion, and we need to execute the exercise the right way. In a simpler example, let's say I'm not throwing the weights around, I'm just doing a squat. If I squat down to halfway, and then once I hit halfway, I start shifting forward. Well, then, hey, maybe I don't have the hip mobility to do this right now. And all I'm going to do by getting that extra little bit of motion is really increase the risk of injury during my exercises. Exercise is a risk-reward situation all the time. And I want you to make gains, and I want you to try hard. But don't be dumb. We'll just leave it there. Speaking of dumb, the last thing that I want to talk about is your periodization. So you've got to be a little dumb to get stronger and to get bigger, right? You have to push yourself really hard. You've got to have that masochism inside you. However, when you're working out and you're doing, let's say, you're doing the same program for six months, you're not promoting a whole lot of variability. And therefore, you're not promoting a whole lot of mobility and flexibility. You have to prioritize those things at certain points. But more than that, you have to just switch up your training. That's kind of what your coach is designed to do. It's designed to say, hey, this is what we're going to do now. I'm going to let you push really hard on gaining relative strength. We're going to try to see how heavy we can make your deadlift this month. But then next month, we're not going to do that. Maybe we do it for three months. But after that, we need to take a break every now and then. One of the problems with people who are powerlifting or Olympic weightlifting is they compete too much. You spend too much time testing and not enough time building your strength. And it's just not a good way for longevity for one, but also just for making the gains. It's not about making the gains this week. It's about making the gains over the long term. So we want to keep a long term focus. And you do that by periodizing. So make sure that, you know, especially if you're feeling that back tightness, you got to make sure you change up your programming every now and then. It's okay to do things that are lighter. It's okay to lose a little bit of strength in order to gain other fitness qualities. Endurance, for example, muscular endurance, it's going to help you keep your technique during the lift. So make sure you're not neglecting that. That's going to be it for me. If you like this video, hit the like button, subscribe, leave a comment below so I know you like this stuff. And so you can be notified when I release new videos if, you know, this is your shtick. If you need something else to watch, well, we talked about hip mobility. You probably need hip mobility if you have a back tightness problem. Look at my Limber Up with Lance series hip mobility video. I'll link that somewhere around here.