Avoiding whole categories of movement is terrible fitness advice

I resisted the urge to write about this a few months ago, when it was first published in the New York Times, but instead of the urge passing, it has persisted. I’m finally giving in.

The article is about things you can do to hurt your back, beginning with this thing to be avoided:

“… what we euphemistically call the B.L.T.,” or the bend, lift and twist, said Dr. Arthur L. Jenkins III, a neurosurgeon in New York City who specializes in spinal surgery.

Doing all three actions at once, whether by shoveling snow or extracting a child from a car seat, “maximizes the stress on the disc, making it more likely to rupture,” Dr. Jenkins said. “As a spine surgeon, I would never do it.”

Source: The Worst Habits for Your Back, According to Spine Surgeons – The New York Times

I have never met Dr. Jenkins, but I bet it is false that he never does a bend, lift, and twist movement. Everyone, everywhere in the world, does this movement all the time. And it is almost always harmless, especially when the weight is very low.

The odds that you’re going to hurt yourself by bending and twisting to pick up a tissue that missed going in the trash can are pretty small. Perhaps not zero—if you are out of shape, or overweight, or have a pre-existing back injury, it does become possible to injure yourself that way.

Obviously, if you’re going to pick up a heavy weight, you always want to do that mindfully. Set yourself up facing the weight, so you don’t need to twist. Instead of bending at the waist, hinge at the hips. Then lift.

However (and this is the first half of my main point): You’re going to repeatedly do this, over and over again, over your whole life. It’s simply unavoidable.

If your toddler is about to run into traffic you are going to bend as far and twist as much as necessary to snatch him up. If you need to get your child out of his car seat, and the only parking space you can find doesn’t leave you with anyplace to stand where you can reach in and get him without twisting, you’re going to bend and twist. If there’s something heavy in the back corner of the closet, maybe you’ll spend 10 minutes shifting all the clutter in front of it so you don’t need to twist to reach it. But if there’s something light back there, you’re just going to bend and twist.

The other half of my main point is this: If you’re going to do something repeatedly, over and over again, over your whole life, you should train for that thing.

I do not mean that you should start doing your deadlifts with a bent, twisted back. I mean, you should build habits, movement patterns, and appropriate strength to do what you need to do.

I would recommend starting with videos by Mark Wildman. For this action in particular, here are two. The first is a non-twisting version of this movement, that you can use to safely build the strength:

Once you’ve got some strength, move to a lighter weight and then do this version, which first adds some rotation, and then adds more rotation:

Note that the ideal version of this exercise avoids both the bend and the twist! Instead of bending, you hinge. Instead of twisting, you rotate. But in the real world, you’re going to end up bending and twisting all the time, because nobody can be perfect about this stuff all the time.

Avoiding a whole category of movement simply makes you less ready—less capable—of doing that movement when you do it accidentally, or when it becomes necessary to do it on purpose.