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If you’re someone who feels underwhelmed when people tell you that practicing yoga is valuable for athletes, I understand. I fell into this camp for years as a competitive runner. A lot of us with limited exposure to the practice consider its only benefits to be flexibility and relaxation. And whether you’re a runner, cyclist, skier, hiker, HIIT class enthusiast, weightlifter, or anything else, those probably tend to fall pretty low on your priority list.
However, after I became a personal trainer, it wasn’t long before I noticed that incorporating specific yoga for back strength into my usual workout or cool-down routine noticeably reduced the tightness and aches in my lower back.
That got my attention.
Most athletes I know who try a yoga back routine for a few sessions find that they want to continue because of the improvement in how they feel. Even if you don’t struggle with back pain or tightness, practicing specific poses in yoga for back strength helps ensure less risk of back strain.
Another common misconception is that you need to sacrifice an hour at the gym to make time for an entire yoga class. Not true. Incorporating a few specific poses for core strength into your existing training routines is more than sufficient.
How Does Yoga Help With Back Strength?
Yoga contributes to back strength in several ways, including strengthening commonly overlooked muscles in the lower back as well as strengthening muscles that are supportive to the back. This translates to less likelihood of the back needing to compensate and becoming overworked, fatigued, and potentially strained or injured. This stronger support structure also creates improved posture and/or increased range of motion in the supportive hamstrings, spine, and hips.
The body awareness that you take away from a yoga practice can help you rely on strong muscle groups, including the commonly underutilized glutes and core muscles, as the primary agents of movement when squatting, running, lifting, and walking.
Muscle strains in the lumbar area with a known mechanical cause are likely to be overuse injuries caused by fatigue or damage due to repetitive loads. This can be the result of poor posture, such as leaning forward for extended amounts of time while cycling or running with your back hyperextended.
These strains can also be prompted by intense and acute muscle effort combined with poor form while weight lifting, twisting, pushing, or pulling. These types of loads or rapid force development can injure the smaller muscles in your lower back, such as the multifidus, that are not intended to perform heavy lifting or powerful movements.
Ways Yoga Helps With Back Strength
The following are some of the back-strengthening benefits of yoga for athletes.
1. Yoga Activates the Glutes
Many runners and cyclists experience tight hamstrings and low back pain. These aren’t necessarily unrelated as both athletes tend to find it difficult to properly activate their glutes and instead rely on the hamstrings for leg extension. This creates tightness in the hamstrings, which can, over an extended period of time, cause the lower back muscles to compensate by taking on more of the load than they can handle. That, in turn, can cause back pain.
Practicing yoga strengthens not only the gluteal muscles but body awareness. When you know which muscles you’re activating, you learn to engage the right muscles at the right time. This translates to being able to more effectively rely on your glutes when you run or ride.
You can learn to feel your glutes contract in common yoga poses such as Bridge (Setu Bandha Sarvangasana) and Locust (Salabhasana), as well as during simple transitions such as Standing Forward Bend (Uttanasana) to Mountain (Tadasana).
2. Yoga Stretches the Hip Flexors and Hamstrings
If you’re an athlete, chances are you experience tightness not only in your hamstrings but your hip flexors. When these supportive muscles groups are compromised, the back muscles tend to compensate.
Practicing yoga increases flexibility and mobility of tight muscles and joint structures, which means the back muscles won’t need to pick up the slack or become fatigued and potentially strained.
3. Yoga Improves Core Strength
Yoga poses that strengthen the core—including back muscles—translate to you being able to maintain better form not just in your yoga poses but in any type of exercise, whether that means cycling, running, hiking, weight lifting, or using the elliptical machine.
Core-strengthening yoga poses help ensure the smaller postural muscles of the upper back are engaged and support your spine properly when you log long biking workouts or train for that ultramarathon.
4. Yoga Improves Your Body Awareness
Yoga trains you to be exquisitely aware of what is happening in your body so you can start to move it more efficiently and safely.This might be as simple as your teacher reminding you to hinge at your hips as you bend forward, to activate your core muscles in challenging exercises, and to be relentlessly present with whatever situation you find yourself.
This translates to you later remembering to activate your glutes while running or keep a flat back when lifting something heavy or awkward, which can help prevent lower back injuries.
7 Back Strength Exercises for Athletes (That Just Happen to Be Yoga)
Start to incorporate some of these yoga poses for back strength as part of your strength workouts or cool-down routine a few times a week.
Try practicing each pose for 20 seconds and eventually build up to 30 seconds. You can also work up to a second round of each pose.
1. Balancing Table Pose
This pose is essentially the same thing as bird dog exercise, in which you start on hands and knees and then extend a leg and opposite arm at the same time and crunch. Except here you hold it as a static posture.
This isometric contraction (that is, squeezing your muscles without moving) helps you build not only strength but stability in the smaller postural back muscles such as the commonly overlooked multifidus and the spinalis, which are crucial for spine stabilization. It also strengthens the erector spinae and the glutes and forces you to focus on the mind-body connection as you maintain your balance.
How to: As you extend one leg straight behind you, squeeze your glutes and quads to enhance the stretch in your hip flexors. Remember to keep your back flat like a tabletop. Think about sucking your belly button in toward your spine but continue to breathe throughout the pose.
2. Plank Pose
Essentially a high push-up, Plank Pose strengthens not just your arms and shoulders but your entire core.
How to: It can be easy to want to find the shape of this pose at any cost—even if that means your upper body does all the work while your hips sink a little toward the mat. Instead, focus on engaging throughout your core to keep your body straight like a plank of wood.
3. Chaturanga
This exercise is similar to Low Plank position and builds core and back strength in the deep abdominal muscles, including the transversus abdominis that encircles your midsection like a corset and is integral in maintaining spine stability during heavy lifting.
How to: It can be challenging to know exactly how to engage your core properly in Chaturanga. Try pushing through your heels, a simple and intuitive action that essentially engages all the necessary back and core muscles.
4. Boat Pose (Paripurna Navasana)
This core-strengthener contributes to core and back strength, especially the lower abdominals, which can help support your spine during your workouts and everyday life.
How to: It’s important that you keep your core engaged and lower back flat in Boat Pose. This helps train your default posture to a more neutral spine even in challenging situations.
If you find yourself rounding your back to keep your legs lifted, bend your knees and bring your hands to the backs of your thighs or rest your heels lightly on the floor. The most essential part of the pose is maintaining a flat back. As you build back strength, try reaching your arms straight alongside your legs and, eventually, move toward taking straight legs.
5. Bridge Pose (Setu Bandha Sarvangasana)
This yoga pose is similar to the regular strength training exercise known as body weight bridges. The yoga version helps train the mind-muscle connection by challenging you to engage your glutes, which can be tricky to activate without overtensing your lower back muscles. Strong glutes are critical for offloading excessive workload on the low back. Bridge also releases tension in the hip flexors, which in turn prevents low back pain by helping maintain proper pelvic alignment.
How to: As you lift your hips toward the ceiling, you’ll feel a stretch along your hip flexors. To emphasize the hip flexor stretch, engage your glutes and reach them toward the backs of your knees. If you find your knees start to drift away from one another, squeeze a block or a small box between your thighs.
6. Locust Pose (Salabhasana)
This is similar to the back extension exercise known as Superman. An underrated backbend, Locust doesn’t look dramatic but it effectively (and rather intensely) engages all your back muscles, which is surprisingly uncommon among backbends. And, unlike a lot of more bendy backbends, it delivers profound benefits but doesn’t require a tremendous amount of flexibility, making it accessible to those of us with real-people bodies.
How to: Initiate movement by squeezing your glutes and hamstrings to lift your thighs off the mat. Practice activating these muscles while relaxing your lower back muscles. You can keep your hands on the floor, lift them alongside your body, or interlace your fingers behind your back and reach your knuckles away from you.
7. Downward-Facing Dog Pose (Adho Mukha Svanasana)
I like to end my core-strengthening routine by stretching the entire posterior chain, including the hamstrings, glutes, and calves. Down Dog does all of that.
How to: If you have tight hamstrings, you’re going to feel them in this pose. Bending your knees can help you find the shape without experiencing some seriously uncomfortable tugging in your hamstrings. Keep your low back flat and reach your heels toward the floor to stretch the calf muscles and Achilles tendon. There’s no need to force your heels to reach all the way to the floor.
