Stretching the spine and back muscles is one of the most important aspects of Physical Training and that’s because the spine gives us that electric charge from the brain to the cord itself. You can get injured with a broken wrist, I’ve had my legs broken and had my ribs nearly crushed but having a broken back if worse a broken spinal cord, the chances of coming back are slim to none. Keeping yourself flexible in that area gives the rest of your body that power and supercharged.
That
electrical energy in your body is really at that cord that’s in the middle of your back and the stronger it is, the stronger your body is. It connects to everything from your muscles to your nerves, all the way towards the brain where it all brings the rest of the body together. There are many ways to stretch the back but there are those that actually teach the wrong way and don’t realize that they can get hurt doing some of these things. Do your own research and you’ll see what I mean.
One of the best exercises you can do for your back is the
Bridge. This exercise alone can help bring that powerful charge in the spine into a level of strength you couldn’t have imagined before, you can do this in the Wrestler’s Bridge (aka neck bridge) on the head or the Gymnastic Bridge (wheel pose for you Yoga maniacs). There are many ways to do the Bridge and you can even do certain athletic moves while in those positions.
Another part of the body that many neglect is your neck. Your neck is a series of muscles and tendons that help hold your head up and held up with the muscles of the back. You see everything has to work together otherwise we’d be pretty awkward looking. Too many people forget to work the body as a whole but you have these wackjobs as experts in the gym telling you to do this for this muscle and that for that muscle, it’s all crap. When you work on the whole body but focus on a specific part, you get a different perspective on what it takes to work the body as a complete piece.
Quite arguably the greatest Catch Wrestler of all-time Karl Gotch taught his students that if you want to be a complete wrestler, you must first learn the bridge because it teaches how to work the body in unison and it’s one of the best forms of
Physical Conditioning. Now you don’t have to be a wrestler or a world-class athlete to do this stuff, with the right instruction and the will to practice, the majority of people can learn this stuff. There’s even Bridging in Yoga if you haven’t figured that out already and Yoga is one of the most popular forms of training.
Like I said before, you don’t have to be a wrestler, gymnast, Yogi or another type of Athlete to understand and learn how to keep your body specifically your back and spine in great shape and it’s a great time saver. You don’t need to do cardio or an hour of weights to get in awesome shape, you can if you want but I can assure you from personal experience and from a couple I’ve trained, working exercises that target the back and neck while using the while body will get you breathing harder than an asthmatic finishing a 10 second sprint.
Your body will become a fitness machine and it doesn’t take more than a few minutes a day. At 240+ lbs. I can hold a wrestler’s bridge for three minutes anytime I want and can hold quite well on the gymnastic bridge and am in better shape because of these exercises than I ever did when I was training with weights in my teens. I’ve even become stronger in the weights through some of this type of training and I’ve kept getting stronger every time I go to the weights without touching them for months at a time. Not saying this can happen for you but with practice and learning different things, you’ll be surprised what you can do outside of that type of training. Keep your back strong and spine stronger, it’ll thank you in the end, I guarantee it.
