How to Brace Your Core for Heavy Lifts Stop Lower Back Pain

If you're struggling with lower back pain or back pain in general, when you're doing your compound lifts, it's very likely that the reason you have that is because you haven't mastered a breathing techie called bracing.

That sounds like a strange claim at first, because breathing and back pain feel like two separate things, but they are wired together through a mechanical chain that runs from your lungs down to your pelvis, and once you see the whole chain the rest of this makes sense.

The chain works like this, and it starts with the fact that your spine is a stack of small bones with discs between them, which on its own is not stable under load. The muscles running up your back, the erectors, hold it upright. But muscles pulling on a flexible column can only do so much, so your body has a second system: the space inside your torso, bounded by your diaphragm on top, your pelvic floor on the bottom, and your abdominal wall all the way around.

When you fill that space with air and squeeze it from every side, the pressure inside rises, and that pressurized cylinder sits directly in front of your spine and acts like a support column. Your spine is no longer holding the weight alone. It has a pressurized chamber pushing back against it from the front.

And so when you're doing heavy deadlifts, squats, bench press, military press, or even loaded carries, you want to learn how to use your diaphragm and your lungs to brace your spine.

And the basic idea behind bracing is when I'm putting my spine under a very heavy load, I'm using my chest cavity and the pressure created from it to brace my spine and support my erectors going up my back so I don't get hurt.

Picture an empty aluminum can that you can crush with one hand without much effort, then picture that same can sealed with pressure inside, like an unopened soda, strong enough to stand on. The aluminum stays the same thickness the whole time. The pressure inside is what changes what the walls can resist, and your torso works on the same principle, which is why two lifters with identical muscle mass can have wildly different tolerance for load.

This is also something that does a great job of helping you with keeping proper form and technique, especially during heavy deadlifts or heavy squat movements.

The reason form holds better under a brace is that a pressurized torso resists bending. When your midsection is soft and you load it, the bar wins the argument and your spine rounds or your ribs flare, and once that happens the bar path drifts and the lift breaks down from the middle out. A stiff trunk keeps the hips and shoulders moving at the same rate, which is most of what good technique actually is.

And so the basic premise is you take a deep breath into your diaphragm, you push outward during the rep, and the pressure that you create from that outward push is what helps to stabilize everything.

There are two parts to this, the breath and the push, and people who try bracing and feel nothing almost always have one of the two and not both, so learn them in order.

The first part is breathing into your diaphragm. Your diaphragm is a dome of muscle sitting under your lungs, and when it contracts it flattens downward, which pulls air in and pushes your abdominal contents down and out. That downward displacement is what creates pressure in your midsection. If you breathe with your chest instead, your ribs lift and your shoulders rise and your diaphragm barely moves, so you get air but you get almost no pressure where you need it.

And the easiest way to do this is actually by laying on your back, is your feet flat on the ground on the floor, place one hand on your chest, place one hand on your belly.

Pull in a deep breath and watch your hands. If the hand on your chest rises first, you are breathing into your chest. If the hand on your belly rises first and the chest hand stays quiet, you are breathing into your diaphragm. That is the entire test, and you can run it in thirty seconds.

Most people fail it the first few times, and that is not a strength problem. If you have spent years sitting at a desk with your ribs pulled down and your shoulders forward, chest breathing became your default because it is the path of least resistance in that posture. You are rebuilding a pattern, not building a muscle, so it comes back faster than you think, and a few days of practice is usually all it takes.

Once you've learned how to breathe into your diaphragm, the next step is to use that pressure that you've created to evenly push outward 360 degrees all the way around your body.

The word "evenly" matters more than it looks like it should. Most people who learn belly breathing then push their stomach forward only, which stretches the front of the abdominal wall and leaves the sides and the low back soft, and a cylinder that is only pressurized on one face is not a cylinder. You want the pressure going out the front, out both sides into your obliques, and into your lower back against your belt or your hands.

Now, if you kind of feel like you're pooping, but you're pushing out and you should feel, should be able to talk while you're doing this, you should feel that pressure pushing out on your stomach.

The talking check matters more than it sounds. If you cannot speak, you have closed your throat and you are holding air by trapping it above, which spikes pressure in your chest and your head rather than your abdomen. That is where the dizziness and the seeing stars comes from. A real brace is a muscular squeeze around air you still control, not a clamped throat.

Then once you've mastered that 360 degree outward pressure and being able to hold it for five seconds, then the next step is doing that under a load.

That five second mark is not a random number someone picked. A heavy single takes about three to five seconds from the moment you break the floor to the lockout, so if you can only hold a brace for two seconds you will lose it exactly when the bar is heaviest and your spine is most exposed.

For a deadlift, take your deep breath standing, brace, then hinge down to the bar with the brace already set, pull, and release at the top. The brace goes on before you move, not after you have already bent over, because bending over compresses the space you were trying to fill.

If I'm doing a squat, it's going to be deep breath, hold my brace, go into the squat, and then at the top of the rep, I can release my breath for bench press.

On bench, you brace before the bar leaves the rack, hold through the descent and the press, then reset at lockout. Military press follows the same order, and it matters more there than people expect, because the load is sitting directly over your spine with nothing to lean on.

Now the challenge with bracing, especially when you're doing like an overhead carry or even just a regular loaded farmer carry is you want to try to figure out a way to deep that brace as much as possible by taking small breaths while you're carrying that load.

That is the hard one, because a carry can last thirty or forty seconds and nobody holds their breath that long under load. You keep the abdominal squeeze constant and take short shallow sips of air on top of it, so the pressure never fully drops even though air is moving. It feels awkward for the first few sessions and then it stops feeling like anything.

This is also the exact technique that makes belts useful, and it is the part most lifters get backwards.

Most guys get a belt and cinch it all the way as tight as they can, thinking tight equals supported. Then what they've done by doing that is not leaving enough space between the belt and your body for your bracing to push out.

A belt is not a corset squeezing your spine into place. It is a wall for your abdominal wall to push against, which raises the pressure you can generate and gives your nervous system something to feel and aim at. If the belt is already crushing you at rest, there is nowhere for the expansion to go, and you have spent money to remove the thing you bought it for.

Two fingers of space between the belt and your stomach, worn lower on a squat.