Fit Tip Thursday: The Best Back Stretches

In a previous "Fit Tip Thursday" video, "How to Keep Your Back Healthy," I outlined a few simple exercises to help strengthen your lower back. Many of us will experience back pain at some point in our lives, and our increasingly sedentary lifestyles are only making this more likely as our postural muscles grow weaker and tighter from disuse.

We can reverse this trend though, by strengthening and stretching the spinal erector muscles. It only takes a few minutes a day, several times a week, to keep our backs healthy and pain-free. These are exercises and stretches that either you do now, or you will pay a physical therapist to make you do them later.

So, in addition to doing the simple exercises I illustrated in "How to Keep Your Back Healthy," you also want to stretch the back as seen in the video above. I like to alternate between the two, doing a back exercise and then a back stretch. This way you can get both done in less than five minutes, yet these "mini workouts" will reap huge rewards in keeping your back healthy.

Ultimately, the goal is to do them proactively to keep your back healthy, not reactively when you are already in pain.

Did you find this video helpful? Watch more Fit Tip Thursdays for great tips to help enhance your workouts.