Our modern-day digital lifestyle habits of working on laptops, texting and scrolling bring with them lots of slouching, shoulder-rounding and forward head posture.
This creates a situation where the muscles on the back of our bodies, which we tend to neglect anyway because they’re out of sight, get over-stretched and under-strengthened, relative to the anterior muscles of the upper body.
And over time, this can lead to chronic poor posture, painful, rounded shoulders, and neck issues.
So what are we supposed to do? Give up our laptops and smart phones? Let’s face it, that’s not going to happen.
But what we can do to counteract these problems is to incorporate posterior chain exercises into our workout routines.
In this post, we’ll go over what posterior chain exercises are, the anatomy of the posterior chain, and examples of exercises for the posterior chain muscles that can be done at home or in the gym.
Related content on posterior chain exercises:
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5 Little-Known Dumbbell Exercises To Keep You Strong, Healthy And Pain-Free After 50
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Weightlifting for Seniors: Safely Enhancing Strength and Fitness and Boosting Quality of Life
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How To Achieve Excellent Fitness Over 50 in 90 Minutes A Week
Posterior Chain Exercises: Essential Moves for Strength and Stability
Building a strong posterior chain is crucial for overall fitness, and can significantly improve your performance in any sport or physically demanding hobby. The posterior chain includes muscles such as the hamstrings, glutes, lower back, and upper back. Incorporating posterior chain exercises into your routine helps enhance strength, posture, and injury prevention.
Posterior chain exercises are effective not only for athletes but also for individuals over 50 looking to improve their general health and maintain a high level of pain-free function. These exercises target important (but often neglected) muscle groups that are vital for daily activities and can alleviate common issues like chronic back pain.
By focusing on a combination of compound movements, such as lunges and rows, and single-joint movements, such as back extensions and rear delt raises, you can achieve balanced muscle development and increase functional strength.
In addition to basic multi-joint movements, single-joint exercises can challenge your posterior chain further and improve your overall muscular development and resistance to injury.
Whether you’re a beginner or have decades of experience, infusing your workout routine with various lower body and upper body posterior chain exercises can yield impressive results. Prioritizing these exercises in your training program is essential for optimizing strength and maintaining a healthy, functional body.
Understanding the Posterior Chain
The posterior chain encompasses a group of muscles crucial for movement, stability, and overall health. Understanding the anatomy, importance, and common issues related to this muscle group is vital for optimizing exercise routines and preventing injuries.
Anatomy of the Posterior Chain
The posterior chain consists of several muscle groups primarily located on the backside of your body. Key muscles include the glutes, hamstrings, erector spinae, lats, and upper back musculature.
The glutes are powerful muscles responsible for hip extension and rotation. The hamstrings, located at the back of your thighs, help with knee flexion and hip extension. The erector spinae muscles run along your spine and aid in extending and straightening the spine. Additionally, muscles like the rhomboids, traps, and latissimus dorsi (lats) contribute to upper body strength and stability.
Importance for Health and Performance
A strong posterior chain is fundamental for posture, stability, and power. Proper development of these muscles supports your spine, reducing the risk of back pain and injuries. Enhanced posture from a robust posterior chain combats the adverse effects of prolonged sitting.
In sports and everyday activities, posterior chain strength aids in superior performance. These muscles generate significant power for movements like running and lifting. Moreover, maintaining balance between the posterior and anterior muscles is critical for overall muscle balance and injury prevention. Strengthening exercises can alleviate chronic issues such as shoulder pain and improve core stability.
Common Issues and Imbalances
Many people face issues like muscle imbalances and discomfort in the posterior chain. Lower back pain is often attributed to weak muscles and poor posture, resulting from extended periods of sitting and insufficient exercise.
An imbalance between the anterior chain and posterior chain muscles surrounding the shoulder joints can lead to pain, injury and reduced performance.
Hamstrings and glutes are also prone to weakness and strains. Inadequate strength and flexibility in these muscles can contribute to knee and hip problems. Addressing these imbalances through targeted exercises and stretching routines is essential for maintaining muscle harmony and overall health.
Regular evaluation and correction of these imbalances are crucial to avoid chronic pain and improve functional movement patterns.
Multi-Joint Posterior Chain Movements
Understanding the movements that will strengthen the various posterior chain muscles will allow you to add exercises for these areas to your strength training routine, no matter where you work out or what equipment you’re using. Each category of movements targets specific muscle groups to optimize function and prevent injury.
Incorporate these exercises regularly to build a well-rounded, powerful posterior chain.
Along the way, I’ll also go over some current popular exercises and movements that I do not recommend for people over 50 – and explain why.
Glutes and Hamstrings
Recommended Exercises:
Lower Body Push movements focus on the quadriceps while also engaging the glutes and hamstrings of the posterior chain. A lower body push exercise involves straightening your knees and extending your hips. Typically you are either pushing your body up from a bent-knee position to a fully upright position (as in a squat), or pushing a foot plate away from you (as in a leg press). The exercises listed in this section are multi-joint exercises because they involve movement around both the hip and knee joints.
Leg Press – These are performed on a leg press machine in a gym. The kind where you are sitting upright are usually a little more comfortable than the kind where you are laying back at a 45 degree angle.
Ball Squats – These would be performed at home with a swiss ball behind your back up against a wall. You can hold dumbbells in your hands for resistance.
Reverse lunges – These focus on the glute, ham string, and quad muscles. Perform them by stepping backward with one foot and lower your hips until both knees are bent at 90-degree angles, with bodyweight or additional resistance like dumbbells for added intensity.
Not Recommended:
Barbell deadlifts – For us over 50’s the deadlift carries too much risk of injury to make it worth any gains you might get from it. One little break in your form and hello herniated disc.
Barbell Squats – Holding the barbell in place on your back puts your shoulder joints in an extremely vulnerable position, and is a recipe for disaster. And resting a heavy barbell on your spine is not good for it. Many bad things can happen during a barbell squat, and the same muscles can be worked much more safely with the leg press or lunges.
Kettlebell swings – These are performed by swinging a weight with both hands from between your legs to shoulder height. The weight is moved mainly by the force of momentum, which increases the risk of injury and decreases the effectiveness of the exercise for building muscle.
Lats, Rear Delts and Rhomboids
Incorporating upper body pulling movements that target the upper back and shoulders can help in building a robust posterior chain. This can include pulling down from overhead, or pulling in a rowing motion.
Recommended Exercises:
Pull-ups and chin-ups – These are fundamental for building the upper back muscles and posterior deltoids, as well as the biceps. You want to make sure you always use a palms-up, underhand grip with your hands closer than shoulder width apart, and pull until your hands are near your collarbones.
Rows – These offer great benefits in terms of strength and muscle hypertrophy for the rhomboids, lats and rear delts. They can be performed using a machine, cable or dumbbell. With the dumbbell row you would brace yourself on a flat bench with your opposite arm and knee. Squeeze your shoulder blades together in the starting position to prevent over-stretching.
Not Recommended:
Bent-over barbell rows – These put a tremendous amount of increased pressure on your lumbar spinal discs.
Wide overhand grip pulldowns behind the neck – These incorporate what physical therapists call a close-packed position of the shoulder joint, and it’s really bad for your shoulders to introduce heavy resistance when in that position.
Single-Joint Posterior Chain Exercises
Single-joint posterior chain exercises are crucial for building strength and stability. This section will explore exercises that involve movement around only a single joint, utilizing both free weights and machines, and some exercises I don’t recommend for over-50s.
Incorporating these movements into your training routine can enhance posterior chain strength, improve overall stability, and reduce the risk of injury.
Erector Spinae, Glutes and Hamstrings
Core stability is essential in maintaining proper posture and preventing injuries, especially low back pain. Strengthening these muscle groups will contribute to overall stability.
The erector spinae muscles are located on each side of your spine; for our discussion we are focusing on the low back area.
Recommended Exercises:
Back extensions – These can also be performed on machines, a bench or a swiss ball, focusing on extending the hip joint to fully engage the posterior chain muscles.
Leg curls – These are performed by bending the knee using a machine, either in a seated or prone position.
Not Recommended:
Barbell hip thrusts – The hip thrust involves placing your upper back on a bench and driving your hips upwards with some form of resistance on your hips, such as balancing a barbell on them. I’m not sure who came up with this, but I can’t think of anything good about it. There are tons of much more comfortable and safer ways to strengthen your hips and low back.
Romanian deadlifts (including single-leg Romanian deadlifts), aka RDLs – These incorporate a “hip hinge” movement, which involves bending at the hips while maintaining a neutral spine, so are a single-joint exercise. Same risk to your lumbar spinal discs as mentioned above for barbell deadlifts.
Good mornings – These involve putting a barbell across your shoulders, then bending forward at the hips until your upper body is parallel to the floor. See squats and barbell deadlifts above for the reasons I think they should be avoided.
Traps
The trapezius muscles, or “traps”, cover the upper back and attach to the back of the neck. They help achieve good posture and also serve to protect the cervical spine.
Recommended Exercises:
Shrugs – These are performed by holding a weight in each hand and shrugging your shoulders straight up and down in an “I don’t know” motion. You can use dumbbells, a machine or a barbell for resistance, but the barbell version is the least comfortable because the bar will rub up and down your thighs. Make sure to pause a second or two in the top position.
Not Recommended:
Rack pulls – These are partial deadlifts where you pull a barbell up off of a rack or two blocks explosively, performing a shrugging motion in the process. The momentum used to make this happen makes the exercise more dangerous and less effective.
Rear Delts
Using dumbbells, cables or machines for exercises like rear delt raises can further isolate the posterior deltoids. This ensures balanced muscle development, preventing any weaknesses that could lead to injuries.
Additionally, focusing on these areas helps counteract the “mirror muscles,” which often get overemphasized in training programs.
Recommended Exercises:
Rear deltoid raise – These can be done with a machine or cable. move your arms from the front of you out to the sides until they form a “T”.
Shoulder “Ts” – These are done with dumbbells while face down on a flat bench. Keep your arms straight out to the sides and raise them toward the ceiling with elbows straight.
Not Recommended:
Face pulls – These are done standing with a cable and 2 handles as shown. This motion puts a lot of detrimental torque force on the rotator cuff muscles.
Programming Posterior Chain Workouts
When structuring posterior chain workouts, it is crucial to balance various exercises to prevent muscle imbalances, manage volume and intensity to ensure optimal muscle growth and strength, and integrate proper recovery techniques to prevent injuries and encourage progress.
Creating a Balanced Routine
A well-rounded posterior chain workout targets key posterior chain muscle groups we have discussed, Along with the anterior chain muscles that perform upper body pushing, as well as the abdominals. Both multi-joint and single-joint movements should be included.
In addition, you always want to make sure you go through a warm-up prior to the strength training workout to decrese the risk of injury and prepare your body for the intense workout ahead. The warm-up can include riding a stationary bike, marching in place, and/or performing a couple of multi-joint exercises with light weights to get the blood flowing and raise the internal temperature a little.
Volume and Intensity Considerations
The volume and intensity of exercises must align with your training goals. For strength training, aim for moderate rep ranges (7-10 reps for upper body, 9-12 reps for lower body per set) with the heaviest weights you can use with perfect form.
Time under tension plays a crucial role in hypertrophy. Slow, controlled movements increase muscle engagement.
Track your workouts by recording your weight and reps, and adjust as needed to ensure progress.
Avoid excessive volume, which can lead to overtraining and injuries. There’s no need to perform strength training workouts more than twice a week for optimal gains and recovery.
Recovery and Progression
Recovery is pivotal for any training program’s success. Schedule rest days and consider active recovery options like light cardio or outdoor physical activity you enjoy.
Posterior chain workouts can cause significant muscle soreness, so recovery strategies like stretching are a great idea right after the workout, while your muscles are warm.
Adequate nutrition are essential. Make sure to consume a balanced diet, with adequate amounts of protein
Gradual progression is key. Incrementally increase weight, reps, or both to continue making gains without overloading your muscles too quickly. Listen to your body and adjust your training accordingly to avoid setbacks.
Prevention and Management of Injuries
Preventing and managing injuries involves addressing common postural and muscle deficiencies, engaging in rehabilitation exercises when needed, and adhering to safe training practices.
Ensuring proper form and technique is vital to avoiding back pain and other injuries.
Common Postural and Chain Deficiencies
Individuals often experience muscle imbalances and poor posture, which can lead to low back pain and other injuries. Weak posterior chain muscles, such as the glutes, hamstrings, and lower back, can contribute significantly to these issues.
Improper form during exercises and a sedentary lifestyle exacerbates these deficiencies. An assessment by a reputable certified personal trainer can help identify and correct these imbalances. Posterior chain exercises will strengthen the muscles that show a deficiency and improve overall posture.
Rehabilitation Exercises
Injury rehabilitation requires targeted exercises to restore strength and function. If you sustain an injury, or have surgery, listen to your doctor and medical team and do as they advise.
If you go through physical therapy, it is best to do only what your therapist tells you to do, and don’t do anything else in the gym for the injured area. Once you are fully released, make sure to progress slowly and avoid pain.
Tips for Safe Training
To train safely and prevent back injuries, always prioritize proper technique. Use mirrors or feedback from a certified personal trainer to ensure correct form. Warm-up sufficiently before workouts and stretch after to prevent muscle tightness and injury.
Make sure to choose exercises where you can safely exit the exercise at any point. Don’t use exercises where you are at risk of getting stuck under something, or having something fall on you.
Incorporate a balanced workout plan that addresses all the major muscle groups, avoiding over-reliance on any single exercise. (This means more than just chest and biceps, guys 😁.)
Listen to your body and rest if you experience pain or discomfort. Ensure equipment is in good condition and suitable for your body type and fitness level.
Frequently Asked Questions
Learn how to effectively engage and strengthen your posterior chain muscles through various exercises tailored for different needs, whether you’re aiming for at-home workouts, running improvement, back pain relief, or just general senior fitness.
How can I strengthen my posterior chain muscles at home?
To strengthen your posterior chain muscles at home, incorporate exercises such as lunges, swiss ball back extensions, dumbbell shrugs, and shoulder “T’s”. Dumbbells and resistance bands can be useful for resistance.
Which exercises target the posterior chain for running improvement?
Here’s a sample routine for running improvement:
- Leg Press – lower body power
- Hip Adduction – injury prevention
- Calf Raise – lower body power
- Chest Press – arm swing, upper body endurance
- Mid Row – arm swing, upper body endurance
- Low Back Extension – running form, core strength
- Abdominal Crunch – core strength
These exercises can enhance your hamstring and glute strength, leading to better running efficiency and reduced injury risk.
(To hear an in-depth discussion on strength training for runners, check out my podcast interview for 6AMRun.com HERE.)
What are the best posterior chain exercises to alleviate back pain?
To alleviate back pain, integrate exercises like back extensions to strengthen the erector spinae. And when performing rows, choose exercises where your upper body is supported to take the pressure off your lumbar spine, like 1 arm dumbbell rows or seated machine rows with a chest pad.
Can you recommend a workout program focused on the posterior chain?
A balanced workout program should include both pushing and pulling movements for both the posterior chain and anterior muscles.
Here’s an example of a balanced workout focused on the posterior chain:
- Reverse Lunge
- Leg curl
- Close-grip underhand pulldowns
- Dumbbell incline chest press
- Back extension
- Rear delt raise
- Abdominal crunch
- Shrug
What are suitable posterior chain exercises for seniors?
Seniors will benefit from the same exercises recommended above, and definitely should avoid those not recommended. These exercises help maintain mobility, improve muscle strength, and reduce the risk of falls without excessive joint stress. Range of motion can be adjusted to avoid painful movements. Remember, strength training is supposed to help you, not hurt you, so avoid anything that hurts.
Key Takeaways:
- Posterior chain exercises enhance strength and athletic performance.
- The posterior chain refers to muscles on the back of the body that perform hip and back extension and pulling movements.
- Focusing on these exercises helps with injury prevention and posture improvement.
- Varying your routine with both compound and single-joint movements yields optimal results.
- To train safely and prevent back injuries, always prioritize proper technique.
- Listen to your body and stop if you experience pain.
