As fitness professionals, most of us have had our share of those odd, unsolicited comments or personal messages from a fitness “expert” who, after watching 5 seconds of our Deadlift PR video (or maybe one of our client’s video) has come to the conclusion that we are doomed and fated to get injured according to their Jedi powered injury prediction abilities!

The concept & narrative behind – “ALWAYS lift with a neutral spine or you’ll hurt yourself” and “NEVER round your back while lifting or you’ll get injured” – is highly oversimplistic and has been shown to produce more of a fear monger-y / nocebo effect on most people, wherein, they get fearful & unnecessarily hypervigilent and avoid spinal flexion in every single day to day tasks they do, thus completely missing out how robust & adaptable our spines are and the complexity and variability with which our bodies can move. This narrative leaves people thinking that their back is fragile, weak and easily breakable and prone to damage/injury at the drop of a hat (or in this case, picking up a dropped hat with a flexed spine).



Our spines are capable of flexion, bending/rounding, twisting, or else it would have been made up of a single long bone like the humerus or femur!



It’s worth mentioning here that, with regards to lumbar flexion & strength production – flexed lumbar spine postures have been associated with greater strength efficiency than lordotic postures during a maximal lift in pain-free individuals. Yes you read that correctly.

(Mawston et al., Gait & Posture, 2021). Study link –>(1)

The above is the most comprehensive study to date exploring the influence of lumbar posture on trunk muscle recruitment, strength and efficiency during high intensity lifting. The study found that flexed lumbar spine lifting postures increased the body’s ability to generate a trunk extensor moment and significantly improved NME (neuromuscular efficiency).

Conversely the lordotic / straight lumbar spine posture resulted in the lowest extensor moment.





Here are a few more references of studies that show – lifting with a bent back is more energy efficient, and also has NO significant difference (read ~4%) in lumbar spinal compression forces than lifting with a straight or neutral spine as commonly believed. Study links –>(2),(3).

It’s important to understand that an injury is a highly unpredictable and a multifactorial phenomenon. There are no credible studies which shows that ‘lifting with a flexed spine is inherently more injury prone in general for everyone compared to lifting with a neutral spine’. It depends. Whether or not an injury might occur would depend on several factors like – an individual’s tissue’s load bearing capacity, load management/mismanagement, risk factors involved in the task to be undertaken, tissue preparedness, adaptations & tolerance for the specific task, fatigue levels, past training history, sleep/nutrition overtime, overreaching, and several other variables in combination. Isolating one particular factor, such as – ‘lifting posture/technique’ and PREDICTING an injury without even considering the individual, the context, their past training experience and so many other variables, etc. is a highly reductionist way of looking at something very complex. It’s impossible to predict what WILL and what WILL NOT cause an injury? So how and where do these claims come from? –> spinal flexion causes injury, knee crossing the toes in squats causes injury, neck extension while lifting causes injury, etc.



Here’s a study that looked at physical therapists’ ability to assess spinal motion and predict injury based on the spinal motion. So, how accurate are visual assessments by physical therapists of lumbo-pelvic movements during the squat and deadlift? As it turns out, they were not good at predicting injury. We have to realise that, when we think we have x-ray vision and can detect minute movements of someone’s joints through clothes and meat, well – WE DON’T. And this type of research helps us realise this better and makes us humble.

(Jimmy Falk et al. Phys Ther Sport. 2021 Jul.). Study link –>(4)

Therefore, if you are one of those injury predicting “experts”, you may consider getting in touch with Mr. Dunning and Mr. Kruger, because you might be over-confident in your abilities to override the complexity and variability in how the human body can move. These “experts” usually have a vastly inflated sense of their own abilities to assess things with their eyes and confidently gauge positions of the pelvis and spine of the lifter based on a few frames in a video through clothes and soft tissues. Remarkable. They would then go on to loosely toss around arbitrary rules on exactly how EVERYONE SHOULD and SHOULD NOT move, failing which – an injury awaits them.

Now I can hear some of you ask – “Oh, so are you saying technique doesn’t matter at all?”. Firstly, that’s a strawman because nobody said technique doesn’t matter. Optimal technique may matter for performing an exercise efficiently based on what goal you have (strength, endurance, hypertrophy, etc.) and there are a few general technique guidelines attached with every exercise, be it a bicep curl or clean & jerk. But with that being said, there’s a lot of uncertainty and assumptions around what a general optimal technique may be for every exercise for every individual. There may not really be an applicable-to-all technique. Technique would depend on THAT individual’s goals, adaptations, capacity, abilities, anthropometry & the specific exercise in question. In most cases, we would need to find the technique that fits THAT individual instead of force-fitting the individual to the technique that suits our bias.

What if one trains to lift with a neutral spine as well as a flexed / rounded spine? What if the goal is to build tissue tolerance, adaptability and preparedness in all possible positions of the spine, including a flexed one? And if one has built preparedness to lifting with a flexed as well as a neutral spine, would these injury predicting experts still confidently predict injuries by taking one look at someone lifting with spinal flexion?

Here’s what Geoff Futch, Mr. Geoff Futch, PhD (Biomechanics & Exercise Physiology) & my mentor, has to say about the concept behind “neutral”:

“The concept of neutral gets recklessly tossed around by far too many folks in this industry. Neutral spine, neutral pelvis, neutral foot position, etc. They tend to look for external clues about “alignment” which don’t mean anything about internal forces (how our body produces force). How do you know if “neutral” for one person should be the standard for another person?”



Numerous studies have shown that even when people try to maintain a neutral or lordotic spine they still have large degrees of flexion (typically greater than 20 degrees which is often more than 40% of max flexion). Here are some examples below:

Kettlebell swings showing an average of 26 degrees of flexion



Good morning exercises showing between 25-28 degrees of flexion



Squats and deadlifts showing 50% and 80% max flexion respectively.

Strongman lifts showing upto 45 degrees lumbar flexion.



“Lordotic lifting” postures showing minimum 22 degrees of lumbar flexion when the trunk is only tilted 65 degrees forward. Even when people tried not too flex they still flexed.



Therefore, even though we THINK we are maintaining a neutral spine and we THINK we are not flexing / bending at the lumbar by eyeballing it during squats, deadlifts and KB swings – we still are.

A detailed article on the above topic of Neutral Spine, link –>(5)

I (sadly) have to mention below some caveats & obvious examples for some smart alecks.

We all know that higher risk factors may still exist in certain extreme scenarios – like a person who squats with 20 kgs suddenly tries squatting with 100 kgs. Or a person who is a great jumper is asked to jump straight off a building. There’s of course a middle ground and rationale to what’s unpredictable and what WILL cause injury. Understanding how complex things are and how much we DON’T KNOW and cannot predict is important to keep us humble That’s why I never predict things like injury.

We need to stop this fear mongering around spinal flexion while lifting, and focus on building confidence, self-efficacy, tissue tolerance capacity and preparedness around moving and lifting in various ways.