By: Elinor Emesz and Igor Klibanov
You want to strengthen your lower back muscles, glutes and hamstrings, as well as prevent lower back pain. You may have heard that a good morning can be a good exercise for this, but you’re not sure how to do it.
In this article, I’ll cover everything you need to know about how to do a proper good morning workout, including:
● What is a good morning?
● Benefits of the good morning exercise
● How to do a good morning: proper technique/good form tips
● Avoiding injury
● How to incorporate good mornings into your workouts
● How many sets and reps?
● How much weight should you use?
● Alternatives to good mornings
● What if you don’t have enough mobility to perform good mornings?
Before we jump in, you’re probably wondering what qualifies me to talk about good mornings and exercise tips, so I’d like to introduce myself. Hi.
I’m Igor.
I am a 7-time author on fitness and nutrition, including the book Run Faster, Jump Higher, Go Farther. I am also a personal trainer and have been selected as one of the top 5 personal trainers in Toronto, Ontario.
Now that you know a bit more about me, let’s jump in.
What Is A Good Morning?
A good morning is an exercise for your lower back, hamstrings and glutes. In a good morning, a bar is placed on your upper back. With it on your back, you push your hips back to bend forward (as close to 90 degrees as you can), and then return to your starting position. Simple.
You can incorporate some tools into your routine to make it more effective. You can check suitable fitness equipment from your trusted supplier. They can make your good morning exercise more fun and interesting.
Benefits Of The Good Morning Exercise
Good mornings are a great exercise because they work a lot of important muscles all over your body. Basically, the more muscles they work, the more benefits it has such as:
● Strengthening your lower back muscles, as well as your glutes and hamstrings. In other words, it will help you develop a strong posterior chain.
● It’s a compound movement/exercise (compound movements/exercises are exercises that work
multiple muscle groups at once). This means it is a great use of time (since you are working several muscles at once) and is also very effective, as it works muscle groups throughout your whole body.
● Preventing lower back pain by learning the difference between spinal motion and hip motion
● Act as a good carryover to deadlifts (great if you like to deadlift)
● Improves your hip mobility as well as your hamstring flexibility. Great for overall hamstring development.
How To Do A Good Morning: Proper Technique/Good Form Tips
There are a few ways that you can approach the good morning exercise, but here are the steps for how to do the most common and proper form (and avoid poor positioning):
1. Set up the bar to be about mid-upper chest height
2. Set up the pins in the squat rack to be about waist height
3. Before getting under the bar, squeeze the shoulder blades together, to create a “shelf” of muscle.
Original source: here.
4. While maintaining this upper back “shelf”, get under the bar, and place it on the upper back (make sure you don’t place it on your neck).
5. With the feet shoulder width apart, bend forward by moving your hips backward until the bar touches the pins (make sure to maintain a straight/neutral spine, not to put all your weight on one leg, and keep your core engaged).
6. Return to starting position
7. Repeat
Avoiding Injury
Many people often ask themselves: “are good mornings bad for me?” or “are good mornings dangerous?” The answer is no, if you do them right. Thus, when it comes to a strength training exercise like a good morning, it’s really important for you to know how to avoid getting injured, since the risk can be relatively high if you do it wrong (and low if you do it right). Here are a few easy tips you should use to prevent/avoid injury:
● Make sure you don’t place the bar on your neck
● Don’t round your spine – that’s basically like asking for injury
● Don’t use more weight than you can handle: if you can’t get down to the point where the bar touches the pins, your weight is too high. Using more weight than you can handle is ego lifting, not strength training.
○ The best way to build up the amount of weight you can handle is by using a principle called “progressive overload“. According to this principle, you start light, then slowly and progressively start to lift heavier weights over time. Maybe by 5 pounds every 2-5 workouts. The more advanced you get, the slower you should increase the weight.
● If you don’t have the shoulder mobility to do a good morning, and it ends up rolling onto your neck, don’t do it. If this is the case for you, don’t worry, below we’ll talk about alternatives to good mornings.
How To Incorporate Good Mornings Into Your Workouts
Sometimes when you learn a new exercise, it’s hard to know how to fit it into your workout routine. Here are a few places in your workout where you can include it:
● Either as a major lift or as an accessory exercise
● As a major lift, warm up to it, just like you would for any major lift. That is by using ramp-up sets. Each set, getting progressively heavier and heavier. A good rule of thumb is for every 50 pounds you can do, do 1 warm up set. So if you can do 200 pounds for 10 reps, your first warm up set would be 8-10 reps at 45 pounds. The next warm up set would be 6-8 reps at 95 pounds. The next warm up set would be 5 reps at 135 pounds. Then, 5 reps at 185 pounds. And then you get into your first working set. The purpose of the warm up sets is to make the work sets both easier and safer.
● As an accessory exercise – do it for light weights
● Pair it up with spinal decompression exercises which are exercises that stretch your spine, such as reverse hypers or hanging off a chin up bar (dead hang).
How Many Sets And Reps?
The thing with sets and reps is that it really depends on your goal. If you want to build muscle, the number of sets and reps would be less than if your goal is to build your strength. The approximate sets and reps for the following common goals are:
● Lower back pain prevention: 1-3 sets of 10-20 reps
● Strength building (where your priority is strength and not muscle mass): 3-10 sets of 3-6 reps
● Muscle building (AKA muscle hypertrophy):
○ With muscle building, it’s more about the weekly sets, than the daily sets. For beginners: 6-10 sets per week. For intermediates and advanced trainees, 24+ sets.
○ For muscle building, the reps are less important than how close you come to muscular failure. You should be within 1-4 reps of failure. So whether you do sets of 5 reps or 30 reps, just get close to failure, but not all the way to failure (the risk of injury would be far too high). Enough research supports that you can get equal muscle growth whether you do low reps (like 5) or high reps (like 30). The main variable is proximity to failure.
How Much Weight Should You Use?
You might think that the amount of weight you should lift depends on how much you weigh. Though the thing is, if you think about it, two people that weigh the same would handle a different amount of weight. For example, both might weigh 170 pounds, but one may be able to lift 150 pounds while the other might only lift 100. When it comes to how much weight you should lift when doing a good morning, there are two main guidelines:
1. What’s your goal? Lower reps – you can use more weight than higher reps.
2. Can you bend at least 70-80 degrees with your chosen weight? If you can’t go that low, the weight is too heavy.
Alternatives To Good Mornings
The good morning is a great exercise but it’s not for everyone, especially if you have previous spine injuries/pain or have limited shoulder mobility. There are many alternatives and variations of regular ol’ standing good mornings to choose from such as seated good mornings, safety bar good mornings, single leg good mornings and others.
Here are the 4 best exercises to use as alternatives to good mornings that work similar muscles, are easier on your body, and are just as effective:
Deadlifts
The deadlift exercise is similar to good mornings in terms of muscles worked. However, when you do a deadlift, unlike good mornings, you start with the bar on the ground, bend down, lift the weight/bar with you on your way up from the bottom position, and continue to do the exercise with the bar in your hands (the bar should be at about your hips when you’re standing and your shins when you’re in the bottom position). Deadlifts don’t require you to have good shoulder mobility.
Loaded Back Extensions
Loaded back extensions aren’t exactly similar to good mornings in the sense of what you do, since it is a completely different exercise. However, they work the same muscle groups and parts of your body (lower back, glutes and hamstrings).
Loaded back extensions are especially good for your back, (especially since they help your posterior chain strength), which is why they are a great alternative to good mornings. Another good benefit to doing them as an alternative is that you don’t need to have great shoulder mobility.
3. Reverse hypers
What you do in a reverse hyper is very different from a good morning. However, like loaded back extensions, they work similar muscle groups and parts of your body (lower back muscles, hamstrings and glutes). Overall, reverse hypers act as a great alternative to good mornings, especially since they’re both effective posterior chain exercises. But reverse hypers do minimize hamstring tension.
. Like loaded back extensions, a good benefit to doing reverse hypers as an alternative is that you don’t need to have great shoulder mobility.
While the loaded back extensions emphasize the hamstrings, the reverse hypers emphasize the lower back.
4. Zercher good mornings
These are very similar to regular good mornings, in the sense that the forward bend is the same. They also work the same muscle groups (back, hamstrings and glutes), though Zercher good mornings work a couple more (biceps along with some minor involvement from the rear delts).
The main difference that makes Zercher good mornings easier is that instead of holding the bar on your upper back (which requires you to have good shoulder mobility and move them backward), you hold it in front of your chest in the crooks of your elbows. This is much easier on your spine (yet still helps improve your back strength), which can help you avoid injury, and is perfect if you don’t have the shoulder mobility to do regular good mornings.
5. Single Leg RDLs
Just read my article on that topic 🙂
What If You Don’t Have Enough Mobility To Perform Good Mornings?
As you probably know by now, in order to perform good mornings, you need to have sufficient mobility in different areas of the body. If you lack it, there are different things you can do for the different types of mobility you’re lacking, such as:
Lacking hamstring mobility:
Hold a light weight at the edge of your range of motion, while still maintaining a neutral spine. Do multiple sets of 10-30 seconds, and your range/mobility will improve pretty quickly.
Lacking shoulder mobility:
Do soft tissue release on the pecs and subscapularis (the muscle on the front of the shoulder blades). Combine that with stretching those same areas.
Lacking mid-back (thoracic) mobility:
Do thoracic mobilizations over things such as a foam roller. That’s when you lie on your back, with a foam roller placed around your mid-back. Hold it there for 1-2 minutes.
The foam roller can also be good for reducing upper back tension, but make sure you have perfect form.
