By Gabe Valentin, Performance Coach
There's a belief that shows up in almost every gym: keep your spine neutral, no matter what. Don't round your back. Don't twist too far. Lock it in place and leave it there.
That is not how your spine is built to work.
Your spine is designed to move in four directions — flexion, extension, rotation, and lateral flexion. When you only train it to hold still, you are not protecting it. You are making it weaker in the exact ranges it needs to handle when life asks for them.
A 2026 narrative review in Sports pushed back on the "neutral spine only" doctrine directly, at least in the context of loaded lifting: the authors argued that rigid postural rules matter less than how gradually and consistently the spine is loaded and exposed to movement, and found that abrupt changes in training exposure predicted injury risk more consistently than simply moving out of a textbook-neutral position.[1]
Flexion is bending forward, rounding your back. It's one of the most avoided positions in training, which is exactly why it matters.
Building strength and control here is what protects you the moment you end up in that position in real life — reaching down to grab something off the floor, tying your shoes, picking up a kid.
You've probably heard someone say they threw out their back picking up something that wasn't even heavy. That usually means the spine was never trained to handle that range — not that the movement itself was dangerous. The same review makes this point about loaded flexion specifically: progressive, controlled exposure builds tolerance in the position, while avoiding it altogether just leaves the spine unprepared the first time it's asked to do the job.[1]
Extension is arching or straightening the spine. Most people spend so much time sitting that this range goes quiet without them ever noticing.
Training it helps pull your posture back into place and strengthens the muscles that hold your shoulders and upper back together — the ones that spend all day switched off in a chair.
Rotation happens every time you throw, swing, or even walk. A lot of people rotate through their arms instead of their spine — and that costs them.
Isolating the movement to the arms and shoulders instead of sequencing it through the trunk reduces how much force you can generate, and it can push extra stress into the lower back, which ends up compensating for a job the spine and hips were supposed to share. If your back tends to be what gives out instead of your legs or hips, that's often less about the low back being "weak" and more about the ribs and pelvis not doing their part of the rotation — the exact mechanism we break down in Struggling With Back Pain? It Might Be Your Ribs and Pelvis.
Learning to rotate properly is what lets you transfer force efficiently — the same sequencing we cover in Why Rotation Training Is Missing From Most Workouts (and Why You Need It).
Lateral flexion is bending side to side. It's the most overlooked of the four, but it plays a real role in everyday mobility, core stability, and rotational sports like golf.
If you only ever move forward and back, you're leaving an entire plane of motion untrained — and asking your spine to improvise the first time it needs it.
Your spine is not fragile. It's adaptable, if you train it that way.
Avoiding movement doesn't protect you. It just means your body is unprepared the first time it needs that range in real life. Train your spine in all four directions and you build a body that can handle whatever comes its way.
Gabe Valentin is a Performance Coach at Apollo Performance Chiropractic & Training in Pleasantville, NY.
