After Dr. McGill went over the day-to-day movement patterns, he wanted to see me squat and deadlift. We didn’t pull from the floor, but he had me do a two-inch block pull. The slight elevation allowed me to have less back pain while training the “lifter’s wedge”  that I needed to apply right away.

He told me that he’d been analyzing my YouTube videos and noticed that I get loose on my lighter lifts, but on the heavier ones (near max), I was as tight as I needed to be. He explained that this is very bad and that I need to be much more tense and focused within the 25- to 65-percent range on the squat and deadlift. I had too many micro-movements in my deadlift (all of the time) and during my squat (some of the time). A micro-movement is essentially any kind of looseness where you don’t maintain pristine tightness and posture. This applies to day-to-day activities, too.

The main thing he changed with my squat was in regards to my lack of full body tightness, along with the fact that I would round my lower back (in other words, get loose) at times when I didn’t sit back correctly.This applies to the deadlift, too. I need my elbows down and my upper back locked into my lower back in an anti-shrug position, bending the bar with my lats and creating tightness across my back from my traps to my glutes.

When coaching other lifters, as well as myself, I’d lost sight of locking the lats in from the back of the arm to the hip. I was only focusing on the rhomboids and traps. Once I had the bar across my back, and after he explained the importance of trying to bend the bar and engage the full back, I remembered what I’d been missing.

This same happened when Dr. McGill looked at my deadlift. As soon as I set up and pulled, he knew exactly what was happening.

  1. I looked loose.
  2. I was losing power.
  3. It was messing my back up.

What had happened was that I had lost the wedging technique I had used before being injured. Instead, I got “tight,” or what I thought was tight, and just went. In other words, I dive-bombed. No more of that for me. I practiced a few times, and it was interesting to find how the first one, where I was loose, hurt. However, the next five or six sets didn’t hurt a bit. I’ve gotten back to my roots, and I won’t be pulling loose off the floor or dive-bombing anymore. Being loose kept my hips higher than they should have been, and it kept them from being loaded. My lats were never locked in, and I had micro-movements all over the place. He then showed me exercises to correct some other issues—movements like the birddog (Superman), plank/rolling to side plank, KB work, the McGill sit-up, and some different carries and holds. He made me perfect all of these.

Once I showed that I had the anti-shrug and corrective exercises locked in, I started peppering him with questions. I have wanted to know a lot of this stuff for years, and now, finally, I had the most decorated back guy in the world in front of me.

I started with what everyone wants to know: How should you have your head, and where should you look when you’re squatting and deadlifting? Keep in mind that there are exceptions for everything depending on a person's build and injury history. Dr. McGill likes a posture with your head up and eyes looking higher than forward—but no more than that. This is about locking the back in and slightly extending it with no movement in the lift and no flexion.

He also went into the issue regarding the nerve problems in my left leg and explained that having my head anywhere lower than straight ahead would cause neurological signals to stop going down my leg, shutting down power. I then asked him about flexion during the deadlift, and he told me that freaks will always exist who can defy the laws of nature and get away with it—for longer than the average athlete anyway. However, non-freaks will likely have serious issues with their spines. He very rarely ever advocates any kind of flexion. Notice here that I said rarely, not never.

It is important to look at backs on a case-by-case basis, not a one-mold-fits-all. This is why he had to see me in person. He had to touch my back, watch me lift, and see how horrible I am at sitting in a chair and flopping on the ground. You can’t take a cookie-cutter approach to back injuries. Dr. McGill said the difference between a corrective exercise and an exercise that will hurt you is sometimes very small, and that something that’s corrective for me could potentially hurt someone else. This is a very difficult thing to prescribe unless you know exactly what you’re doing.

Once we finished in the lab, we headed back to Stu’s office for another sit-down to discuss what we had so far, along with a short recap. He couldn’t stress enough how important it is to have perfect posture all day. He kept saying, “Brian, you just stole another dollar out of your lifting account” every time I moved the wrong way to get something or got up or down the wrong way. He told me that I need to save my back work for lifting only and to not engage my erectors all day if I still expect to have power and endurance when it counts.

Using my hips to lift, stand, and sit will really help this process. If I want to lift at a high level, I need to start doing these small things, especially since my back is broken in multiple places. This way, I’ll only be making withdrawals from my “bank account” on lifting days. At this point, my body will not allow me to do both.

Now, it was time to come up with the plan...