Improve Your Mobility and Strengthen Your Back and Legs With the Good Morning Exercise

Your strength, mobility and alignment can all benefit from saying "good morning." Err, doing the good morning exercise, that is.

"The good morning exercise gives you full-body benefits, like helping you learn how to stabilize your spine in a neutral position and building your hamstrings," says Aaron Leventhal, CPT, owner of Fit Studios in Minneapolis.

• What is a good morning? This exercise gets its name from the way you might sit up in the morning in bed with your legs extended. Alternately, it looks like taking a bow with a flat back. A good morning, also sometimes called a back raise, involves hinging forward at the hips and keeping your hands up at your shoulders, often holding a barbell along the base of the neck.
• What muscles does the good morning exercise work? The long, stabilizing muscles — called erector spinae — along your spine, as well as your hamstrings and gluteus maximus.
• Who can do good mornings? All fitness levels, even beginners.

Although this exercise is often done with a barbell and weight plates, Leventhal suggests starting with just the bar or no weight at all. If your gym has a dowel — a long, wooden stick that is about the size of a barbell but lighter — that's also a good choice for beginners. A broom handle works, too!

Start with as much weight as you can lift for 12 to 15 reps with good form (even if that's just your body weight), Leventhal says. Add another set of 12 to 15 reps on your next session, and then one more set on your third session.

Once you can complete 3 sets of 12 to 15 reps with your starting weight, add about 5 to 10 pounds and aim for 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps. Keep adding weight gradually, but always focus on your form.

Try doing good mornings before one of your tougher workouts. "One of the best aspects of the good morning exercise is that it's great as a warm-up move," Leventhal says. "You're getting your hamstrings, back and core ready for a more intense workout."

If you're warming up with good mornings, start with just your body weight and do one set of 12 to 15 reps. To incorporate good mornings into a leg-day routine, try for 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps with either your body weight or a barbell.

As you're bending, you'll feel a nice hamstring stretch, since those are the primary movers in this exercise. Your glutes, core and hip stabilizers also kick in to keep you upright and balanced. Having all these major muscle groups working together can:

• Improve your range of motion
• Strengthen your back and legs
• Ease any tightness in your hips
• Improve your posture and alignment
  

Although the good morning exercise is a simple combination — hinge down, hold, stand up — there are several ways it can be done improperly, Leventhal says. Watch out for the following form problems.

Looking Up

This is the biggest issue Leventhal sees. As people hinge forward, they tend to look up rather than down, and this takes the spine out of neutral alignment because the neck is bent. When that happens, the spine becomes unstable; there's a tendency to arch the back and "pop" the ribs forward. Pretend you're holding a tomato under your chin to keep your head in the right spot, Leventhal says.

Squatting

Keeping your knees slightly bent can add some "slack into the system," which is good for functional movement, Leventhal says. After all, you'd never keep your knees locked out to bend down and pick something up, so mimicking a bend in a natural way is helpful, he says. But too much bend and it becomes a squat, which takes the movement out of your hamstrings and into your quads.

Hinging Too Far Forward

Pay attention to when your hamstrings tell you to stop. That might be early in the forward bend, and that could be frustrating — which is what leads many people to keep going, despite hamstring and hip tightness. If a stretch starts to feel like a strain, you're flirting with injury, Leventhal warns.

Body-Weight Good Morning

If a barbell's too heavy and you don't have access to a dowel or broom handle, you can easily do a good morning exercise anywhere with nothing more than your own body weight.

1. Place your fingertips on the back of your head and lift your arms with your elbows flared out.
2. Stand tall, press down into your feet, and hinge your hips back while keeping your spine straight.
3. With a slight bend in your knees to engage your hamstrings, bend forward until you feel like you're just about to arch your back.
4. Slowly come back up with your hands still on your head and squeeze your glutes at the top.

Seated Good Morning

If you have very tight hamstrings or are recovering from a knee injury, you can make the exercise much more about your core and back muscles by doing the move while sitting on a bench, sturdy chair or box.

1. Sit on a bench with your knees bent at 90 degrees and your feet flat on the floor.
2. Hold a barbell or dowel at the top of your shoulders behind your neck.
3. Hinge forward slowly, keeping your head and neck in line with your spine.
4. Pause at the bottom of the movement where you start to feel tightness in your hips, then slowly lift back up.