In this instructional video, Mark Ottobre highlights that roughly 80% of people experience lower back pain at some point and introduces the "Bitter Soaring Test" – a timed endurance hold that gauges lower back stability. He explains normative performance tiers (under 60 seconds = below average, around 2 minutes = typical, 3 minutes = elite) and emphasizes that lower back pain is often linked to insufficient trunk engagement rather than a terminal condition. Ottobre outlines the three "hubs of stability"—the spine, hips, and scapula—and argues that injury prevention hinges on strength endurance (how long one can hold the position) rather than maximal relative strength such as heavy deadlifts. For those with existing back issues, he provides a progression: starting with prone Superman holds, moving to 45‑degree hyperextensions, and advancing to full 180‑degree hyperextensions. The video concludes with a call to follow his channel for more guidance.
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Did you know that 80% of people suffer from lower back pain at some stage in their life? What I'm doing right now is called the Bitter Soaring Test. Basically, it's a scale of how long can you hold this for? So a below average score would be below 60 seconds. Where most people wanna sit is around that 2-minute mark. And if you're elite, you're gonna get around that 3 minutes. So lower back pain hits a lot of people in a lot of different ways. It can take people off work, it can take them from their training, And people often think that lower back pain is a death sentence. It's not. It's simply about how do you engage your trunk. There are 3 hubs of stability in the body. There's your spine, which is what I'm stabilizing right now. There's your hips, which is actually helping me stabilize right now in this position. And there's also your scapula. These are hubs of stability. Now, when we do this one, we're obviously focusing on the stability aspect of our spine, and that infers less lower back pain. So this is a very difficult test to do because obviously it's about endurance. And when it comes to back strength, a lot of people think about back strength as relative strength, as in if your deadlift is bigger, if you get a bigger number, a 200 kilo deadlift, then you'd have a stronger back. Now that's certainly one metric, but what it actually shows, what research shows in terms of injury prevention is strength endurance is the quality of the lower back that we wanna optimize for Not relative strength. So that means that not getting an injury in your lower back is less about your maximal strength of, let's say, being able to deadlift 100 kilos or 200 kilos, and more about strength endurance of how long you can hold this position with your body weight. This is where, when you're training, you wanna optimize for endurance when it comes to the lower back to prevent lower back injuries. Now, how could you start this if you do have a lower back injury? Well, you can always start prone. So on the floor, you can do a Superman hold, Which is basically this, but you're on the floor, so there's not much way to go. What are we, 2 seconds away? We've hit our 2-minute mark. Then from there, you can go to 45-degree hyperextension, lots of different variations, and then finally you can get into the 180-degree hyperextension, which is what I'm doing now. And I can tell you, my lower back and my glutes are absolutely on fire. If you've enjoyed this video, make sure you follow Mark Ottobre for more. Thanks, Mark.
