Good Morning Superman

Working hard for a flat stomach but neglecting your back muscles? Well neglect your back and no one will see your six-pack or admire your navel piercing because you'll be hunched up like Quasimodo doing his shoelaces.

Your biceps bend your arm, your triceps straighten it out. Most exercises are designed to work both, either in tandem, or one after the other, so as not to create an imbalance. In one key area, however, that rule seems to go out of the window. In the quest for the hard body we tend to spend a lot of time worrying about rock­hard bellies, but forget that unless we strengthen the spinal muscles to cope we could be sowing the seeds of serious back trouble. It's a tribute to the awesome power of vanity really - we all know what a six-pack is, but when was the last time you saw someone on Baywatch with just, like, awesome erector spinae? The first most of us know about our back muscles is when they fail on us. Building up the stomach muscles can actually help provoke that by adding to the imbalance between the muscles that curl up the back and the muscles that straighten it. So even if they're not going to win you admiring glances from the opposite sex it pays to put a bit of effort into your back.

Putting your back into it

When people talk about the back muscles they usually mean the ones that show towards the tops of the shoulders. Men in particular are fond of working the lats (laterals) that help give a V-shaped torso. The muscles that get ignored, however, are the erector spinae which run up the length of the spine and help hold up upright and straighten the back. It's your erector spinae you reach for when you feel something go in your back. For most of us it's only at that moment that we even think of exercising our back muscles which is part of the phenomena that sees some four out of five adults suffering from lower back pain. The more you're working the rest of your body, the more you need a strong back to hold it all together.

Just one thing though. Kill or cure is not the way to work in a gym, so before working your back you should be sure to have sought out qualified medical advice and talked it over with the gym instructors. You have? Promise? OK, over to you.

Superman-or indeed superwoman

Lie flat on your front on a mat and smoothly lift both your arms and your feet off the mat as if you were trying to curl your whole body into a bow shape with only your stomach, ribs and hips left on the mat. Keep it steady, hold it for a moment, then return. Now add a slight twist to that by slowly raising your right arm with your left leg, then your left arm with your right leg. This should be comfortable enough to do ten or twenty times without feeling difficulty.

Good morning

The name of this exercise suggests that it goes back to a particularly courteous bygone age since really what you are about to do is take a bow. Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and your knees slightly bent. Bend forward from the waist until your torso is parallel to the floor and hold this position for a moment before gently rising back up. If you feel great doing this, then you can add weight to the exercise with either a very light barbell across your shoulders or a light dumbbell in each hand with the weight resting on each shoulder. If you are a beginner to back workouts or feel anything that could remotely be described as a twinge, then don't even think about the weights.