Bird dog exercise: strength and control on all fours

The bird dog exercise is done on all fours: you reach one arm forward and the opposite leg back, keep your pelvis still, then switch sides. In the app it is called Superman on All Fours, but it is the exercise most people know as the bird dog. In gyms, “superman” usually means a different exercise done lying on your front, which is where the confusion comes from. Unlike most exercises in this section, the bird dog is about strength and control rather than stretching.

What the bird dog exercise works

The app describes it as strengthening the deep muscles around the spine. Those include the long muscles either side of your spine, the erector spinae, and the deeper layers beneath them, whose job is to hold your back steady while your arms and legs move.

A laboratory study measured muscle activity in 30 healthy adults during nine common rehabilitation exercises, including this one, which the authors called the quadruped arm and lower extremity lift. It was one of the few that worked a muscle hard enough to suggest it could build strength: the gluteus maximus, the big muscle of the buttock. The other exercises, done at body weight, produced lower levels of activity that the authors thought better suited to endurance and stability training (Ekstrom et al., 2007).

Put simply, the bird dog asks your trunk to stay quiet while your limbs move. That is the skill it trains.

What it should feel like

Steady effort, not a stretch. You should feel the muscles along your back, around your middle and in the buttock of the reaching leg working to keep you level. It is normal for it to feel wobbly at first, and for one side to feel harder than the other. It should not cause pain in your back.

Mistakes that break the steps

• The pelvis tipping or turning. The steps say to keep your pelvis still. As the leg goes back, the hip on that side tends to lift and roll outwards. If it does, the reach is bigger than you can control yet.
• Losing the flat back. You start with a flat back and keep it. A lower back that sags towards the floor, or an upper back that hunches up, means the trunk has stopped doing its job.
• Same arm, same leg. It is the opposite arm and leg, reaching at the same time.
• Swinging rather than holding. The steps ask you to hold the reach, then come back. Swinging the limbs up and down quickly skips the part that does the work.
• Forgetting the other side. Switch sides, as the last step says, so both get the same work.

Does the bird dog exercise help back pain?

The bird dog is one of many exercises used for back pain, and the evidence is about kinds of exercise rather than this one movement.

• Motor control exercise. The bird dog belongs to the family of exercises that train control of the trunk muscles, which researchers group under motor control exercise. A Cochrane review of 29 trials with 2,431 people with chronic low back pain found that motor control exercise reduced pain compared with minimal intervention, but gave similar results to other forms of exercise. Minor or no side effects were reported. The authors concluded that the choice of exercise should probably depend on preference, the therapist’s training, cost and safety (Saragiotto et al., 2016).
• Exercise in general. Across 249 trials, exercise reduced pain in chronic low back pain by a clinically important amount compared with no treatment, usual care or placebo, with moderate-certainty evidence (Hayden et al., 2021). For prevention, a meta-analysis of 21 trials with 30,850 people found moderate-quality evidence that exercise combined with education lowered the risk of a new episode of low back pain (Steffens et al., 2016).
• A note of caution. In a trial with 60 young, physically active men, bridging and bird dog exercises twice a week for six weeks did not improve trunk performance or balance compared with a control group. The authors suggested that the low doses typical of fitness and rehabilitation routines, and a group with no obvious problems to fix, may explain it (Prat-Luri et al., 2025).

So the bird dog is a sound exercise rather than a special one. It earns its place by needing no equipment and being easy to repeat, not by outperforming other exercise. If your back pain has lasted a while, a physiotherapist can choose exercises for what they find; how much physiotherapy costs covers the options. For more on long-term back pain, see will back pain go away on its own? and lower back pain from sitting.

Where the bird dog fits in a routine

In the app, the bird dog is the third exercise in the Spine Wake-Up session. It comes after the cat-cow stretch on all fours and a thoracic rotation, and before the glute bridge. The session moves the spine first and then asks it to hold still.

It also counts towards something bigger. The NHS recommends that adults do strengthening activities on at least two days a week that work all the major muscle groups, including the legs, hips, back and abdomen, and lists bodyweight exercises among the options (NHS). A few minutes of bird dogs does not cover all of that, but it is a start that fits before work. How far short sessions can take you, and why the lower back seems to need more time than the neck, is covered in is two minutes of exercise enough?

If you are comparing apps for this kind of routine, our guide to what to look for in back pain apps covers the basics.

Who should be careful

• Pain into a leg or arm, numbness or tingling. Get these checked first. Pain from your bottom down the back of one leg, sometimes with tingling or numbness, is typical of sciatica (NHS).
• Warning signs. Pain, tingling, weakness or numbness in both legs, loss of feeling around your genitals or bottom, or changes in your bladder or bowels need emergency care, not exercise. Call 999 or go to A&E (NHS).
• A recent back, hip or shoulder injury or surgery. Ask the team treating you when to start.
• Wrists, knees or shoulders that hurt on all fours. The exercise loads all three. If any of them hurts, ask a physiotherapist.
• Pregnancy. The NHS advises stopping any exercise in pregnancy that makes you feel uncomfortable, too hot or unwell (NHS). Ask your midwife if you are unsure.
• If it hurts, stop. NHS advice is to stop exercises if your back pain gets worse and see a GP (NHS).

Bavelu’s Spine Wake-Up session, designed and filmed by physiotherapists, puts the bird dog in the middle of a short morning routine. The rest of the session is listed above, and the full guided video is in the app.