There's a lot more to lower back strength than simply straight up and down movement (flexion and extension) like with a deadlift.
In fact, you'll find that the stronger you get at just THAT plane of movement, the more likely you are to injure your back doing stupid stuff like turning to pick up a piece of paper or sneezing.
To avoid that, you need to strengthen your spinal stabilizer muscles (and there are a lot of them) and the best way I've found to do it is with offset loading on the hyperextension bench.
This allows you to maintain a straight up and down movement while getting anti-rotational loading on those small muscles up and down the spine that protect it during actual rotational movements.
You get the benefits without the twisting.
How to Perform Anti-Rotational Lower Back Training With Offset Loading
This method is one that I call Typewriter Hypers...you'll be using an empty bar (Olympic bar or EZ curl bar, depending on your strength level...you can put some weight on the EZ bar if it's too light but the other is too heavy) and a 45 degree back extension bench.
You're going to start by holding the bar in the middle then doing a regular back extension.
Then you're going to shift your hands over just a little bit (3 inches or so) to the left, so that you're gripping the bar a little off-center.
Then you'll do another back extension...then shift over a little more, then repeat. This is what it looks like after a couple of reps.
Keep going until you get far enough that you have to really fight the rotation strongly. You can see in these pics that I'm gripping on the fat end of the bar with one hand and really having to battle the rotation strongly.
Do one rep there, then go back in the other direction, towards center...all the way to the OTHER end of the bar.
Come all the way back to center and then end the set.
Take a few minutes rest, then repeat going to the RIGHT at the start instead of the left so you keep things balanced in terms of loading. Two sets of this will be all you need (even one would be fine, to be honest, since you are going in both directions).
Overall, this is a fantastic finisher to help strengthen those small stabilizing muscles of your lower back as well as the larger spinal erectors.
By gradually shifting the "offcenterness" of the load, you create more anti-rotational torque...then less..then more again...then less.
You can very easily gauge the amount of torque by how far to the end you shift your grip.
This simple method will work all those small stabilizer muscles that supports the spine in a variety of movements, such as sneezing...
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