As a Physical Therapist who understands pain, here’s how I reacted when I hurt my back while deadlifting on Monday:
I was deadlifting about 80% of my 1 repetition max, which is a weight I lift often. For whatever reason, by the second set, each rep gave me more and more soreness and pain in my left low back. (This is when I would tell someone to stop). On the 3rd set, I got a really intense, sharp pain, 9/10 pain, in my left low back after the 1st rep. I felt a snap. I was actually limping while walking. I limped over to the turf in the gym and laid down to experiment.
I did some mobility exercises on the floor. And I tried doing a full bridge, which hurt a lot. But I was able to do every exercise with at least partial range of motion, and I did them for like 5-7 min total or so. Getting up from laying down hurt, but not as bad, so it felt better. I went on with my workout, still in pain, limped for a few steps but that went away. I was originally planning on doing pull ups after deadlifting, but decided it wasn’t the best idea. I moved on to the lat pull downs I usually do but with a lighter weight, a weight that I was comfortable doing. I do them a lot, about 3 sets to failure with wide grip row bar and 3 sets to failure with a regular lat pull down bar. Then did 4 types of arm (bis/tris) exercises, 3 of which I was standing for. With all of these exercises, I did a lower weight than I usually do. I did a weight that I was comfortable with. The pain got better and better as I went through my routine. As I was leaving, the bridge was pain free and getting up from the floor hurt a lot less. I was good enough to be able to go to Brazilian jiu jitsu training a couple hours after hurting my back. I did have some low back pain while training but it wasn’t too bad.
The next day, I was pain free and went to go treat patients with low back pain. I went to the gym after to do chest and shoulders and went to squat. I tried to do a full ass to grass squat with 50% of my 1 rep max, but that hurt my low back, so I did a box squat with that weight which felt good. Every other exercise was normal for chest and shoulders
2 days later went back to deadlifting with 60% of 1 rep max with no pain, did pull ups after that and had a solid gym sesh doing back and arms.
Disclaimer: this is not medical advice, this is just a way for me to show how I react with pain with what I know. It applies only to me. It’s cheaper and faster than what people usually go through and I didn’t rely on injections, surgeries or anyone else to help me treat it.
If something doesn’t make sense, question it, call me out on it. Here are some questions to get you thinking.
Why didn’t you freak out when you hurt your back and started limping? What if you tore something?
Why didn’t you go get an X-Ray?/MRI? go to the ER?
Why did you decide against doing pull ups?
What caused your pain in the first place?
How did you know which exercises were ok to do and which weren’t?
Are these the exercises everyone should be doing when they have back pain?
Are these the only exercises that would help?
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