The frustrating thing with the lower back is that the things that help are pretty variable.

The two thing that almost help universally are:

1. Proper posture
2. Strengthening the core

That may be obvious to us, but yeah not very obvious to most people. The tough part for rehab though is that not everyone responds well to the same exercises for the most part, so as a physical therapist/chiro/trainer/etc. you have to have a flexible plan for how you approach it.

Again, like the knee strengthening the glutes seems to universally help. I wrote in the shoes article I referenced last post some studies that show glute medius and maximum directly helping low back pain.

The thing that whenever there’s increased mobility in the low back which is meant to not move much at all, you have a high potential for injury and pain. Taking the strength and mobility back to the hips, t-spine, and ankles helps immensely with alleviating arch/knee/low back pain by minimizing the amount of movement of those joints and increasing stability there.

Anyway, I’m gonna stop rambling now.

I concure

Dutch,

I’m not sure if you’ve got this checked out yet or not but you said that the injury happened about a year ago (i saw the video sometime last year on the mainsite, I think you were with Boz, amazing shit, bro).
I just wanted to let you know that last May the same thing happened to me, I didn’t see anyone about it and I just did some mobility stuff and stuck to mainsite training avoiding heavy deadlifts. The pain never really went away, but it got better throughout the summer.
When Field Lacrosse season started in Sept I had to get the problem fixed (athletes have a huge problem with denial lol). So I saw a great chiropractor who is a spine specialist. The pain went away, just like you after working with kelly and Boz, eventually my 1 rep max deadlift pr went up, things were going great for sectionals. Then a couple weeks ago my back went again during a 10 rep max set of deads. From what you described it sounds identical to my injury, you might want to go see a doc and tell him you want to rule out the possibility of a disk lesion, because if that’s what it is, without treatment it’s just waiting to come back again.
I don’t know if you’ve had an athlete with this problem, but it can become very serious, it’ll go away and come back repeatedly for years. One day you’ll wake up and won’t be able to move because your spine is trying to protect the protruded disk with a calcium build up on both of the vertebrae that sandwich the injured disk. Once this happens you’re pretty much fucked. Not trying to scare ya, it just sounds really familiar and you’re probably a lot smarter about getting back into deads than I was.

Wish you the best in your training,

Kevin

I roll my glutes on a lacrosse ball (basically position the ball under each cheek and roll); especially my upper glutes for lower back pain relief. The foam roller doesn’t seem to be doing it anymore. I’ve heard of people using 5 or 6 inch PVC as well.

Great story. In my experience as a pilates instructrr it is all too common seeing lower back injuries in the gym. I believe its due to the imbalance of the larger lower lumber extensors and rectus abdominals compared to the deeper stability muscles (transerve abdominus). The deeper muscles arent developed to ther same level as the more superficial ‘movement’ muscles which results in deeper instability and inevetibly injury. I try to encourage heavy lifters to dedicated 1/2hr 3 days a week to put the heavy weight down and do specific deep core strengthening exercises. This will help create a more even balance and minimise injury.