“There are two kinds of pain. The sort of pain that makes you strong, or useless pain. The sort of pain that’s only suffering. I have no patience for useless things.” – Frank Underwood

Back pain sucks. A lot. I’ve dealt with it since a freak football injury in university left me unable to walk without assistance for a few months. It’s reared it’s ugly jangled and toothy head every now and then through the duration of my adult life, and sits idly below the level of consciousness of everyday thought for the times when it wasn’t all consuming. My actions in the gym were dictated by what I thought could cause it and what I had to do to avoid it.

The thing about low back pain that makes it so difficult to “fix” is that it can be from a vast multitude of causes, whether it’s structural, tissue irritation, or even psychosomatic effects of stress or positional disturbances. This means there’s no one exercise that will work for everyone, no one stretch that can target the cause, and no simple pill that can take everyone’s pain away.

That doesn’t mean you have to skip your arm workout, or third arm workout this week, because you have a cranky lumbar region. It also doesn’t mean you can’t move weight while your back is pushing back against you. Even when my back was angry, I could still train upper body and lower body with some movements and get a quality workout in. My clients have found the same benefits.

One of the benefits to simply getting in a workout, even with back pain, is the psychological application to completion of a task. Being in pain creates a self-limiting thought process that strips the persons ability to think of what they can do successfully, especially if everything causes some form of discomfort. This can lead to a pattern of activity avoidance, deconditioning, worsening symptoms, and further activity avoidance. Maintenance of a training routine can help disrupt this cycle and produce some level of conditioning and strength improvement, even while recovering from injury or just living with it.

Getting in the workout itself is usually not the problem for most people, though. The bigger issue is when doing an exercise, even a benign movement like a dumbbell side raise, causes the low back to hurt, and more insidiously when it hurts the day after. When your back hurts during a movement, it’s pretty easy to adjust your positioning to find a spot that doesn’t hurt, or at least not as much. If it doesn’t hurt until the following day, you’re a little late to the dance to do anything about it.

No one likes to be injured, but you probably also don’t like to not train hard and look all gunny and swole and stuff either. Let’s face it, girls won’t approach many guys if they look all injured and stuff and definitely if they can’t train the hell out of their biceptuals and deltopotamusses. Or deltapotami? Whatever, this isn’t National Geographic, we’re talking about getting jacked with a bad back.

Because I’m a meathead at heart as well as someone who cares about helping people move better and feel better, I wanted to share 2 simple strategies to help you get a solid training session in without having your cranky low back derail the good times and good gains.

#1: Focus on Hips

A lot of the biomechanical low back pain someone has that isn’t the direct result of neural damage can be assisted through positioning and bracing strategies to help improve the stability of the lumbopelvic region. This means that if you walk around with your core and hip muscles all slack and not doing their job, some spinal shifting and shearing can occur, which puts undue stress on connective tissue that’s likely already overstressed and trying to heal.

One of the easiest ways to adjust your positioning or posture, and to get some active stabilizers to kick in their fair share is to simply try to flex your glutes. This movement causes the pelvis to move into a position where the glutes can flex best, typically posterior tilt versus anterior tilt, and also causes the abdominals to flex along with them.

I look so young and innocent without a beard.
This simple contraction can help reduce a lot of issues with low back pain that is structural or positional in nature. For instance, let’s say you always stand with your butt out and your low back extended like you’re trying to get started in a back bend that you never see through. This glute flex can help pull you out of this extended posture slightly, while also giving you some ab stiffness to take pressure off the likely overworked erector spinae. If you’re computer guy and hunch like no ones business, flexing your glutes and abs together like this can help buttress your low back muscles to essentially spread the load, much like the flying buttresses of gothic churches helped hold the tall vertical walls and prevented buckling and falling over.

This doesn’t mean you have to walk around all day long with a permanent glute flex going on. I mean, I’m sure everyone wants to look like they’re in desperate need of finding a bathroom, but You’d likely wind up with more than a sore back if you did that.

Instead, try flexing and holding the contraction when you’re doing an exercise, especially one where you know you would have to involve your core or low back in some way. For instance, leg extensions probably wouldn’t require this, and it might prove incredibly difficult to do, but an overhead press with dumbbells or barbell would do it. Likewise, any exercise performed in standing, and even in seated or kneeling would benefit from a booty pump.

 

For lower body exercises, one position that seems to reduce a lot of low back discomfort is the split stance one demonstrated above. Doing split squats and lunges can give a good training stimulus without smashing your low back. If you’re looking to train deadlifts, that can get a bit dicey as to whether it works well or not for low back pain, and without knowing you specifically and what you would respond best to, it might be worthwhile to limit the time spent under heavy loading until your back is feeling better, or approach it in a different manner to still train the movement.

One way I use quite effectively with clients to get them to understand the feel of the tension required to deadlift effectively is to use a band to develop transverse resistance versus saggital resistance.

Trying to keep the thumbs on your legs and then get the hips as far forward as possible and pulling the shoulders back can prove to be very difficult for many people, and a good thing about this is there’s minimal shear force on the low back at the bottom of the movement, reducing strain that could cause some irritation to the back.

#2: Switch up training volume and intensity

Higher loading can cause some problems for back pain individuals, but so too can loading with higher volume sets. If the back is sore, doing a 30 rep set may not be the most beneficial thing in the world, especially if the area’s local endurance isn’t that great.

Because this can be troublesome, you can play with the numbers to make them dance for you like marionette puppets. Unless they freak you out. Then think of dancing kitties, but with less autonomy.

For instance, let’s say you plan on doing 3 sets of 30 reps with 2 minutes rest between each set. That means you have a total volume of 90 reps for that exercise. First, you’re a sick freak for thinking that sounds like a fun workout, and I kind of like it. Second, instead of doing 3 sets of what would likely exceed the volume endurance of your low backs’ ability to not make you hate your face, you could adjust the numbers to make them more friendly.

Instead of 3 x 30 reps, you could do 6 x 15 with 60 seconds rest between sets. You could also do 9 x 10 with even shorter rest breaks. Sure, you would lose some of the benefit from the metabolic demands of higher volume sets, but you would make up for it by not being in pain for the next 23 ½ hours. The total time would be the same, but there would be mini windows of recovery in between the sets to allow the area to recover a tick more than if you just blasted through with reckless abandon.

If you’re used to doing higher intensity but lower rep ranges, you could likely stand to “cross train” with some more moderate loading and higher volume for a workout or six. While it may not build strength or neural impulse demands in the same way as heavier loading, it can help to develop conditioning through the movement, and also groove the pattern to work on fine tuning the technique of the movement more effectively.

While using these more moderate loads, you can increase the demands of the exercises by simply trying to increase the relative intensity of the contractions used with the exercise. When you get to the top of the movement, try to crush the contracting muscles as hard as possible, squeezing the life out of the bar in your hands and smashing your glutes into the end range of the motion to the point where you feel like you’re going to poop a kidney from all the awesomeness coursing through your body.

This increased level of tension development, as well as the additional time per rep being used while under tension can help to create some additional tension-related and metabolic stress related muscle damage that will help with hypertrophy. Plus it might help you to work out your anger at seeing Jon Snow get mutinied at the end of the last season of GoT.

These two simple tweaks may not be entirely sexy when it comes to mind-altering information about your training program, but neither is getting to the point where you feel like you can’t train anymore. Finding a way with your workouts will help you to still get your gun show tickets out there, and also likely lead to incremental improvement in your back pain. Now go rock your chesticles, beeceps, deltacus maximus and any other fun muscle names on the docket for today.

 

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