I posted back in early January about hip pain that I was suffering that seemed be caused and exacerbated by deadlifts. You suggested that it was a load management issue and to reduce external loading by lowering RPE and ramping up volume slightly - performing sets of sixes.
This worked amazingly. I was able to do sets of sixes with almost zero pain and I kept up with this protocol for about 4 weeks at which point I worked back into the 12 week strength template. I just finished the template and ended with a 10 pound increase to my deadlift 1rpm. Not as much of a gain as the other lifts, buy amazing to have any increase from where I was six weeks ago.
The other change I made (and I’m not sure that it had any effect) was I stopped deadlifting in my squat shoes and used slippers instead. Would getting rid of the 3/4" heal from squat shoes have any material effect?
In any event, I just wanted to post a quick thank you for the advice and recommendations you provided. They helped tremendously! I no longer have any hip pain!
Hell yeah! Glad this approached helped and you are doing well.
Regarding shoes - it would be quite difficult to assign any level of correlation to the shoes. There are a lot of variables at play when we are discussing pain treatment.
Even with exercise / load management, we must be cognizant of contextual effects (meaning the person’s thoughts, beliefs, trust in the process, perceived authority giving advice, environment, etc). Load management likely helps because it keeps you active (identity component) while allowing de-sensitization to occur (decrease in symptoms) and other cognitive benefits (decrease fear avoidance, catastrophizing, gives self-efficacy in controlling the process, etc). Whether any meaningful tissue changes were made is a completely different discussion. When we consider something like altering shoes, perhaps it played a component or perhaps natural regression to the mean occurred and you would have gotten better anyways without any assistance, provided you didn’t keep pushing into sensitization (symptoms). Hope that helps. If you were to nail me down on this - I’d argue the shoes likely had minimal if any effect; especially if you were previously deadliftting in them without any symptoms.