I’ve been suffering from chronic hip pain on the outside of my left side for about two months. I believe it started while training either deadlifts or rack pulls. I’m currently on week 7 of the 12 week strength program and all of my lifts are doing fine except the deadlift. There is some pain when walking the bar out of the rack during squats, but after the first rep, it’s okay. Essentially, it hurts the most when I push off of it (think of the jumping motion of shooting a layup in basketball).
In any event, I’m looking for any recommendations to help rehab it and/or train through it.
Overall this sounds a bit like a load management issue and perhaps glute tendinopathy which can present with lateral hip symptoms over greater trochanter. Either way, loading modifications likely need to be made with training and basketball. You can schedule a consult with us here: Contact Us | Barbell Medicine.
What’s training been like prior to this and most recently? Any recent traumas to the area?
Thank you so much for taking time to reply. Loading modification makes sense. My last ~6 months of training has consisted of running through two cycles of the BBM HLM template, one run through the GPP Hypertrophy template and I’m currently in week 7 of the 12 week strength training template. Training has been great with the exception of the hip pain that seems to be worse after deadlift sessions. The only impact to my squat has been some pain when simply unracking and walking the bar back to start the set. I deadlifted yesterday and have a lot of pain today just walking around.
Do you have any specific recommendations to modify the load? Should I skip the 1 @8 and do several sets at a lower RPE? Would it be helpful to not train the deadlift for a period of time and instead train some of the assistance exercises (e.g. rack pulls, paused deadlifts, SLDL, etc.)?
For load management - I’d start by reducing external loading by lowering your RPE. I’d also recommend perhaps ramping up volume slightly to further regulate external intensity - example performing sixes. Finally, I typically recommend adding in a tempo to further control the external load - such as 3.0.3 (3 second eccentric, 0 second pause, and 3 second eccentric). I wouldn’t recommend avoiding the deadlift right now. After modifying loading if you still aren’t having improvements then I’d alter ROM to tolerance with rack pulls. Then if that doesn’t help then I’d change exercises.
Symptoms will likely be a part of the process but should be tolerable and not severely increase during session or after (up to 24 hours) or leave you feeling debilitated. Keep us posted.
Thank you so much for the suggestions. I’ll incorporate your suggestions into my training over the next several weeks and report back to let you know how it’s going. Thanks!