Potentially, unless the information elicits a nocebo effect. Which in this case sounds like it had the potential to do so. The problem with more information is we then need to assess the quality and efficacy of the disseminated information based on supportive evidence.
“They said the left side of my pelvis had anterior pelvic tilt and my right didn’t. They tried pulling it back in-line and told me I need to strength it in this position. Does this jive with current research or not? In any case, I felt the adjustment in the tension in my hip flexor and hamstring.” - This, especially, is what I am referencing. The narrative here is unsupported in the research evidence, and same goes for the intervention.
Thanks for the reply Michael. I just want to say I take the information I receive here very seriously. I’m a PhD student and I’ve received some of the most helpful information around pain and strength science here. To the extent possible, I’m adapting my narrative and focusing less on pain. For the most part, my experience with health practitioners in Canada aligns with what I read here and when it doesn’t I’m somewhat skeptical (see the example you referenced above). When my leg was numb last year my doctor said it was no big deal after checking for red flags and told me to keep exercising; my AT told me to keep low-bar squatting. They said there was no need for imaging because it wouldn’t change the treatment. When my anxiety around my pain has been high, they have only encouraged me that it’ll be fine. I have a healthy respect for expertise; however, I believe that it seldom resides in one place. Since these health services are free, are not interested in racking up repeated visits for money, have helped me several times in the past (in pursuits outside of lifting), and I’m cautious, I see no reason to abandon the institutional services here. To clarify, they definitely did not suggest that the anterior pelvic tilt was the cause of my pain. It was simply a part of analyzing my gait cycle and probably addressing every angle they can. Likely extraneous information and I was just checking to see if I should ignore it. I mention things that might be questionable here and typically ignore anything that I assume BBM would agree with so it might give the perception that these practitioners aren’t helpful. However, they certainly don’t catastrophize problems, and encourage squatting and deadlifting as treatments.
Oh right, so I don’t remember what my doc said regarding the pelvic tilt in detail - that was so long ago and I wasn’t that interested back then as I wasn’t lifting yet and never experienced any issues during day to day activities.
One more thing that I just remembered because you mentioned not pushing out your knees so hard causes less pain. As a matter of fact during the time I had some variable degree of pain during squat and deadlift sessions I noticed that when I pushed my knees out real hard that I had more severe pain in that exact moment. I could even feel this just when setting up on the deadlift and pushing out real hard vs. doing it more natural. Actually lifting and locking out the weight was not really what seemed to be causing my pain.
After some thinking about things I also noticed that I kept my knees too far back on the squat and that I tried to exaggerate the sitting back motion. Playing around a little it suddenly made absolute sense that the more I push my knees forward the easier it gets to push them out as well as I had more leverage. Now I’m not saying push your knees forward (actually do them exactly as described in the book)… just make sure you’re not over-exaggerating the sit back during the squat and be more generous with pushing your knees forward during the descent. I think the over-exaggerated sit back is a bit similar to the situation with the over-exaggerated ‘elbows up’ on the low bar squat grip, something I was also guilty of for a long time causing me biceps tendon issues.
Yes, jwis! For much of the last two years, I was sitting back too much (almost vertical shins) and my elbows were high, making it hard to keep my back tight. I’ve only recently narrowed my grip and it’s easy for me to keep my upper back tight now. As I’ve been re-adjusting how much I sit back I’ll probably have to experiment a little with pushing out my knees. I really think I was overdoing it; I saw so many cues online saying “push out knees as hard as you can” and I think I was pushing harder outwards than upwards. In any case, I’m glad no to be focusing on my LLD, my last session at 190 still felt easy and it’s been a long time since that was the case, so things are looking up. I’ve needed to learn to not overdo some common cues. My squat still feels crooked, I’ll probably have to examine it but I’m not going to make a big deal out of it. I’ve also drastically upped my warm-up sets right now to make sure I have my full range of motion easily available when it starts getting heavy.