Low back pain on and off for the last year.

Pain & Rehab Forum [Moderated]
1

Hey!

I’m a 32 yr old male, 6ft 175 lbs. In my early 20’s I followed the SS program and went from about 150lbs to 180lbs in a few months while increasing my lifts.

At around 25 I stopped lifting as much and had been going to the gym occasionally and not really following any programs. Mainly just maintaining my current strength and losing some weight.

Fast forward to last year where I was doing some fairly normal weight squats without a huge sudden volume increase that week when I “tweaked” my lower back. It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt with my back. It happened at the bottom of the squat and the panic made me finish my rep rather than dumping it on the stops.

(This also is the year I went through a break-up with a long term partner and then another breakup with a new partner sooo stress was probably at an all time high?)

So I took a break for a day or two then slowly started up doing body weight squats and making sure to continue my regular activities despite the back pain such as putting on socks and bending over.

Slowly I got back to the gym and I found I couldn’t tolerate any squat movement but trap bar deadlifts were completely fine. So I started trap bar deadlifts with low weight high reps and slowly got up to doing higher weights. At one point I removed a mattress topper I had that made the bed too soft. The morning after sleeping on the harder bed, my pain was like 80% gone.

Fast forward to a month or two ago and my lower back pain has returned. I haven’t really been increasing my lifts much as I usually just go to the gym to get some reps in with an RPE of about 6-8 doing deadlifts, bench, pulldowns and sometimes leg presses. I haven’t been gaining any weight and haven’t really focused on getting my diet right. Recently sleep has also been not great.

Given all this, is it just normal for me to not be increasing my strength much?

My lifts are and have been steady for a while now with 5 rep sets of like 150 lb deadlifts, 80 lb benchpress, 7 rep max chin ups etc.
I just feel like I’m not progressing at all. Am I just a really low responder?

When I was 22 following the SS program at 180lbs doing it 3 times a week diligently I only got up to about:
3x5 x 240 lb squat

1 x 5 x 300 lb deadlift

3 x 5 x 125 bench

3 x 5 x 115 ohp

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Adam,

Thanks for the post. Good to see you here again, though I wish it were under better circumstances. Sounds like it’s been touch and go for a bit.

Sounds like your return to training, while good, was a bit aggressive for the fitness you had at the moment. Kind of like spending more than you have in your bank account, you know?

Rehab strategy aside, it seems like this is what has happened again. I’m very curious as to what program you’re running right now, as I think it could use some modification.

I do think that strength improvement and adaptations relating to that are hard to do when you’re in pain. Kind of like it’s hard to invest if you’re living paycheck to paycheck…we need to get your head above water.

As an aside, those numbers from when you did SS are pretty close to average for men, if not slightly above average. Starting strength novice linear progression ending weights don’t seem to be predictive of future success however, as there are plenty of people who have been convinced to keep running the program to hit some arbitrary number, e.g. 315, 365, 405, before they’re an “intermediate”. Despite ending at a higher number, almost none of them go on to squat 500, let alone more than that.

Don’t be a stranger.

-Jordan

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