Pain while not lifting and finding "threshold tolerance"

Pain & Rehab Forum [Moderated]
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Wasn’t sure where to post this since its not really an “injury”. I have dealt with some low back discomfort that mostly occurs outside of lifting. There have been tweaks and such in the gym, that I have recovered from quickly using everything I’ve learned from BBM. These tweaks generally occur 1-2x year (not every year, but over the last two years) when I try to be a hero and increase my acute workload in anything too fast so there is certainly a total workload correlation that I am addressing in my training. Reducing my workload resolves “pain” within days.

That being said, I have had lingering uncomfortable “sensations” ( I could describe them as tone, “tightness” and twinge although I realized that’s not really meaningful) that don’t really seem to resolve the way I’d prefer them to. I notice them mostly outside the gym, during warm ups and in between sets. Very rarely do I have any issues at all during a lift itself. Especially if I am not paying attention to it. I have an odd click on my left side over my spine that is notable between sets of bench after arching or if I have a lat pump and anything that involves extension (ie, bench, rows, pull downs etc) seems to increase symptoms. The click is not really painful, and is dependent on my position and presumably “size” if the muscle if it has a “pump”.

Derek and I have had a conversation about the chronic side of things but I thought an open discussion on how to (if you should?) trouble shoot these things so I guess my question is, do I do anything training wise about it? I have about 10 years of training experience, and my volume is fairly high with a high amount of “isolation” type work as I have physique goals as well. When it comes to assessing my “tolerance” for load or volume, are there any recommendations you all might have as far as pinning it down? It seems a bit tricky since there is not a definitive point that symptoms are heightened and generally warming up is all I need with symptoms returning to baseline after the session. Would I start by cutting back my “isolation” type work first that might impact the area? Typically after an upper body day I feel more symptoms compared to after a SQ/Deadlift day.

Any thoughts are appreciated and I am happy to give more details if needed.

Thanks in advance

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I think that anyone who confidently suggests a “cause” for such symptoms is fooling themselves.

It actually sounds like you can tolerate training load / volume fairly well overall, since you typically don’t have issues during training and notice them more outside the gym. You’ve also made an interesting observation regarding the role of attention here.

If you really want to try to “do things” about it, it sounds like you’d be on the right track by manipulating some of the variables related to your upper body training, but we really have no way of predicting what may or may not help. Just one of those things, man.

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