I am a 26 year old male who has been training for about 6 years. I am usually able to manage tweaks (knee, shoulder, etc.) and get back to normal very quickly. However, I have had recurrent lower back issues for over 2 years now. If I had to place a location where I feel the pain, it would be on the left side around the iliac crest. In the past I have mitigated the issue when the pain levels rise by adjusting volume and load, even switching up exercise selection during bad flare ups if needed. However, it always seems to come back at some point in my training.
For instance, this flare up of the issue seems to have no training-related cause at all, I just woke up this morning with some discomfort. I have been training for about 6 weeks now after a 4 month layoff due to my gym being closed. I did not think much of the discomfort this morning as I have had this issue in the past and the discomfort would generally reduce once I was warmed up in the gym. Today however, during deadlift warm-up sets there was an increased level of discomfort (I did not make it into working weight for deadlifts). This discomfort was more than I have felt in quite a while (I am guessing it is likely that I am more sensitive to this because I have not had to really deal with it for the last few months?).
I have read the articles on pain, and listened to the podcast episode on it, and I know that making adjustments in order to rehab the injury is the right solution. It just seems like this is always something that stalls out my training. This is something that I have not been able to ever fully rehab, it simply ends up at a very minor level of discomfort (an annoyance really) that I am able to work through during workouts. Do I need to take longer on trying to rehab this, or is this something that I will potentially just have to deal with on and off throughout my training?
This may warrant a consultation with us so we can talk through your experience and help provide individual guidance. With that said, often there is a propensity to think one should never experience symptoms in life and/or training, which is unrealistic. Even if we follow recommendations with managing stressors appropriately, we may still have experiences we label as painful. This is why we discuss self-management regularly. Happy to discuss further.