For the past year or so I’ve had reoccurring (roughly once every 6-8 weeks) back pain in the left side of my mid/low back.
The pain roughly around the L1/T12 area, and I would describe it as s sharp pain the flares up when I move, especially bending over in a way that involves lumbar flexion, sitting or lying on my left side, but almost entirely unfelt when standing up.
From looking at related articles online it feels that the pain is in one the intermediate intrinsic back muscles, especially because it’s definitely linked to my neck movement (moving my neck in big ranges of motion causes the pain too).
The first time that it happened to me it was quite debilitating, to the point that I had to go to the hospital to get it checked as I suspected there was something wrong with my kidney (that was also in light of high creatinine levels in a urine test in addition to the pain) but ended up just getting a shot for the pain.
The next several times that it happened, I managed the pain a little better and kept moving/training and seemed to help, but it keeps happening and usually forces me to take a few very light workouts until it goes away.
I’m a 24-year-old male and I’ve been consistently doing resistance training for about two years, and my programming currently is heavily based on the BBM programs.
So far, I’ve treated it as a loading issue, because the pain doesn’t seem to be from a specific movement or from pulling a muscle, but then again, it’s also occurring at seemingly unrelated phases in my training (high stress/low stress).
The only other culprit that I can think of is sleeping position. I sleep on my belly a lot of the time with my head cranked to one the sides (not a particular one), I’m aware that this is probably pretty bad but it’s not very reasonable to think this is the cause, because it doesn’t explain why I’m not having that problem all the time.
What do you think is the proper course of action? is this common and I should just try to work around it?
I wouldn’t worry about your sleeping position. We have no data this is meaningful in any way. It’s also really difficult to control sleeping position once asleep. I likely wouldn’t focus on trying to find an underlying pathology necessitating fixing in this scenario but we’d need a consult to give individualistic advice. Contact Us | Barbell Medicine.
It sounds like you are managing well but adjusted training as necessary.