Hey there BBM, checking with a question regarding some repeated “injuries” I’ve been encountering and hope you can provide some suggestions.
Over the last 3-5 months I’ve had 4 relatively minor incidents with my lower back during deadlifts and RDLs. This always happens at the top of the movement, never on the way up. I don’t know what’s actually occurring, but it feels like my lower back “slips out” at the top of the lift. There’s no missing it when it happens. I typically stop DLs or RDLs at that point and can usually finish the remaining exercises I have left over, as long as they don’t put too much stress on the lower back. However, once I get home and cool down the pain and tightness intensifies and I either have to miss some workout sessions or go light for a few.
During this time my lower back usually feels tight and swollen. I have some pain in any position but, if the situation is particularly bad, then I won’t be able to stand up straight with both feet flat on the floor at the same time. The situation usually clears up within a week or two and then I can get back to lifting heavy. However, I feel like I must be doing something wrong for it to be occurring this frequently. The first time it happened I was pretty sure I was arching my back at the top of the pull, so I’ve been consciously trying to avoid that. I don’t think the weight is too heavy. When I’m not having an issue my top set typically feels like an RPE 8 or so. This happened last weekend on an earlier set, so more like an RPE 7.
I realize it’s probably hard to pinpoint the cause from a text description, but does anyone have any suggestions for what might be leading to this?
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Unfortunately not going to be able to give a very confident, very specific “cause” for you here, but rather recognize that this is something that many of us have experienced.
In many cases, people get back to lifting heavy too soon after the initial tweak, and are often using a training program that has too little exercise variation (for example, overwhelmingly focused on S/B/D and very close variations). I discuss this in more detail here:
It may require a bit longer, more gradual of a ramp back up, and temporarily broaden your variation to include a wider variety of exercises and rep ranges involving the affected area, before ramping back up in load and specificity on that “main” movement.
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Thanks Austin. That’s helpful. I was doing a little research yesterday on this and saw some suggestions that maybe I wasn’t clenching my abdominals at the top of the movement. The theory is that relaxing my abs at the top was causing my spine to take all, or most of, the weight. I’m honestly not sure if my abs are clenched at the top or not, I’ll have to pay attention to it next session. I’m certain they’re clenched on the way up, but I may relax them at the top.
Do you think there could be anything to this?
I don’t think that’s likely to be true (your abs are on whether you want them to be or not) or contributory to the injury.
FWIW, I don’t really cue that in the deadlift or its variations.
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Ok, that’s very helpful. I was kind of stumped when I read that, so I’m glad to know that’s not something I need to look at. I’ll just try dropping the weight and working my way back up more slowly than what I’ve done the last few times.
The thing that gives me pause there is that I’ve had this occur with both Deadlift sets and RDLs. I’m currently running Hypertrophy 1. My top Deadlift set right now is typically 285lbs for 8 and my top RDL is usually 235 for 10. Since I’ve hurt it on RDLs, and the weight on RDLs is so much lower, I just wonder how low I’m going to need to lower the weight. I’ll just work through my warmups and see how it feels I guess.
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I know no two cases are the same, but this sounds similar to my low back issue a couple of years ago. In my case, I experienced pain at the top of the low bar squat, and no pain for the rest of the movement. It seemed to only get worse as I de-loaded.
Early in the rehab process we identified some over-extension on my low bar squat. This makes sense to me - as I braced for the squat, I’d go into over-extension. When going heavy, this self-corrected on the way down. As I deloaded, I was able to maintain the over-extension through more of the movement.
I can’t say that this is your issue, but hopefully it helps you troubleshoot.
I was doing something similar at the top of my deadlift for sure. I think I’ve corrected that, but I’ll be looking for that moving forward to make sure that’s not still happening. It could be the issue, or at least part of it. Thanks for the feedback!