Good morning all,
I’m wondering if you can help with lower back pain and how I should treat it. I hurt my lower back when I was around 19, I don’t remember a specific event that did it but my teenage years were spent doing martial arts and an apprenticeship that involved learning a few different trades working on power lines, cables, etc. That involved lots of lifting heavy awkward things and manual work. It’s always been the same, a sharp pain in the base of my spine, usually from putting on my shoes/socks, reaching or something equally trivial that will result in sharp pain, ‘putting my back out’ then certain non specific movements would result in the same sharp pain.
This would happen frequently through my twenties (I’m 34 now), I could go months without any pain, have regular sports massage and osteopathy which felt like it helped say the time but I’m not sure if ever did anything.
I started resistance training around 4-5 years ago and the movement I was most scared of was the deadlift for fear of hurting my back. Fast forward to now and I’ve had the most sustained period of my life having no low back pain, being able to do things that I never thought I would and generally live a happy, pain free life.
Yesterday I hurt my back for first time in as long as I can remember, I’d just been doing a workout from intermediate 3 from group programming and had a really good session, no pain at all in the lower back, bent over slightly to pick up my keys on the way out and bam, my back went. I’ve had close calls a few times that have gone quite quickly but yesterday evening anything from walking to pouring a drink would result in a sharp pain in the base of my spine.
Ironically the workout I had been doing was fairly long as I’ve been experiencing elbow pain from squats and I was experimenting with different positions to find a way of not taking the load on my elbows. I haven’t written anything in the Facebook group as I really don’t want to come across as a moaner after asking for help with the elbow pain. Despite what I said above I’m really not someone who is constantly injured and am someone who will train or play frequently unless I absolutely can’t. One thing of note from yesterday is that it’s still very cold in the UK and I was wearing an old compression top that has a terrible habit of riding up. Just before working out I’d walked my dogs, we go across a big open area that is very exposed and was very cold and windy. This top constantly rides up during a workout and I wonder if the exposure of my lower back to the cold could have been the difference to unknowingly cause an injury? Also I’ve noticed that the pain is very specific to my left side, the unpredictable stabbing pains comes when weight is on my left foot, the pain from pouring a drink came from a slight tilt to my left, etc. Unfortunately lying down it hurts rolling to either side. I should note that other than these sharp pains there is no ache or dull pain.
Sorry for the huge text dump but I figured as much information as possible would be helpful. I’m wondering where I go from here? I’m absolutely gutted, training has been going so well and in addition to getting stronger it’s also a massive help with my mental health. While I’m confident it will get better, it’s been so long since I hurt my back this bad that I’m not sure if I should take a break for a few days or find something I can do to keep everything moving.