Tingle near sacrum/tailbone

Pain & Rehab Forum [Moderated]
1

Hi,

For the past year or so I’ve been dealing with an uncomfortable tingling sensation around my sacrum/tailbone area. It isn’t a sharp pain, but almost like an old static CRT TV, if that makes sense. I pretty much always feel it during my heavy squat or deadlift sets, and it gets worse as I get close to my 1RM. I set aside a couple of weeks where I cut my volume and intensity down a lot thinking I might just be carrying too much fatigue. Sadly, the static feeling slowly started to come back as I gradually returned back to my normal training. I haven’t been using a belt for probably 6 months hoping that reducing the absolute intensity would help, but it hasn’t. Finally, I started the new low fatigue template about a month ago hoping it would be a breath of fresh air, but still running into the same issue (Finishing the first block in a few days, hopefully future blocks will be better). I record myself during my sets all the time and I don’t think there are any glaring issues with my form. Also, I think I gage my RPE ratings pretty well, and if anything, I’m probably undershooting more than overshooting. I’m 22 Male at 175lbs, have stayed around the same weight for the past year or so, I sleep well, eat well, stress is decently managed, and I don’t know what to do. Slowly falling out of love with strength training and haven’t made any progress in the past year since I feel like I’m constantly being bottle necked by this. Any guidance would be awesome. Thank you.

2

Hi there,

Sorry for the delay here.

Really sorry to hear about how frustrating of an issue this is, and I can see how this would make training a lot less enjoyable. Unfortunately it’s pretty tough for us to hypothesize about what could be going on based on this information alone, and outside of our general advice for managing pain/other unpleasant symptoms in the gym, this is the sort of thing that may be best served by a consult with our team, if that’s an option for you. Outside of that, I would probably be trying to stay engaged with training by making more radical changes to exercise selection and increasing the amount of exercise variation in your programming as an initial step. Basically taking a break from “SBD”-focused training, both to potentially help with symptoms but also to help you stay mentally engaged and enjoying other aspects of training and staying active. Our most recent podcast with Dr. Miles on “spondy” also discusses these kinds of general strategies, independent of that particular diagnosis, and may be worth checking out.

3

Did you ever find a resolution to this issue? I am seeing a PT for it later this week and I am curious how you fared.