Hey guys,
I injured my back deadlifting about 8 weeks ago. I was working up to my single for the day on week 9 of Powerbuilding III when I had a sudden lose of strength. I didn’t have any pain in the moment but I went from pulling 515 at rpe 6 to not being able to make 225 leave the floor.
I’ve been attempting to rehab it ever since, I’ve deloaded obviously and tried to find movements and/or ROMs that didn’t make symptoms worse. Unfortunately that’s been very hard to find, any hinging of my back seems to cause pain in my lower back to worsen. At one point going on vacation for a week the only time I felt better was after about 5 days of complete rest, even then, I have to hold my breath to tie my shoes which is very uncomfortable. I’ve had days where it’s be tolerable to squat a plate for tempo sets of 10 but generally this is very uncomfortable.
At the same time, my upper body strength has been fine . I continued doing the template with upper body movements, recently hitting 365 at rpe 8 on bench, and 225 on strict OHP at rpe 8.5, all while not being able to half squat or RDL a plate without pain. I also have no symptoms from training upper body, it seems completely fine. I skipped the last three weeks of the template and instead I’ve transitioned to hypertrophy II for the time being.
My question is this, am I okay to continue upper body training as usual? At this point my bench is set to pass my squat after 3.5 years of using your programming and guidance. My PRs are 405/365(@8)/535. I’ve had two flair ups of my hamstring, very much the same as what Jordan and Austin have described going through, as well as a back injury carrying a 500lb patient up a flight of stairs at work as a firefighter, and an achilles strain from stepping awkwardly out of the truck. This has all held back my lower body training tremendously. At this point my bench is really the only thing I find interesting in my training and I’d like to continue with the templates as usual while I continue to attempt to rehab my back.