What happened to Ronnie Coleman?

After watching your last video on YouTube, podcast #39, I started thinking about Ronnie Coleman and his current health situation. If you don’t already know there is a new netflix documentary on him and in it they address his lower back injuries and crippling pain he is deali with. Interestingly his doctor sort of blames hard lifting for his lower spine injuries and noted that he still trains, even though he (the doctor) would advise against it. This seemed to be a theme throughout the documentary from other bodybuilders that he trained too hard and ruined his body. Then on his personal live stream, Dorian Yates talked about this and mentioned he switched to machines when he had lower back pain, whilst adding that ronnie trained too hard and that it caused his current situation.

So basically everyone is blaming heavy lifting it seems and I wanted to ask if this reasoning sounded acceptable. My take on it, would be that ronnie’s workout RPE ia more to blame that just the lifting itself. He was probably working the comp lifts at RPE 9/10 and in doing so injured himself. Could you hypothesized a reason for ronnie colemans back injuries? I was scared to see what happend and a lot of my friend told me “see what can happen? that’s why I don’t lift heavy weights and you should stop too!” and im getting sick of hearing it, with no real logical comeback

No, this reasoning does not sound acceptable.

If I had to guess, he likely had his pain / injuries mismanaged, likely had inappropriate, unnecessary, ineffective, and/or complicated spinal surgeries associated with inappropriate post-operative rehab (in other words, returning to heavy lifting too quickly post-operatively).

Your friends are wrong, and this situation merely represents confirmation bias for what they already believe / want to believe. Show them evidence of all of our healthy, vibrant, high-functioning older folks who train with barbells and they’d probably shrug it off.

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Surely the bucket loads of steroids and PEDs have something to do with his poor health too?!!