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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   1093 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 6, 2026

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Threw out my back last week. The squat racks were all occupied, so instead of doing RDLs I did some back extensions on the Roman chair. I have no idea what I did wrong, I held just a single plate and the following evening my lower back seized up and I spent the next few days unable to sit down or bend over without pain.

I like the idea of working out; i fear the possibility of an injury and never having it recover and being in chronic pain

My flatmate injured his rotator cuff. Since I'm also getting old and frail, I made an effort to learn from some-else's experience. I bought some dumb-bells intending to do a variety of arm exercises to strengthen the stupid little muscles that hold the ball in the socket before anything bad happened. I took it steady, starting with just the two kilogram bar, only adding a one kilogram plate when I could do twelve repetitions with just the bar.

I followed the instructions in the booklet that came with the dumb-bell. Start at seven reps. Work up to twelve. Return to seven but with a slightly heavier weight. As I increased the weights, I noticed that I needed to brace my core; I was exercising a lot of muscles, not just my arms.

My back grew stronger and stopped aching. I found that to be a memorably excellent result, worth passing on in a comment in theMotte :-)

Lifting is one of the safest ways to be active

A 2024 review by Tung et al examined 17 studies on injury rates in both powerlifting and Olympic weightlifting and found that powerlifting has an injury rate of just 1 to 4.4 injuries per 1,000 hours of training, significantly lower than popular sports like soccer (around 15 injuries per 1,000 hours). Even more importantly, most injuries reported were minor injuries like muscle strains, overuse issues, joint sprains, etc.

Bodybuilding is even safer [citation needed since I can't be bothered but you can look it up].

Most of the advice I've seen suggests that injuries like this are a lot more common if you're really pushing limits. The advice I see on sport-specific fora (lifting for other sport fitness, not lifting qua lifting) is to avoid small maximal sets, and that 1RM measurement isn't worth the injury risk.

Strength training is good, but it can be good enough much better than sitting on the couch without hitting an exertion requiring grunting or even breaking (much of) a sweat.

Sorry to hear my man. Backs can be finicky. Hope it feels better soon.

It's better already. I first did something to my back back in 2020 in a Covid-induced coughing fit. Took a lot of time to fix it until I found a good neurologist with a YouTube channel. His main message was, "if you break your arm, do you immediately start trying to bend it again to make it less resistant to fractures? Of course not? So why do you think you should treat your back pain by constant stretches and twists and stuff? Leave it the fuck alone, let it heal! Go fix everything else around it! Fix your thoracic spine, fix your glute activation, fix your anterior chain!"

I did all that and realized that deadlifts and RDLs don't actually hurt my back. Can't say that about the girl that was doing deadlifts like a shitting dog, with her PT watching her like it was normal.

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