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Wellness Wednesday for May 6, 2026

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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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

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].