Rehab a lumbar sprain
Reply With QuoteGet a form check and fix your programming and recovery. If starting at 225 leaves you debilitated shortly afterwards, you may have to start at a lighter weight. I know it sucks, but there's a weight out there you can lift with perfect form that won't hurt your back. Patience and persistence, grasshopper.
Handling injuries is mostly just doing what you can and knowing your limits. You shouldn't be doing running on a low back injury or sprinting or box jumps, for example. You should do what you can and leave no room for error or improvement; i.e. the stress should be plenty and perfectly applied. After the layoff period which may be a few days to a few weeks, you have to find out what you can and cannot do. Luckily there are unweighted versions of every exercise we do and collective experience has shown that exercises like deadlifts, presses, and chins are the best "corrective exercises" at our disposal.
Being able to pick and choose correctly is what makes a great recovery. This is a case where exercise selection is the variable. Obviously, chins is the heaviest exercise until you're deadlifting around or over your bodyweight for reps, because it's the only exercise you can't always "unload" (with a band or other form of assistance). A deadlift can be done submaximally and it would still be effective depending on the context. A press can literally be a broomstick held isometrically in a pair of gymnast rings and it would still be effective depending on the context. I mean, you can hang from the chinup bar, but even that is a heavy task if, say, your rotator cuff is torn. Building up the strength to dl and press gives you the strength to squat and bench again, as all the exercises have a degree of overlap. But squatting and benching seem to be tougher to get right on injury than deadlifting and pressing and there's all sorts of reasons as to why which we don't need to go into right now.
If I were a guy who hurt his L-spine badly, I'd take a few days off until I could walk ok or relatively pain free and then I'd hit the gym and I'd hit it softly, like that song by Tenacious D where Jack Black's singing about how he's going to make sweet sweet love but do it in a soft and gentle manner. Just exactly like that. That means everything from deadlifting 95lbs (hell, 50lbs if 95 is too high) from blocks or a similarly elevated position just to get into the right position for when I get to 135. That means doing 45lb presses if my back allows and using the lighter, shorter bars they have in the gym if I can't manage 45. I'd use dumbbells only if no shorter or lighter barbells are available only because I'm going to be using barbells and dumbbells are not barbells; completely different execution. Again I'd make sure my form is perfect down to a T. Using bad form on lighter weight while injured only makes it worse because the location in the body has been weakened by the injury. In effect, lifting a deloaded weight while injured poorly is similar to lifting a heavy weight poorly while uninjured because the tolerance of stress and margin of error is smaller when you're injured. Keep that in mind and be anal about your form.
Check your sleep and food intake. Get enough Z's and dem dere protons, boii. Don't git phat, thoooo. Finally, there's tons of success stories on rehabbing backs, broken backs, splinted backs, backs with hardware, backs post surgery, Double Back by ZZ Top, ... So just read up on those and get a sense of what to do. Mostly it's just working "around" the pain, meaning doing what you can and not making it worse by being eager or stupid. Forget about setting PRs by next Wednesday or Christmas or March, just focus on getting back in the game. Good luck.
Originally Posted by BradBv
