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Is pain just nothing to worry about sometimes?
Hey guys,
I am asking myself if pain sometimes is just the body adapting to stress. For example, I am feeling a very small amount of low back pain since I've started low bar squatting (never squatted low bar before). My technique ist not absolutely egregious at least, so I came to the conclusion that a little pain is nothing to worry about. Is this vaguely correct or should every remote pain signal be a warning?
Do you guys experience episodes of pain during or after your workouts?
Thanks in advance!
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Read the SS book-there is a chapter on it.
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You should expect to feel fatigue and tightness in the muscles of your lower back and posterior chain after squats, but not pain. Pain (not talking about DOMS here, which you shouldn’t have very much of) means you are injuring yourself. It means you’re doing it wrong, and that most definitely IS something to worry about.
Sometimes pain is the result of spazzing out and doing something wrong in an isolated incident. When that happens, you should be able to immediately identify the cause and remind yourself not to let that happen again. But if it’s happening as an ongoing thing, it means you’re doing it wrong all the time.
If your lower back hurts after squatting, you’re most likely not getting the lumbar region set in extension and keeping it that way, i.e., you’re rounding your lower back. You need to fix that because it will only get worse as you try to add more weight, and will at the very least cause your progress to stall, soon, at a not very heavy weight.
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Thanks for the answers. I do have a slight lumbar flexion while squatting but as I mentioned, it was evaluated not to bad in my form video. Furthermore, I usually see lumbar flexion in the technique videos here or even for example in the Art of Manliness YT video where Rip teaches the squat so I don't think I have to worry too much. I'll definitely keep an eye on my lower back "pain" though.
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Pain's a hard thing to communicate. It's kind of like flavor. If you don't have a common ground with which to discuss the sensation and compare, you can't really accurately convey what's going on. I have found there are some pains that just don't mean anything though. For example, I've had a minor pain develop in my left knee when doing my lighter squat warmups. It's not bad, and it doesn't get worse the more exertion I put in. In fact, when I get to heavier warmups and work sets, it's gone. Another time though, I injured something going off course when squatting and ending up with my weight distributed into my heels. This, or something I did to compensate and regain my footing, put some kind of pressure on the SI join it did NOT like at all. It got stiff and painful and I'm assuming inflamed. I tried best I could to keep trianing in the following days while recovering, and was managing light and medium squats even. But arching for the bench gave me issues, and heavy deadlifts were definitely a no-go, because as the weight went up and I exerted myself more, the pain ramped up a lot. I took that as my body going "seriously, do not do what you are doing". And that's how I generally treat pain. If it escalates tremendously the more I exert myself, it probably needs to be treated a little more lightly and given time to recover. If it's just an annoying thing that doesn't get worse and worse as the warmup sets get heavier and heavier, I ignore it. This is of course not including muscle soreness. I don't even define that under "pain".
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CommanderFun,
thanks for the insight. That sounds like a good strategy.
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