Back Pain immediately after heavy set of 5s

[Nate Mielke]

Immediately after my heavy squat set: 8/17/20 Squat - YouTube I felt an extreme amount of tightness on the right side of my lower back. I walked it out and stretched it a little but was still very tight. Decided it was probably nothing and proceeded to do 2 back off sets of 315lbs for 5. Didn't hurt too bad during the movement except unracking the weight didn't feel good at all. I'm wondering if this is what caused the pain to begin with. Since the rack is bolted into the edge of the wood I can't get the center of my foot under the bar without my foot hanging off the edge so I realized I'm basically doing a mini good morning to unrack the weight. My other theory is that I was favoring one side during the set. It's hard to describe because everything was a blur under that heavy weight but I felt like I may have been pushing slightly harder with my right leg than my left.

Anyways, I proceeded to do my 5x5 bench sets. My arch didn't seem to aggravate my back. I had RDLs programmed and started with 2 warm up sets for 20 reps with the bar and my back seemed to feel better as the sets went on. I put on 135lbs and it felt about the same. I figured I might as well go ahead with my programmed 265lbs for 2 -3 sets of 8 reps and it felt about the same in terms of pain level in my back as the previous sets.

However, about 4 ish hours have passed and the tightness and pain has significantly increased. Hurts to bend over and touch my toes although once I stay in the position that initially hurts for a couple seconds the pain goes away. After my shower when changing it hurt to stand up on my right leg when putting my shorts on my left leg. I feel the pain/tightness just sitting in my office chair. It's an aching pain that I would describe as almost extreme soreness. It's has a dull throbbing to it. The pain is not centered on my spine but rather off to the right on what I'm guessing is my erector spinae muscle.

I'm not sure if anyone has any guesses of what occurred. Do you think it's just a muscle strain? Regardless does anyone have suggestions on what I should do moving forward. I have OHP and light squat day scheduled for Wednesday.

[Will Morris]

I’m not trying to be pedantic here, but I have something like 90 minutes worth of lecture material regarding this topic on this site, there are multiple articles throughout the site about this topic, and there are countless threads about back pain and training.

It takes an awful lot of time to retype the same guidance to people for the same questions over and over again.

If you have a chance, review some of the lectures, articles, and threads and then if you have some more specific questions, ask them here.

[Nate Mielke]

Gotcha I will check out some of the resources but thankfully it's already feeling better.