The main coaching point that helped me was to NOT over-extend at the top of the rep. Meaning my feet should never end up as high or higher than my hips. When I over extended it aggravated my back; as soon as I quit over extending at the top and started relaxing at the bottom and letting the weight swing in front of my face, my erectors and glutes got stronger and my back-leg-glute pain & foot falling asleep went away. I did RHs every other day for 10 weeks (4x20-25) with BW then adding 5-10 pounds every week. After about 4 weeks I was finally able to Squat and DL; before this I could not Squat or DL. 17 years later NO issues; I still do RHs 1-2 per week and squat and pull 1-2 times per week with no issues and have yet to put a belt on either. Just my experience, hopefully this can help somebody.
First off, I’m an internist and not an ortho and I have zero insight into the intricacies of the various surgical approaches to back issues. However, I was a hospitalist for many years and followed countless back surgery patients as an medicine consultant. I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the “OMG Put all my assets in the wife’s name and hope she doesn’t run off with the plumber.”
However, it does seem that your main issue is pain as opposed to motor, sensory, or autonomic nerve loss (the type of damage Mark so poetically alluded to). My experience with the results of surgery where pain is the only symptom is very spotty. Not based on data, just anecdotally. Your mileage might vary.
My first suggestion would be to get nerve conduction studies to confirm actual nerve damage. You may have already had this done. My next recommendation would be to use surgery for pain as the absolute last resort. Mark will probably ban me from this forum for asking this but have you had a course of physical therapy with a decent therapist?
Have you tried acupuncture? Have you been so debilitated that lifting through this is not an option? Have you gotten second opinions? Do you have an actual diagnosis of what’s causing your pain?
Cute story: My favorite neurosurgeon of all time was so busy that he didn’t have to operate on people he didn’t think would get better (this despite supporting multiple ex-wives). I loved sending patients to him because he was capable of thinking outside the box and found non-surgical solutions for a number of my patients. Once I had a young patient in his early twenties who was a surfer who had intractable back pain. All his orthopods wanted to operate.
He was extremely reluctant to do this so I sent him to my friend who promptly called me up and said he was going to put the kid in traction. I had been under the impression that that went out with trephining.
In a month the kid was surfing again.
The moral is, exhaust all nonsurgical options first! Good luck!
I may get roasted for saying this, but pull ups do wonders for relieving back pain and sciatica. I've done the lifting a lawn mower or moving awkward heavy furniture thing from time to time resulting in temporary injury and back pain, but hanging from the bar seems to get me better again very quickly.
I'm no doctor, but I think the decompression of the spine during chins or pull ups helps alleviate pressure on the sciatic nerve and of course strengthening the back muscles at the same time.
I switched from chins to pull ups a while back because they were harder to do and seemed better suited for me.
Maybe add the weight to ankles instead of waist to assist decompression?
In my personal experience, decompression helped a lot 40 years ago, and now it aggravates the shit out of my low back. In my personal experience, the reverse hyper fucked up our backs in here, and I got rid of it years ago. In my personal experience and my experience with coaching other people, when your back gets tweaked you stop doing situps and back extensions, because wiggling your lumbar spine around makes it worse. Wear your belt, squat and pull, and get the back and the anterior support muscles as strong as you can, and this will prevent and treat back tweaks.
I've had the same experience as Rip on the hanging. Seemed fine until about my early 30s and any time I've tried it since then its made my back feel worse, not better
Ryan Arnold
ryanarnold1178@gmail.com