I am a broken record on this subject, but perhaps hip squats could serve while you heal?
It's been a mixture of different injuries, to be honest.
The first injury was caused by deadlifting, either it was flexion or accumulated stress. I didn't feel it right away, but woke up next morning with pain in the lower left side of my back, and soon after got sciatic nerve pain in my right glute. Took 2 months of rehab and several trips to the chiro to fix it.
Okay, so back to the gym with me, but it only took 2 weeks of running LP to regain strength for me to get injured again. Same spot, but now with the addition of a very stiff and painful area around my lumbar spine. I've been seeing the chiro, and I've been trying to work around it, even if it meant only squatting the bar, but I can't do it. Too painful. It hurts like hell to set my back in extension when deadlifting, and it hurts when I approach the bottom of the squat.
Just to emphasize: It's not because I don't want to squat and deadlift - it's my favorite lifts when I get them right.
I can do isolation stuff, but I can't go heavy. Even then it hurts my back.
I am a broken record on this subject, but perhaps hip squats could serve while you heal?
Heh, you're right. I guess it's because I was vaccinated with a phonograph needle. I forget sometimes how archaic some of my phrases are. OTOH, I make a number of them on purpose. This one was unintentional though.
Broken record: An LP with a break or scratch in the audio grooves that causes the needle on the tone arm to skip and repeat as the LP rotates on the phonograph turntable.
The only LP I know 'bout is linear progression... nah, I'm 22, I know about those frisbee-thingys.
But thanks for the suggestion, I'll try out hip squats for my next session.
FWIW, back in 2012 I was diagnosed with a triple-hernia (inguinal & umbilical), and was told to lay off weightlifting till I had surgery, because of how large the hernias were. I fooled around with lifts that I could handle without feeling pain in my groin, which basically meant I could do only upper-body related stuff. I didn't lift anything heavy, but worked with higher reps and lots of sets. The new stimulus meant that I put on a visible amount of size in just 4-6 weeks. All my relatives and friends noticed it too. Chasing that pump on upper lifts for a month or two can be a lot of fun if heavy squats and deadlifts aren't possible.
I think I was gaining 1lb/week, with the caveat that I was underweight (~180lb @6'1"). There was minimal fat gain, maybe put on 1/2" on my waist with ~7lb of weight gain. The rep ranges depended on the exercises, but it was as low as 8, and as high as 15. The real kicker was that I was doing tons of volume, and was doing three 60-90 minute upper body sessions a week, and kept rest around 60s between sets. Basically body-builder stuff using a BB and up to 35lb of dumbbells (all I had). Didn't get any stronger, but chasing a pump was funner than sitting around and doing nothing before surgery.