Why Avoiding Deadlifts Made My Back Pain Worse (Train Around It)

Training Around an Injury Instead of Hiding From It

The worst thing that you can do is avoid using a body part because it's injured.

That sounds backwards, because the instinct when something hurts is to protect it, and protection feels like rest. So you stop loading it, you work around it, and the pain quiets down for a while.

Then you come back six months later and it's worse.

Here is what is actually happening in that gap. Muscle tissue responds to demand, and when demand drops the tissue adapts downward, which happens faster than most people expect. Disuse atrophy starts showing up in days, not weeks, and the muscles closest to the painful joint tend to shut down first because your nervous system reflexively inhibits them to guard the area.

So you lose strength in the exact spot that needed support, and the tissue around it takes over work it was never built for, and now you have two problems instead of one.

Your goal should be to try to use that body part within your limits so that you can strengthen that part of your body rather than allow it to atrophy and become weaker because you avoided it.

That phrase, within your limits, is doing most of the work in that sentence.

It does not mean train through sharp pain, and it does not mean load the thing the same way you did before it got hurt. It means finding the version of the movement that your body currently tolerates and living there until it tolerates more.

I have issues related to my low back that go back from all the way to my teenage years when I was wrestling and it's always been a problem for me.

Deadlifts were the thing that set it off, pretty much without fail, and so deadlifts became the movement I quietly removed from my program, which meant the entire posterior chain stopped getting loaded, which meant my back had less support than it had a year earlier.

I used to use that as an excuse to skip leg day two and I can tell you it wasn't until I leaned into being able to strengthen that part of my body and do more deadlifts that I was able to strengthen my body, adapt around that injury point where I didn't experience that pain anymore.

The mechanism there is worth sitting with, because it is not that the injury healed on its own while I happened to be deadlifting.

Tendons and ligaments lay down collagen in response to mechanical tension, slowly, over months, building in whatever direction the force gets applied, which is how connective tissue remodels itself under load over time. Take the force away and the remodeling signal goes with it.

Pain is partly a prediction, and this is where your nervous system starts to matter just as much as the tissue does, because when a movement has hurt you before, your brain gets more protective about that pattern, which can mean you feel pain at lighter loads than the tissue can actually handle. Doing the movement safely, repeatedly, at loads that do not flare you up, walks that prediction back down.

In practice, it comes down to picking a load where you feel the muscles working and you feel nothing sharp. For me that meant trap bar pulls from blocks at a weight that felt almost embarrassing, three sets, twice a week.

Then add a small amount, hold it for a few sessions, and only move again when the previous load feels easy the next morning. A little soreness the following day is nothing to worry about, but a flare-up that lasts three days means you went too far, and you back off to the last weight that did not do that.

Most people aren't too aggressive with injured areas, they're too passive, and that passivity is the real problem, since a year of avoidance costs more than a year of slow loading ever would.

Pain that comes back every time you return to a movement is usually telling you that you never built the capacity for it, rather than telling you to stop.