D’oh! Stupid back pain!
Back pain bites (substitute your favorite verb).
Things that help:
Strengthening your core.
Getting strong, flexible hip extensors and cultivating a balance between the strength and flexibility of hip flexors (which are often worked when you exercise abs) and hip extensors.
Strengthening the small muscles of the back. (An entire book is devoted to this approach to reducing back pain.)
Here’s a Men’s Health article offering several useful moves (thanks, Kris, for turning me on to this).
But sometimes these approaches aren’t enough because the pain is caused by nerve impingement, damage to a spinal disk, osteoarthritis, or any number of other maladies.
Dutifully performing my exercises makes a difference–but the pain is still there, and some mornings it’s bad. I suspect I’ve got some arthritic changes as a result of a deadlifting injury many years ago. So I’ve made an appointment with the neurosurgeon who diagnosed my bulging disk in 1986. We’ll see what he says.
