Health Library / Training
This content is for education only and is not medical advice. I'm a fitness coach, not a physician. Talk to your doctor before starting any medication, hormone, supplement, or new exercise program, especially if you have a medical condition or take prescriptions.
Four out of five people get significant back pain at some point, and the bracket where it lands hardest is exactly the one reading this.
There's one fact that changes how most people think about their back, so I'll lead with it.
When researchers have taken MRIs of people with no back pain at all, they find disc degeneration, bulges and protrusions at remarkable rates — and the rates climb steadily with age. By the time you're in your fifties, disc degeneration on imaging is close to the norm. A large share of pain-free people in their forties and fifties are walking around with a bulging disc and no idea.
So being told you have degeneration or a bulge doesn't establish that it's the source of your pain. It might be. It's also what a normal back looks like at your age, the same way grey hair is what normal hair looks like.
This matters because scary imaging language changes behaviour. People hear "degenerative disc disease" — which sounds like a progressive illness and is largely a description of normal aging — and they stop moving, stop lifting, and get weaker. The fear does more damage than the disc.
The old advice was rest. That's been reversed for years now: for ordinary low back pain, staying active beats bed rest, and prolonged rest makes outcomes worse. Movement, within tolerance, is the treatment.
What has support: staying active, exercise therapy, strength training, heat early on, and time — most episodes improve substantially within weeks regardless of what you do.
What has less than people think: long courses of passive treatment where something is done to you and you do nothing, imaging early in an ordinary episode, and surgery for non-specific back pain without a clear structural target.
Not the thing people expect. It's rarely about stretching a tight back.
Build the trunk's ability to resist movement, not to produce it. Carries, planks, dead bugs, side planks, anti-rotation work. Your trunk's job during life is to stay solid while your arms and legs do things, and training it that way transfers better than endless crunches, which load the spine into the position it least enjoys.
Train your hips and glutes. Weak, uncoordinated hips mean the back picks up work it wasn't designed for. Hip hinges, bridges, split squats.
Learn to hinge. The single most useful motor skill for a back. Bending from the hips with a braced trunk rather than rounding under load — that's how you pick things up for the rest of your life.
Keep loading, appropriately. A back that's never asked to work becomes a back that can't. Deadlifts aren't inherently dangerous; unearned deadlifts are. Build up.
Walk. Boring, effective, well supported.
Core strength isn't the same as visible abs. Stretching your hamstrings repeatedly when your back hurts often feels good and does little. Posture is less of a villain than it's made out to be — there's no single correct way to sit, and the best posture is mostly the next one. Being "out of alignment" is not a thing that gets fixed by one appointment.
Get assessed, promptly, for any of these:
the area that would contact a bike seat. This is an emergency. Same day.
slapping
Those are the ones where waiting is the wrong call. Ordinary back pain that's sore, stiff, worse with certain movements and easing over days is a different situation.
And anything that isn't improving over a few weeks deserves a physical therapist. I'm not going to tell you what's wrong with your back — several very different problems produce the same complaint, and a good PT sorts that out and gets you loading again faster than rest will.
Your back is more robust than the language used about it suggests. It's also a structure that responds to being trained, and most people with recurring back trouble have a back that's been protected rather than built.
Move. Load it sensibly. Get the red flags checked. Then get back under the bar.
Last updated September 30, 2026