Anybody have any experiences with lower back muscle stiffness and cramping. I had a car wreck about a year ago…went through therapy and all that. My back feels fine,but sometimes it feels like the muscles are just tight and won’t stretch out. Can anyone relate??
When do you get tightness? At first I thought this thread was about tightness during or after a workout session.
More info would be appreciated if you would like more pertinent recommendations. How often, when, what are you doing, what positions, movements make it better or worse, etc. Is the pain limited to one area or does it travel. Not to try to diagnose you, but with more info I could give you some general rec and let you know if you should seek treatment.
Try hanging from a bar - this helps me a lot. I have a prolapsed disc at the bottom of my spine. I usually do it in the mornings as a bit of a warm-up for the day, and at sometimes at the end of a gym session. As an added bonus you will develop your grip strength.
I can relate…I have 2 herniated discs in my lower back and it is stiff on a regular basis…
Do spinal decompression exercises by hanging froma bar…
Do back extensions to strengthen the lower back
Same thing with using the swissball,(I don’t know the name of it, but lie on your stomach on the swissball, and lift you right arm up with your left leg, hold for 2 seconds, then switch…this helps my back a lot…
The tightness in my back just seems to come and go…no particular time when it happens…It doesn’t prevent me from doing anything but the tightness just bugs me.
I do heavy deadlifts with no problem and feel the muscles working in my back but not any shooting pains or anything…just muscle stiffness. If my back is tight before my workout,I usually stretch it out after warming up along with my hip flexors,hams,etc. and its fine…
But later on in the day it seems to come back. I’m thinking that I have built the strength in my low back to a degree but have issues with flexibility in my hips and hamstrings due to being inactive for a while after car wreck.
The hanging from the bar seems to help along with deep tissue massages from my wife.
Also don’t forget strong abs, and flexibitlity all around the posterior chain.
My back was a mess. I feel great now but still get some stiffness. The chriopractor really helped a lot. Once I was better I used to hang from a bar which works good, but what works even better is an inversion table. You can get them for about $200-$300, so if you don’t mind spending the money and have somewhere to put it I’d definetley reccomend it. I squat and deadlift heavy, then get on there afterward and haven’t had any back problems in a couple of years now. I should mention that I pretty much train Westside style, which puts the emphasis the hips, glutes, hamstrings, low back and abs.
I would highly recommend a deep tissue massage from a wife or girlfriend, followed by lots of stretching of the entire posterior chain. Also, as was said earlier, strengthening or some tightening of the abdominals might be in order to loosen up the back some. I’ll just assume you’ve been doing things in a full range of motion so as to not really address that issue. Something that might be an option is submitting a photo to Eric Cressey or Mike Robertson of the Neanderthal no more series for a postural analysis. Hope that might help some man.
the maxX,
I agree on your advice. I was in a similar situation 2 years ago also. Take a car accident combined with lordosis, and I was laid up for almost 2 weeks. Even now, I can deadlift, but I can hardly squat the bar. One thing to think about is sleep positioning and patterns. I usually sleep on my side or stomach. When I sleep on my stomach, I always wake up with back pain, due to the lordosis. If I sleep on my side in a feral position, with my knees pointed more upward towards my chest, I can feel the tight back muscles stretch and relax. This might help his situation. -The Starkdog