Lower Back Muscle Twist & Recovery
By: Saravanan Sivakumar
Tags: Running, Injury, Rehabilitation, Lower Back Pain, Weight Training

Purpose of this Article

Just to give the readers an awareness of how the scary lower back muscle twist or mechanical back pain happens and the path to recovery.

Self- Introduction

Do a desk job & casual long distance running(try and run 3 days week, have been doing it for last 9 years).During the lock down added regular weight training(strength training) to the routine.

What’s a Muscle Twist?

It’s one of the amazing defence mechanism of the body. When the muscle thinks that a particular motion or an impact could cause a damage to the underlying bone, it twists itself preventing the specific motion or impact from traversing further, thereby protecting the underlying bone. This is identical to the fuse blowing off in the faulty line of an electrical circuit, thereby protecting the rest of the circuit.Only issue is that muscle twist can happen during an innocuous movement, due to stiffness in the muscle and various other issues. Once the twist happens it takes a while for normal movement to be restored and the recovery process will be painful especially when its occurs in the lower back

As it happend to me

Dec 17th: Had to do long hours of work in an improper posture(as always) This made the back a bit stiff

Dec 18th: Ended up driving 130 miles(up and down) which made the back more stiff

Dec 19th: Woke up in the morning ok, did a bit of warm up and started doing weight training. Everything was fine, until the final set where I increased the weight to my max limit, nothing unusual. It was all good until I finished the lifting, felt better than usual. But as I was lowering the 32.5kg barbell and placing it on the floor, felt like a shock moving across my lower back from left to right. Straightaway felt soreness in my lower back on the left side and bending down was difficult. Was a bit insane at that point and did a few more reps albeit with lower weight.Decided enough is enough and wrapped up. Slowly it became very painful even to walk-around normally. Any basic movement involving the lower body(getting up from chair, bending down a tiny bit, climbing the stairs, getting up from bed)was very painful.

Got to terms with what was going on, decided to listen to the body and respect the flare up. Knowledge gained from reading about muscle twist in the past came in handy.But experiencing the same was completely different. Did gentle stretches for the lower back twice and carried on with usual errands.Thoughts of what if it was slip disk or a more serious bone injury did cross my mind. Decided to take one thing at a time

Dec 20th: Was a big struggle to get up from bed. It was more sore than previous day, a common “delayed onset soreness phenomenon” with all injuries.The common reason for this is, healing starts to kick in next day, with blood flow coming back to normal and the nerves start to feel more . Carried on with the usual errands and did the stretching exercises twice.

Dec 21st — Dec 23rd : Similar experience as previous day with a tiny bit easing. Carried on with office work, making sure I don’t do sit for more than an hour. I couldn’t anyway

Dec 24th: Could feel considerable easing of the lower back. Was able to walk around with considerable ease. Bending down a bit felt okay.Basic movements were at ease though soreness flared up when the strain was higher

Dec 25th: Was more at ease albeit for a few specific movements involving lower back. Was glad to that recovery has progressed to this stage. Good thing is I haven’t taken any pain killers, haven’t found them helpful in the past.Decided to try out a 5km run. Was a bit difficult to in the beginning, felt easier as I progressed and manage to complete the same https://www.strava.com/activities/4514705694

Path Forward

Plan to ease back into the usual routine in a weeks time. Hopefully it takes of well

Lessons Learned