My favorite moment is when someone comes up to me after a WOD and says something along the lines of “My back has been bothering me with cleans for a bit now. Can you tell me what’s going on?”
Kidding. It’s not my favorite moment. It’s one of the things that annoys me the most about being a physical therapist.
The answer is no, I cannot tell you why you have back pain with CrossFit simply by looking at you. There’s no short explanation that’s going to adequately and accurately explain why your back is hurting, what caused it, and how to fix it.
It’s What We’re Taught
Sarcasm aside, I think this stems from a larger problem. The healthcare industry has taught our society to believe that “fixing” pain is a simple formula in the human body. If your knee hurts, get an x-ray or MRI. The x-ray or MRI will show you what’s wrong. Then you repair, remove, or replace the one structure that’s causing your symptoms and voila! Pain is gone.
I wish.
If it worked that way, you wouldn’t hear people talking about how their surgery “didn’t really work” or the injection helped—but just for a short while. Pain is an incredibly complex experience. It involves muscles, connective tissue, bones, joints, nerves, the spinal cord, and the brain. If anything along that path is ‘off’ or not working well, you can have pain.
Specific to Back Pain with CrossFit
Put differently (and more bluntly): you can have back pain despite the fact that there is nothing structurally wrong with your back. Crazy, right?
A muscle might have tightened up and is refusing to let go for some reason. You might have bent over too quickly to tie your shoes and felt your back seize up. It’s possible that postpartum, things are shifting, and dysfunction in other areas causes back pain.
None of those things inherently mean that something is broken. It just means that your system is over capacity. If a muscle is refusing to let go, there’s usually a bigger piece (poor sleep, inadequate hydration, too much alcohol) that’s also part of the picture.
If bending over to tie your shoes causes you to throw out your back, then odds are your hamstrings, calves, and nerves that run through your legs have been tight for quite some time. Postpartum, it’s common for pelvic floor symptoms to show up as back pain.
Causes of Back Pain with CrossFit
Now that we’re clear on the fact that the answer isn’t that simple, I want to list off all the things that could be causing back pain with CrossFit.
- Limited back muscle endurance
- Poor core activation or coordination
- Insufficient pelvic floor strength or mobility
- Lack of hip mobility
- Hamstrings/glutes/quads too strong compared to back strength
- Incorrect technique
- Improper bracing
And this list is just everything that’s going on at the local level. It’s ignoring the fact that your body as a whole may just be overwhelmed by all the cumulative stress you’re swimming in.
You can’t physical therapy your way out of an injury if you haven’t set your system up for success as a whole. Trust me, I see it every day. I’ve got stories.
Fixing Back Pain with CrossFit
But that’s not why we’re here. Let’s circle back to how to fix all of those things. Here’s the quick answers:
- Improve your back muscle endurance
- Learn proper core activation and coordination
- Improve your pelvic floor strength—or mobility
- Improve your hip mobility
- Ensure your hamstrings/glutes/quads/core have a healthy amount of strength—in proportion to each other
- Fix your technique
- Brace properly
But improve to what standard? When is it good enough? And how much of which exercise should you do? Excellent questions.
Let’s back up one step further—how do you even know that one of those things actually needs to be worked on? And even if it is suboptimal, how do you know that it’s playing a role in your back pain with CrossFit?
And, finally—my point—is it actually possible to answer why you have back pain with CrossFit in a blog post?
No, it is not.
If I tried to tell you how to:
- Test everything I just listed
- Figure out where you rank (suboptimal, optimal, above optimal)
- Discern what the most important limiting factor is
- Figure out which pieces were contributing to your pain
—it would be impossible. We’d have an entire textbook on our hands. Good communication may mean you can explain complex topics at a third grade comprehension level. But, sometimes it takes more than a third grade understanding to dissect what’s going on with the human body.
So…Where Do We Go from Here?
So yes, this blog post is sort of a rant. But it perfectly encapsulates why I can’t just immediately spit out an answer when someone asks me “Why do I have back pain with CrossFit?” or “Why does my knee hurt when I run?”
There’s a myriad of interconnected factors that cause pain. It requires a full examination and someone who understands how the body works—not a 15-minute YouTube tutorial.
If you’re interested in fixing your problem—for good—you can reach out to us here. We love working with people who understand wellness is a journey and care about investing in their physical health and wellbeing for the long haul.
We won’t give you a cookie cutter answer (kinda like this blog post was anything but a cookie cutter answer) and we promise to help you feel more athletic than you ever have before.
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