This post is about how I suffered a herniation at L3-L4, and subsequently, what I’ve done in the one year following that to get back to lifting. Let’s cut to the chase.
Go back to September 2009, and I was finishing up a training cycle with the Texas method. It ended with me bringing up my deadlift from 145kg x 5 to 155kg x 5 in 6 weeks, and I was pretty dam satisfied with the progress.
As per usual, I proceeded on to a one week deload to allow for super-compensation and recovery. I would be doing two easy workouts with 80-90% of previous maxes. On the first workout, I did as I normally did, and loaded up the bar for some squats. I easily banged out 2 sets of 120kg x 5, and then proceeded to prep the bar for deadlifts.
With 130kg on the bar, and having been sufficiently warmed up from squats, I thought it would be a piece of cake. I stepped up to the bar, and reached down, and simply pulled without thinking twice. Immediately, I heard a pop, and then a sharp pain in my lower back.
The Consequences
At the time, I didn’t know what had gone wrong. It hurt, but didn’t hurt that bad, so I thought that it was just a tendon strain that would heal up quickly.
A week later, and with back pain bugging me every single day, I decided it had to be something much worse.
I scoured the internet for a possible diagnosis, and came across some forum posts that pointed the possibility of a disk herniation. I’d heard about those before, nasty stuff. Stuff that you don’t recover from. Stuff to which doctors are quick to prescribe surgery for.
In other words, a life sentence. Naturally, I was too stubborn to believe that. And so I decided to educate myself on how to deal with it. What I knew was, that there were 700lbs deadlifters who had come back from a disk herniation – it obviously wasn’t the life sentence that doctors make it out to be.
Finally, an MRI confirmed that I indeed had a disk herniation at L3-L4. So my hunch was right, now it was time to reflect on why it happened and how to deal with it.
(Note that through all this, I still stubbornly continued putting more than 100kg on my back for 2 weeks before deciding to chuck the ego out the door. Thank god for youth.)
Why it Happened
There were many factors leading up to this, including personal failures like practicing bad form and being too stubborn to learn things the right way. However, I think if we were to drill it down, there would be 2 root causes.
Bad mechanics
Take a look at this picture from Crossfit Connection.
Now take a look at a picture of me in the deadlift position.
I’m much more bent over. That means more shear stress on the lower back, which my muscles have to work harder to counteract. Most importantly, a slight hitch in form would put my lower back into a critical level of flexion.
Basically, I wasn’t built to deadlift.
I didn’t stay tight
Lifters have always stressed the importance of keeping tight.
The abdominals are nature’s back-belt, and one has to practice abdominal bracing and maintenance of intra-abdominal pressure to stabilise the lower back during any sort of lifting.
When I whimsically pulled that 130kg deadlift, I wasn’t focusing on the task at hand. I certainly wasn’t staying tight enough, and my back went into a flexion with 130kg tugging at it, leading to the disk herniation.
I short, I didn’t respect myself, and I did not respect the weights
What I did
Take a break from heavy loading
I wouldn’t load anything more than my bodyweight (85kg) on my back for the next 3 months.
I cut out bilateral (on two legs) loading, and in the immediate aftermath of the injury, I was doing only leg extensions and leg curls, which fortunately, was enough to keep my leg strength.
Focus on what you can do
There is almost always some way to effectively challenge your body. Even when walking down a flight of stairs aggravated my back pain, I could still do leg extensions.
After a while, a graduated to bulgarian split squats, never needing to go above a 100kg while continuing to grow my legs.
Fast forward a year, and I’m confident enough to load double my bodyweight on the bar once again. (Though that doesn’t mean that I do)
Core stability and soft tissue work
I immediately took to the literature on how to ensure long term low back health. The one recommendation that I got was the textbooks of Dr Stuart McGill.
While I disagree with some of his recommendations when applied to strength training, these books provide a solid foundation for devising a plan of attack. The details of this could fill an entire article on it’s own, but I’ll provide an example daily routine that I practiced for the first few months after the injury.
On a Daily Basis:
- Side Plank, 30 second supersets for 4 mins. (Right, 30 seconds, switch to left, 30 seconds, etc)
- Front Plank, as long as I could comfortably hold (usually about 120 seconds)
- Foam rolling [1]
- Mobility work, focusing on hip mobility [2]
- Stretching, particularly for the hip flexors.
Eliminating Imbalances
This was harder than I thought.
I was on my High School Track and Field team as a shot putter for a good 4 years. That’s 4 years of training with dominance of one side of my body. Due to bad programming and coaching, these muscular imbalances were left to fester.
The first problem was that my right side was stronger than my left. This meant that when I performed any bilateral exercise, I would sway to my right side and put my back on uneven stress.
The second problem was that my mind-muscle connection to my left side sucked. Essentially, I could easily contract my right quad, but not my left.
This meant greasing the right movement patterns. Learning
My left leg is still weaker than my right after all this time. I’ve got an asymmetrical sway when squatting to parallel with anything above 120kg. But hey, there’s always a workaround.
Be a stickler for form
Good form keeps the joints safe, take it seriously.
I started filming myself performing lifts over and over again. Because of the muscular imbalances, I couldn’t tell what good form felt like. I had to rely on the visual feedback to slowly inch myself into the correct position.
It’s a slow process, and I doubt I can do a properly aligned squat even today. But improvements to movement patterns and proprioception have been made.
Never deadlift again
Stay safe. There are other ways to stay strong [3]
Suck it up. Hope time works to your favour. Be kind to your back
Anecdotes of people who have suffered disk herniations tell us that surgery isn’t a sure-fire solution. It works for some, and fails for just as many.
For myself, the solution was simply to let time do it’s thing. I had pretty bad back pain simply from sitting down for 30 minutes for about 3 months following the event. By month 6, I could tolerate about 2 hours of sitting. By month 9, I was back to heavy loading (>100kg on my back).
Final Words
Do bear in mind that all the above happened to a relatively resilient 18-year-old.
I had youth on my side, and while the injuries will always bug me, the scars are simply souvenirs that’ll always serve as a reminder to give the task at hand the respect it deserves.
In short, I’m thankful that I’ve messed around, learnt some good lessons and gotten away with it.
To those in a similar situation, I hope you find something useful. This article is lengthy, and yet I’ve barely scratched the surface and haven’t explained a lot of terms used. I trust that you can look them up, and provided a few resources in the footnotes.
That said, if you’ve really got a question to ask, feel free to contact me via yewwei.tan@yewhealth.com .
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[1] I took the shotgun approach, foam rolling everything. Glute max, glute med, hams, quads, piriformis, etc. Whatever that hurt, I foam rolled.
A good resource is “Soft Tissue Work For Tough Guys”.
[2] If you cannot achieve a particular range-of-motion with your hips, your lower back will flex to compensate. That means added shear stress. Not something that you want.
[3] In case you’re wondering about my current lower body exercise selection, its:
- Hip Thrusts for Glutes
- Leg Curls for Hamstrings
- Leg Extensions and Barbell Hack Squats off pins for Quads
- Zercher Squats for core stability and general leg strength
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