For the last two weeks one of my female athletes has been experiencing a mixed feeling of being tired / having a bit of pain in her back. Specifically it´s in the thoracic region to the right of the spine. She has a tender area in the erector spinae in this area.
She can sprint and jump without any pain. She sometimes get this tired feeling in her back, but it´s not that bad.
It seems to be provoked by backsquatting. She can lift without pain, but the tired feeling is present when lifting gets to around 75 % of 1RM.
Deadlifting does not seem to provoke the same reaction.
When she was younger she was told she had a tendency to Scheuermanns.
Her strength levels:
Backsquat: 5x65kg
DL: 1x90kg
What´s your take on this? I am bit in the dark here. Insufficient back strength? Trouble with the vertebrae?
It sounds like overtraining is a possibility. If she has also lost strength and endurance, it is almost certain to be overtraining. Try my recovery plan. It takes 2 weeks. You just cut the volume down to about a third of what she usually does. Then drop the intensity by lowering the weight a little, like 85 to 90% of the weight usually done on those lifts. Then the next week, volume is kept the same but you kick the intensity back up. By week 3 she should be able to go back to normal.
If that doesn’t do the trick she may need medical help. The thing is the tiredness and the overuse injury of the erector spinae are very common overtraining symptoms. Where you describe the pain is very typical of overuse of the erector spinae. This is caused not just by overtraining the whole body but can also be due to overtraining of just that muscle. Too much squating, deadlifting and rowing without enough rest will cause that. Another issue is the form on those lifts. If your back bends or rounds this can cause injury over time. The back should be straight on the squat. On deadlifts I see so many people bend mostly at the waist and very little at the knees this put WAY to much pressure on the erector spinae and will damage the back. The deadlift should be done with the butt down and the back straight. The glutes should push the weight up, not your back.
So, make sure the form is perfect, do the recovery, make sure future training allows enough rest and has volume and intensity at appropriate levels for the type of training, make sure erector is given enough time to recover before being used again (squat, deadlift and row variations). I would be very surprised if that doesn’t take care of it.
One more thing that can help. Vary the training. Do high intensity failure training with low volume. Then do sets where you lower the weight to where you are nowhere near failure and then do high volume. Or another high volume program can be doing your 6RM for 3 reps. Try single set training with rest-pause, forced reps, static holds, negatives, and drops, even multiple drops. Try pyramids. Do typical strength, hypertrophy, power and endurance phases. Of course keeping it skewed to her main goal.
I guess we’ll go with a combination of his and Charlie’s. I thought about doing some onelegged DLs for a few weeks.
She has been doing a lot of low intensity back exercises in order to correct her kyphosis - we’ll reduce the amount of these for a few weeks.
She is scheduled for a chiropractic examination on Sunday - we’ll see what happens.
Here’s a status report:
The back is still causing minor problems. The facet syndrome has been corrected and is almost stable now. Still the chiropractor has suggested we skip lifting for a week or two - including lighter loads and exercises which did not elicit the symptoms.
Yesterday she got a bit of pain around her left shoulderblade after swinging her arms during warmup. She did quite a lot of bounding without any problems though.
The feeling of tiredness is still there sometimes - not as much as two weeks ago, but it’s still there. Today she did some long jumps with full runup and several repetitions of maximal sprinting - no problem. Some jumping over low hurdles caused a minor discomfort in her lower back.
All in all I am more and more certain that it is a muscular thing. We have started using foam rollers, which has loosened her erectors.
In an attempt to maintain her strength levels we have been doing onelegged deep squats and high stepups with no load.