First off, if this is your first experience of back pain, or it’s a recent injury, or you’re in intense amounts of pain, you need in person specific guidance!! Save this blog for another time!

I recommend seeing your doctor who can refer you to a specialist. If this will take more than a month, I also highly recommend finding a private physiotherapist who specialises in back pain so you can still make progress while waiting.

Be very proactive & get advice as soon as possible!


BUT! If you’re like I was, then this blog is for you!

Do you have on & off bouts of recurring lower back flare ups? Become totally out of action for weeks at a time, but sometimes it’s ok? Or maybe you feel like you have a weak back? That you need to be careful when doing certain things, or avoid some things altogether?

I might ruffle a few feathers but this stuff needs said, and the sooner you hear it the better equipped you are to start working on your pain.

The hardest battle you have initially is your brain.

Your brain wants to protect you so if it senses danger, it might give you irrational amounts of pain. Its goal?! To slow you down. 

In the initial stage of an injury this protective mechanism can be helpful… but after months and months? Continued restriction is likely a bad habit with multiple unaddressed triggers. This is our brain being silly as it robs you of your confidence! We need to retrain our brain out of these habits instead, which might take some time and effort if it’s been happening for a long time.

Hang on? Did I just call you silly?

Yes, yes I did.

This might sound crazy at first and the practical information is coming, but this bit is super important. Just humour me and have a read.

The longer I’ve worked with people, the more I’ve seen HOW they think about what they’re going through has the largest impact on their results.

Progress is not a nice walk on a clear straight path, it’s a bendy path made of glass that’s on fire and has random fog horns that jump out of the bushes made from only thorns and the screams of hyenas are your only friend…

Unhelpful thoughts whizzing around your head might look like:

“If I move I’ll cause more damage”
“I’m never going to be fixed”
“I’m so weak”
“This just isn’t fair”
“I just need to get comfortable”
“Nothing is going to work”
“I need to lie down”
“I need painkillers”

Thanks brain! So helpful!

You want to give yourself reassurance like you’re a scared puppy and actively replace these thoughts with more positive & curious ones:

“Millions of people have overcome back pain, why would I be any different?”
“Is it sore or am I predicting pain & hesitating?”
“If I keep improving how the muscles work it will take away the reason for pain”
“I won’t cause damage through safe, gentle movements”
“This won’t be forever if I do something about it”
“How does it feel after 5 deep breaths?”
“What if I’m fine and this is illogical/fear-based pain?”


It’s not easy to switch your mindset around pain, and those knee-jerk protective thoughts won’t go away, you just need to be aware of them and switch to a more positive thought as often as you can.

It’s easy to get disheartened when comparing what you can normally do to what you’re currently able to do while in immense pain. Logically you can see how that’s silly, you’re in pain! Of course you can’t just touch your toes or lift something heavy right now, that wouldn’t make any sense!

If it’s too intense to move a part of your body, whether that’s your back directly or your hips & legs, then start by moving the other parts of you that are further away. Stretching your neck and shoulders can decrease tension in your body, making other movements more tolerable.

Then you can start to ease down into the sensitive areas. Keep your breathing deep & relaxed, even start moving the things that did trigger your back with a gentle curiosity “how does that feel now?” – then treat any feedback from your body (whether it’s good or bad) simply as information, not as a success or failure.

This video shows how you can play with areas that feel hypersensitive, almost taunting your triggers to prove that after spending some time moving your range improves and your feel a little better. The more often you experience this the fast you’ll get at relaxing where it would have been impossible before.

youtubeid=wr9pHlgOVEY

Think of it like this, you practice crosswords, you get better at crosswords. You practice running you get better at running. You practice naked dancing with the sea creatures you get better at……

See where I am going with that?

Why would practicing using movement to stop a back pain flare up be any different?

I hear some of you silently scream: “but pain is different!”

Why?

First tattoo I got I nearly cried with how sore it was…. 

I now have 7 tattoos.

Your triggers are more to do with pre-emptive caution than actually causing damage, the more that you practice dominating your body’s knee-jerk defences the closer you get to regaining control over your movement & pain. 

Make movement an essential part of your day, even on days it feels exhausting

Some days will be hard.

Some days you won’t be able to get yourself pain free but remember each day the goal isn’t pain free. Each day the goal is to feel a little better after your practice than before.

No matter how much progress (or lack of) you seem to make, you’ll realise how much worse you feel when you do nothing at all.

Of course, there’s also be days where you do get pain free! Those are great days to do a little actual training, and see if you can do a little bit of extra movement! Remind your body how good it feels to move and keep moving, take the family out for an extra walk, aim to stop the stiffness creeping back in through your day. We want to avoid sitting and sulking!

When I was in my worst pain, I had 2 jobs and had to start work at 5am every day and to be honest I’m really glad for it, because if I wasn’t forced into that schedule I would’ve had a lot more time to sit and feel sorry for myself. And I’m not alone in that. Find a way to give yourself some structure and keep showing up every single day. 

I think we’re all on the same page here: we don’t really want to feel this way ever again!!

So we want to figure out what we missed that led us to this point of pain.

It’s usually something we missed in our physical preparation, and it’s almost always something we don’t realise we’re doing wrong or leaving out.

For example, for me I could lift heavy 1-rep deadlifts, yet if I tried a Single Leg Deadlift with lighter weights I was all over the place or couldn’t do very many reps…. My core & hip stability was terrible, but I didn’t care about stupid single leg exercises, I only cared about my heaviest lifts.
...until my disc injuries forced me to care about my core & hip stability.

This can be a hard conversation to have because we tend think we’re good at stuff – what right does a long haired Northern Irish Dreamboat have to tell me I’m training wrong?! But it can be something small, subtle or something we don’t think is important enough to care about.


I avoided the stability work because I thought exercises looked stupid, but they were massive weak points in my own training. It was NOT a mobility problem that I could fix with stretching.


A common trap to fall into is repeating the cycle of:
- Hurt yourself
- Do things to fix yourself
- Fix yourself
- Stop doing the things you did to fix yourself
- Go back to doing the same things you did before you hurt yourself
- Hurt yourself… 🤦


If a pain or injury is happening over & over again then something is wrong or missing and you have to address that until you’ve ACTUALLY eliminated the weakness, not just temporarily masked the pain. Which is how I ended up creating the Simplistic Mobility Method which assesses your full body for mobility & stability weaknesses, then helps you fill in any gaps you have!


Remember you’re not perfect, neither is your trainer, none of us know everything! We’re all learning this stuff as we go along, so every ‘mistake’ is a chance to improve!

When you have a chronic injury, flare ups can happen at any time as a result of structural injuries, muscle tightness, past injuries, inflammation, too much load, fatigue or even stress!

They might always pop up in your life, especially if you had a super stressful period and can’t fit in the 5-hour-perfect morning routines that seem to be recommended everywhere.

But now you have the tools to confidently nullify your symptoms so you can keep making progress - which is the best path that I’ve found personally and for others. It’s can take a few years to get fully to grips with, just like learning any new skill!

Right now you’re a beginner at working on your own pain flare ups, if you keep working at it you’ll get better at it!

You are the best person to fix you because you can put the work in every day.

- Tom