The week your back goes out, and the six after it

You sit on the edge of the bed, reach for a sock, and something low and to the left says no. Not a sharp tear. A refusal. You get the sock on eventually by hooking your foot up on the opposite knee, and you spend the rest of the day walking like a man carrying a full mug of tea through a crowded room.

That's the morning this piece is about.

The two responses most people pick are both wrong. One is total shutdown: no gym, sofa, ibuprofen, wait it out, and come back six weeks later weaker, stiffer and more scared of the barbell than you were before. The other is the hero move, where you turn up on day three feeling loose, pull 140 kilos because you felt loose, and set yourself back a fortnight.

There's a middle lane. It's boring and it works, and it lets you keep the habit, which is the thing you actually can't afford to lose when you've got a job and a school run.

Before anything else, the stuff that means you stop and get seen

Some back pain is a plumbing problem, not a training problem. Go and be examined the same day if you have numbness around the saddle area or inner thighs, any loss of bladder or bowel control, weakness in a leg or foot that's getting worse, pain following a fall or a car crash, a fever alongside the pain, unexplained weight loss, or night pain that's worse lying down than standing.

None of that is common. All of it is a doctor's job, today, not a "see how it goes over the weekend" job.

For everything else, the person you want is a physiotherapist who lifts. Ask them directly whether they work with barbell training. Somebody who hands you a sheet of pink-band exercises and tells you to avoid deadlifting forever isn't going to be much use to you at 42 with two kids to carry.

I'm not your clinician and this isn't a diagnosis. What follows is how to keep training while the professionals do their part.

Two days of restraint, not two weeks of nothing

The early window is where people overcorrect. Lying flat for a week doesn't speed anything up. It makes you stiff and it makes you frightened, and fear is a bigger problem long-term than the original strain.

Walk instead. Ten minutes, three or four times a day, flat ground, no phone in your hand. If ten minutes hurts, do five. The first walk after the first night is usually the worst one of the day and it gets better each time, which is useful information in itself.

Avoid the two positions that wind most angry backs up in the first 48 hours: slumped sitting on a soft sofa, and repeated bending forward first thing in the morning. Getting out of a low car seat is a common one. Swing both legs out together, plant both feet, then stand. Don't twist out of the seat while reaching for the laptop bag.

What you cut, and what you keep

You're not stopping training. You're subtracting the movements that load a spine that's currently complaining, and keeping everything else, which is more than you'd think.

Cut for now: barbell deadlifts, back squats, bent-over rows, sit-ups, Russian twists, anything with a bar on your back or a load hanging in front of your knees. Also cut heavy overhead pressing if standing under a load makes you brace hard and gasp.

Keep: pressing, pulling, arms, calves, and anything you can do lying down or with your chest supported. A chest-supported row keeps your whole upper back in the game. Dumbbell bench, push-ups, lat pulldowns, face pulls, curls, triceps work — all fine, and they add up to a genuinely decent upper body session.

Keep the sled if your gym has one. Pushing or dragging a loaded sled gets your heart rate up and loads your legs with no bending and almost no spinal compression. It's the single most useful piece of kit in a gym for somebody in this position.

The ten minutes that does the most

Do these most days, at home, before the house wakes up. They're not glamorous.

• Dead bug. On your back, knees up, press your low back into the floor. Slowly lower one arm and the opposite leg. Breathe out as you lower. Eight each side.
• Side plank from the knees. Thirty seconds each side, then build. Stop before your hips sag.
• Bird dog. Hands and knees, opposite arm and leg out, hold five seconds. Keep a glass of water balanced on your low back, mentally. Eight each side.
• Glute bridge. Feet close to your backside, drive through the heels, squeeze hard at the top. Twelve, slow.

That combination is the spine of the Stuart McGill approach, and it's stood up for decades because it teaches you to keep your ribs and hips stacked while you move your limbs, which is what actually goes wrong when a back gives out.

Two minutes of walking afterwards, then coffee.

Loading your legs without loading your spine

This is where most people quietly stop training legs for two months and then wonder why everything feels worse in March.

Start with the goblet squat. One dumbbell or kettlebell held at your chest, sat back between your feet, no bar across your shoulders. The front load pulls your chest up and stops you folding over. Three sets of eight with 16 or 20 kilos is enough to be work and not enough to be a gamble.

Then the split squat, rear foot on a bench or on the floor, dumbbells in your hands. One leg gets a real training stimulus from half the total load, which halves what your spine has to hold. If balance is the limiter, hold a rack upright with one hand. Nobody's watching.

Leg press and leg curl machines are fine if the seat doesn't round your low back. Check that. A lot of leg presses force you into exactly the position you're trying to avoid, and you'll only notice the next morning.

Hip thrusts load the glutes hard with the spine neutral and supported. If your gym has a belt squat, use it and be grateful.

Coming back to the bar

Around week three or four, if the ten-minute work is easy and walking is painless, start reintroducing the hinge. Not with a barbell from the floor.

Go in this order. Kettlebell deadlift from a couple of blocks. Then Romanian deadlifts with dumbbells, light, high reps, stopping well before your back rounds. Then a trap bar from an elevated position. Then the floor, if and when it feels like nothing.

Add one step every week or two, and only if the previous step produced no next-morning stiffness. The test isn't how you feel during the set. It's how you feel putting your socks on the following day.

Expect this to take six to eight weeks to get back to something like your old numbers. It'll feel slow. It's still faster than the version where you rush it in week two and start the clock again.

The part nobody wants to hear

Your training probably isn't what did it.

It's nine hours a day in a desk chair set too low, followed by lifting a 14-kilo toddler out of a cot at arm's length over a bar, twice a night, while half asleep. It's carrying the car seat one-handed across a car park because the other hand has the bags. It's the garden in April after five months of nothing.

Fix the ones you can. Raise the cot mattress if the model allows it. Drop the cot side. Step in close and lift with the child against your chest rather than at arm's length. Take two trips from the car. Get up from your desk every hour, even if it's just to fill a glass.

And here's the trade-off, honestly stated: some people do need a genuine week off everything. If every session makes the next morning worse, three weeks running, you're not managing it, you're feeding it. Stop, get assessed properly, and let somebody with hands and a diagnosis take over for a while.

The goal was never to train through it like a martyr. It's to still be lifting at 60, which mostly comes down to whether you can get through the bad six weeks without quitting the whole thing.

Put the sock on sitting down. Then go for a walk.