What to do with your training when your back goes

It usually doesn't happen under a heavy bar. It happens lifting a car seat out of the back of a Corolla at a funny angle, or picking a sock off the floor on a Tuesday morning. Something in the lower back locks, and for the next ten days you move like a man forty years older.

The instinct is to stop everything and wait. Don't. Waiting in bed is about the worst thing you can do for a general, non-specific back flare-up. Within two or three days of total rest you get stiffer, weaker and more frightened of movement, and fear of movement is most of what turns a two-week problem into a two-year one.

Before any of the rest of this: if you've got numbness or weakness running down a leg, any change in bladder or bowel control, a fever, unexplained weight loss, or the pain started with a fall or a crash, stop reading and go to a doctor today. Those are not "train around it" situations. Everything below assumes a boring, mechanical, angry-lower-back episode that a physio has looked at, or would look at if you booked the appointment you've been putting off.

The first 72 hours: walk, don't rest

Short walks, often. Three separate ten-minute walks beat one thirty-minute walk, because the second half of a long walk is where you start compensating and limping, and limping teaches your body a bad pattern.

Flat ground. No hills at first. Arms swinging, eyes up, normal shoes. If you can't manage ten minutes, do four, and do it six times.

The other thing that helps in that first stretch is changing position roughly every twenty minutes. Sitting still in one chair for two hours is what turns morning stiffness into afternoon misery. Stand up, walk to the kitchen, come back. Set a timer if you're the sort who loses an afternoon to a laptop.

Find out which direction your back hates

Most people's backs are worse in one direction than the other, and knowing which one changes everything you do for the next month.

Stand up and gently bend forward, hands sliding down your thighs. Then stand tall and lean back slightly, hands on your hips. One of those two will feel noticeably worse. For a lot of people it's the forward bend, especially in the morning. For others it's leaning back, or standing for a long time.

That's a rough self-check, not a diagnosis, and a physio will do a far better version of it in ten minutes. But it gives you a working rule: avoid the direction that hurts, load the direction that doesn't.

If bending forward is the problem, the sit-up variations go in the bin for now, along with the toe-touch stretch you keep doing because it feels like it should help. Rounding into the sore position twenty times a morning is not mobility work.

What stays in the programme

More than you'd think.

• Split squats and step-ups. One leg at a time, holding a dumbbell at your side or nothing at all. Far less spinal load than a back squat, and the single-leg work tends to expose the hip stiffness that contributed in the first place.
• Trap bar deadlifts from blocks. The handles are higher than a barbell and you stand inside the frame, so the bar isn't dragging you forward. Raise it further on two 20kg plates if the floor position is still sore.
• Chest-supported rows. Lie face down on an incline bench. Your back does nothing but hold you together while you pull.
• Carries. A 24kg kettlebell in one hand, walk fifty steps, swap. Suitcase carries build the exact bracing you need for lifting a child out of a bath.
• Push-ups and floor presses. Rarely a problem.
• Anything for arms, calves, neck. Your biceps did nothing wrong. Train them.

Bike or elliptical over running for a couple of weeks, and skip the rowing machine entirely at first. Rowing is repeated loaded flexion for twenty minutes, which is the one thing you're trying not to do.

What comes out, temporarily

Conventional deadlifts from the floor. Heavy back squats. Good mornings. Sit-ups, crunches, hanging leg raises, weighted twists. Overhead pressing if standing tall aggravates it.

The word is temporarily. Three to six weeks, not forever. Deadlifting is not the reason your back hurts, and permanently avoiding a hip hinge because you had a flare-up in March is how you end up unable to lift a suitcase in October.

The load you start back with

Halve it. Take whatever you were doing and use fifty per cent, for sets of eight to ten, and finish every session feeling like you could have done two more sets. Then add roughly five to ten per cent a week and stop adding the first week it stings.

Judge it by the next morning, not by how it feels mid-set. Adrenaline is a liar at 6pm. If you wake up the same as the day before, the session was fine. If you wake up worse and it hasn't settled by lunch, that was too much, and you drop back one step rather than to zero.

Mild soreness during training that fades within an hour or two is usually acceptable. Sharp, catching pain that makes you stop mid-rep is not. That's a line worth getting a professional opinion on rather than guessing at.

The three things worth doing every day

The best-known set of low-back exercises is Stuart McGill's "big three": the modified curl-up, the side plank, and the bird dog. They train your midsection to hold position without repeatedly bending your spine, which is the whole point.

Ten minutes. Short holds of about eight to ten seconds, several of them, rather than one heroic ninety-second plank. Look them up properly or get shown them, because the curl-up in particular is easy to do wrong.

Do them in the morning if you can. Not immediately on waking, though. Discs are fuller with fluid overnight and mornings are when most people are stiffest, so have a coffee and walk about first.

The part nobody tells you, which is about your kids

The gym is forty-five minutes. The other fifteen hours are where the flare-ups come from.

Kneel down to lift a toddler instead of bending over them. Get one knee on the ground, bring the child to your chest, then stand. Same with the laundry basket, same with the dishwasher's bottom rack.

Car seats are the single worst thing on the list, because you're bending, twisting and reaching out in front of you at the same time. Open the far door and get in properly, or put one knee on the seat. Don't do it from the pavement with your feet planted and your spine wrapped round the door frame.

Split stance at the sink. Bags in both hands, not one. And when a four-year-old wants to be carried, put them on your front or your back, not on one hip for twenty minutes.

Concede this much

Sometimes you do need two or three days where you do almost nothing but walk to the kettle. Some people need imaging. A small number need an injection or surgery, and no amount of bird dogs changes that. If you're six weeks in with no improvement at all, that's a conversation with a doctor, not a reason to push harder.

But the default answer, for the ordinary sore back that most men get at some point, is movement at a load you can handle.

The whole thing hinges on one decision, made in the first week, when you're standing in the kitchen at 6am deciding whether to go and walk around the block or go back to bed. Go and walk around the block.