How to Relieve or Reduce Back Pain During Exercise: A Practical Guide

Relieving chronic lower back pain during exercise can be tricky—push too hard, and the pain worsens; stop entirely, and progress stalls. Knowing how to relieve or reduce pain during exercise starts with listening to your body’s signals, reflecting on what they mean, and adjusting your approach. Here’s how to work with your body to move forward effectively.

The Worst Thing You Can Do

You're doing an exercise, and it causes back pain. The worst thing you can do is push through it. You are the only one who can feel your body's communication, and pain is an alarm system you shouldn't ignore. Don’t push through it. Instead, listen to your body. This is part of the conversation we're having with ourselves—pain is our body trying to tell us something.

The Second Worst Thing You Can Do

The second worst thing is to stop the exercise altogether. Yes, you’re listening to your body, but taking it to the extreme by quitting can be detrimental. This is what many people do—"I tried the bridge, but it hurt, so I can't do it." But instead of giving up completely, ask yourself some questions and make adjustments. Don't go from 100% effort to 0%. Try something in between.

Three-Step Strategy for Reducing Pain While Exercising

1. Listen to Your Body

The first step is learning how to listen to your body. This is the most valuable skill you can develop to break the cycle of back pain. Listening is deeper than just feeling pain—it’s an active process of interpreting and responding. Your body’s communication changes as you adapt, so you need to stay engaged in the conversation.

When you feel pain during an exercise, slow down, take a break, and reflect. Ask yourself: What type of pain is this? Not all pain is bad. For example, after sitting in the car for hours, your first movements might feel stiff or achy, but those are signs your body needs movement, and you will feel better after you get up and move around.

Good pain tends to be dull or related to stiffness, while bad pain is intense, sharp, or nerve-related (like pins and needles). Trust your intuition—if you feel like something’s not helping, listen to that.

2. Reflect and Adjust

Once you've identified the type of pain, it's time to reflect and adjust. There are three possibilities when experiencing pain during an exercise:

1. Form or technique: Your form might be causing the pain. You could change something about your technique or your form, and it may feel better or be more appropriate for your body.
2. The exercise itself: The exercise may not be right for your body at this time, especially if it mimics the movements from your daily life that contribute to your back pain. For your body, the causes of your condition may make that particular exercise feel too similar to those triggers. For example, your recent back pain results from excessive rounding of the lumbar spine—perhaps due to how you sit on the couch in a slumped position—a particular movement may provide valuable information into the underlying causes of your pain in your everyday life.
3. Intensity: Maybe the exercise is too intense, and you need to ease up. If you were working at 50% effort last time, consider reducing it to somewhere between 1% and 10% intensity and see how that feels.

After some reflection, your answers will guide you toward your next attempt, where you’ll adjust based on what you’ve learned.

3. Work Within Your Edge of Tolerance

Once you've engaged in the process of reflection, it’s time to try again—but with less intensity. Don’t quit, but don’t push through the pain. Find that gray area. Ideally, you want to increase that intensity or range of movement just up to the point where pain would start to occur. This is the strategy I recommend: work right before you hit that threshold of pain, where you know it will trigger discomfort. If you’re truly in tune with your body and maintaining a very low intensity, you’ll be able to sense when you’re approaching that limit, and that’s where you should stop. This is your edge of tolerance.

From there, focus on moving within that range, whether it’s zero to a certain percentage of movement or intensity. This is your range of tolerance, and you’ll work right up to that edge. The goal over time—over days, weeks, and months—is to gradually push that edge further. By consistently working up to your tolerance limit, you’ll gradually increase your capacity. So, the next time you attempt the exercise, you might find you can tolerate 1% more, and you’ll once again work right up to that edge.

The Power of Reflection

Listening to your body doesn’t end when the exercise is over. Often, pain has a delayed onset, so part of this responsibility is reflecting on how you feel later. If you experience pain five hours after working out, ask yourself, What did I do earlier today that could have caused this? This reflection helps you gather valuable information for how you use your body in the future.

If you follow this approach, you’ll find that breakthroughs often happen when you embrace the idea of doing less, but doing it mindfully. You don't need to push harder to get better results. Instead, by listening to your body and making mindful adjustments, you can unlock real progress.

Final Thoughts

Listening to your body is key to breaking the cycle of chronic lower back pain. This is the most important skill you can develop. Listening to your body and adjusting your approach based on the communication your body is sharing with you is a constant dance. If this message resonates with you or you know someone who could benefit, don’t hesitate to share. I do believe that the more that we can get the word out that there is a real long-term solution to chronic lower back pain, the more people we can help. And that's what it's all about for me. Until next time, get down on the floor and connect to your core.