Strong Looks Different Now: Chronic Back Pain and Stress When the Workouts Finally Work

This quarter, my workouts finally started working. My strength went up and my pain flares mostly turned into tightness. But once the workouts stopped being the problem, chronic back pain and stress showed me what my real variable was: sleep, life stress, and the protective patterns I’m still unlearning. Here’s what that looks like.

It was 5:50am on the Fourth of July and I was driving to the gym. I’d been up since three for no reason I could explain. The week before, I had worked out three days in a row for the first time in longer than I could remember, and I felt amazing. Then I spent the next four days doing almost nothing. I went to work, came home, and sat at my computer. No workouts, no walks, and no stretching or bodywork. By Thursday, my entire back had locked up, from the base of my neck and my shoulder blades all the way down into my QL and hip flexors. I had barely done anything that week and I felt the worst I had all month.

If you’ve read my first personal post or my second one, you know I’ve been trying to find a way back to strength training that doesn’t flare me. This quarter, I finally found one that works. And almost as soon as the workouts stopped being the problem, chronic back pain and stress showed me what the real variable was. This post will share what the last three months looked like for me, including the strength that finally started showing up, the stress that took its place as the main driver of my symptoms, and what I’m learning about listening to my body before it has to shout.

**This is not medical advice. Please consult your medical provider for more information.

The Strength Is Finally Showing Up

At the end of my last personal post, I had just switched from bodyweight compound movements to open chain machine work at the gym. Leg extensions, hamstring curls, and very little else. I was hopeful in a quiet way, but I didn’t have proof yet. Now I do.

When I started, I couldn’t push the lightest setting on the leg extension with one leg. The lightest weight you can add on that machine is 10lbs and I couldn’t do it with one leg. By late July, I was pushing 25lbs with both legs. I also couldn’t move the leg press machine one it’s lightest setting with one leg. leg press with one leg. By late July, I was pushing 70lbs with both legs. The leg press is technically a closed chain exercise, but because I’m seated and supported with no load coming down on my spine, my body handles it well. This doesn’t sound like much, but those are real numbers and they went up without a single flare, which is the more important part of the story.

What Those Numbers Mean for My Body

I also want to give you the full picture of what those numbers mean for my body right now. I weigh somewhere between 115 and 120 pounds. The day I barely pushed 70lbs on the leg press for ten reps, I had a thought I couldn’t shake: if I’m struggling to push 70lbs, how am I supposed to squat my own body weight? That’s why bodyweight lunges and squats kept flaring me earlier this year. For my body, they were most of my available strength, not small exercises.

The fatigue curve still surprises me. On single-leg sets, the first four reps feel manageable. The fifth rep, I can barely push halfway. The sixth one is a fight. There’s no gradual slide. It’s a cliff.

My Story Got Flip-Flopped

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I figured out something about my own history that I’d completely missed.

Before my wedding last October, I was working on getting my strength back. I went to the gym and used the few machines I could tolerate, most of them open chain. And I did great. I had minimal flares with steady progress. After the wedding, I stopped working out for about five or six months, and I lost everything I had built.

When I was ready to start again, I didn’t want to go to the gym. The gym can be an intimidating place, and sometimes getting out of the house is enough of a barrier on its own. So I trained in my garage with dumbbells, a bench, and my body weight. I flared myself over and over again for six to eight weeks and got nowhere.

Looking back, the very first time I took this seriously, I happened to choose the right approach for my body. I just didn’t know it was the right approach because I had never tested the alternative. The second time around, I chose the path of least resistance, and it was the wrong one for where my body was. I had to learn the lesson backwards. Most people have to find what works through trial and error, and I did too. I just got the lucky guess first and the error second.

When the Workouts Stopped Being the Problem

Here’s the part I didn’t expect. Once my workouts stopped flaring me, my symptoms didn’t disappear. They moved and they started following something else entirely.

That Fourth of July week was the first clue. My stress was at an all-time high, I was sitting for hours at a time, and I wasn’t moving. My body responded to that week harder than it had responded to three days of lifting.

It happened again in late July. My legs felt tired for no clear reason and my back was tight in that familiar stretching way along my whole left side. I hadn’t done anything I don’t normally do. What I had done was sleep poorly all week, go through a stressful stretch that afternoon and into the night, lose my appetite in the heat, and sip coffee and decaf cold brew all day instead of water. My Garmin watch showed my body battery recharging into the fifties and sixties instead of the seventies and eighties. None of those things are dramatic on their own. Together, they were enough to set off my symptoms.

The Pattern That Wasn’t There

By early August, I noticed there was no pattern between me working out and not working out with this issue. The weeks I trained hard, the tightness was there. The weeks I barely trained, it was still there. That’s when it clicked that chronic back pain and stress were tangled together in my body in a way that no workout plan was going to untangle on its own. The stress and chronic pain connection is something I teach all the time. Living it this clearly is different.

The other thing I noticed is that my flares have mostly turned into tightness. Within this stretch of time, I really can’t remember the last time I had a real pain flare. Now, I just get really tight. There’s a stretching pain that comes with it sometimes, but it’s not the kind that takes me out for weeks. That’s a meaningful shift, even if tightness is its own thing to work through.

The Old Patterns Coming Back

The bigger realization was about my own movement. In my first post, I wrote about catching myself shifting all my weight onto my right leg to throw coffee grounds away. This quarter, I caught that pattern coming back. When my QL fires up, I stop putting weight through my left leg, I rotate away from the movement and I hike my hip. Even on days with little or no pain, I move like the pain is coming. I’ve done it so many times that I’ve taught my body that’s just how we move now.

And every time I check myself, guess what I’m using to get out of those positions? The same QL I’m trying to calm down. Is my QL tight because I keep using it to protect myself or am I using it because it’s already tight? I don’t know yet. Either way, the answer looks the same: calm it down and retrain the movement.

Learning to Hear It Before It Gets Loud

If there’s one skill this quarter has taught me, it’s catching the signal while it’s still quiet.

Calling It on the Golf Course

In July, my husband and I went to Palm Desert for a few days, and I played golf for the first time since our wedding nine months earlier. The first five or six holes felt incredible. I felt loose and fluid in a way I hadn’t in a very long time. Then things started to show up. I switched to only hitting shots with a good lie and skipped the rest. By the 10th-12th hole, I could feel my body going into protect mode. I’d set up over the ball and I couldn’t get into a comfortable stance because everything was so braced. I had to stand there and breathe, almost telling those muscles, “you’re okay, let it go, nothing bad is going to happen.” After about ten seconds, I could feel the tension melt a little. Then I’d swing, and the pain came right after the swing.

So I called it. I stopped when I knew I should have, and I think I called it at a good time.

The Lat Pulldown That Told Me Twice

A few weeks later, I was doing an upper body workout and set up for a cable straight-arm lat pulldown. Before I even started the second set, I felt a little tension in my left low back, near my QL. There was no pain, just a sense that this muscle was working more than it should be. I asked a coworker to watch me and she saw that I was slightly side bent to the left and rotated to the right. So I stopped. I didn’t finish the exercise. I was proud of that because my history is pushing through. This time, I didn’t wait for pain to give me permission to stop.

In August, out of curiosity, I tried that same exercise again. Same thing, within one or two sets. Now I know. That exercise, for whatever reason, sets off my QL right now. One moment of noticing turned into a pattern I can recognize and work with.

When the Signal Is Mental, Not Physical

It wasn’t only physical signals, either. After our July trip, I felt physically capable, but mentally exhausted, like I couldn’t sit down and get anything done. My watch said I slept poorly even though I felt fine. I’ve learned to look at the data and how I feel together, since neither one tells the whole story alone. And I know from experience that if I put my head down and ignore that kind of exhaustion, it spreads into my body. So I took the breaks, went on the walks, and meditated multiple times. By the next morning, my stress levels had come down overnight.

The skill isn’t avoiding every hard day. What the golf, lat pulldown pattern, and mental signals all tell me is that sometimes you have to hear your body while it’s still whispering.

When My Body Was Ready and the Rest of Me Wasn’t

This is the part that doesn’t show up on a leg press log.

In the weeks before our honeymoon, life stacked up. Work was demanding, I was trying to get ahead on everything so I could fully unplug for two weeks, and it felt like every week ended with me exhausted and needing three days to recover before the next round started. Even small decisions started to feel impossible. I put off booking our honeymoon excursions for three extra weeks because the thought of sitting down to do it felt like hard work. When I finally did it, it was the easiest thing in the world.

Wanting It and Having the Energy for It

That same stretch taught me something about motivation that I think is worth normalizing. I wanted to be consistent and disciplined going into our honeymoon. I wanted to look good and feel good. And at the same time, I didn’t have the energy or the motivation to do the work to get there. Both of those were true at once. Sometimes the mismatch is between what you want and the drive to go after it. Sometimes it’s between where your mind is and where your body is. Either way, one can cancel out the other, and that doesn’t make you lazy or undisciplined.

So instead of forcing it, I found a rhythm. I worked out somewhere between Friday and Monday. If I got all four days, great. If I got one or two, that was fine too. The week I skipped entirely, I didn’t punish myself for it. For someone who used to be all or nothing, that’s its own kind of strength.

Not Where I Want to Be, but Closer Than I Was

I’m not where I want to be yet. My leg strength is still a fraction of what I want it to be, I still get tight when life gets heavy, and golf still catches up with me halfway through the course. But this quarter, I started noticing real improvements in how I function day to day, and those are what tell me I’m getting better.

Golf is a good example. I was hurting by the middle of the course, and it took me about a week to recover. But before, bouncing back from something like that took me much longer. This time, I played a sport I love, stopped when I needed to, and was back to normal within a week.

The honeymoon showed me the same thing on a bigger scale. We took a red-eye flight, then another flight, and on the way home, we had about thirteen hours of travel before we even walked into our house. I felt some stiffness afterward, the kind anyone would feel after that much sitting, and that was it. Not long ago, a one-hour car ride was enough to flare me for days.

None of these moments look dramatic from the outside. Nobody else would notice that I handled a full travel day or walked off a golf course on my own terms. But I notice. They’re the proof that the work is adding up and that I’m getting closer to where I know I want to be.

What Strong Looks Like Right Now

If I had to sum up this quarter, it would be this: the workouts finally started working, and that’s exactly what let me see everything else. My chronic back pain and stress were connected all along. I just couldn’t see it while my workouts were the loudest thing in the room. Strong looks different now. Right now, it looks like leg press numbers going up, flares turning into tightness, and getting through a thirteen-hour travel day with nothing more than a little stiffness.

If you’re somewhere in this too, where the plan is finally working but your body is still reacting to everything outside of it, you’re paying attention to exactly the right things.

Leave me a comment down below and tell me where your body is asking you to listen right now.

Other Related Articles on Strength, Stress, and Chronic Pain

• Strong Looks Different Now: Working Out With Chronic Pain in Real Life
• Strong Looks Different Now: Rebuilding Strength After a Chronic Pain Flare
• The Real Stress and Chronic Pain Connection Most People Overlook
• Allostatic Load: What Your Body Is Keeping Score Of (And Why It Matters for Chronic Pain)
• How to Start Exercising Again After a Pain Flare or Long Layoff (Without Setting Yourself Back)

TL;DR

This quarter, the machine approach finally worked. My leg strength went up, my pain flares mostly turned into tightness, and I handled golf and thirteen hours of travel better than I have in years. But once my workouts stopped flaring me, chronic back pain and stress showed me the real variable: sleep, life stress, and the protective patterns I’m still unlearning. I also got better at catching signals early and I learned that wanting the outcome and having the energy for it don’t always line up. This post shares what the last three months looked like for me, including the strength that finally started showing up, the stress that took its place as the main driver of my symptoms, and what I’m learning about listening to my body before it has to shout.