There's a Reason Your Low Back Keeps Getting Sore — You Don't Move It
Two people walk into the clinic with the same sore low back.
The first sits at a desk nine hours a day and hasn't trained in years. Easy story — sedentary, stiff, deconditioned.
The second trains five days a week. Push, pull, legs, repeat. Deadlifts 180. And their back has been niggling for eight months.
Those look like two different problems. They're usually the same one.
It's not that you don't move. It's that you only move one way.
Your body adapts to what you repeat
Repeat a narrow range of positions and patterns, and you get very good at that narrow range — and progressively worse at everything outside it. Meanwhile the load doesn't disappear. Same tissues, same direction, same joint angles, day after day, with nothing to offload them. It's rarely one bad rep that does the damage; it's the ten thousand identical ones before it.
Your lower back is usually where the bill lands, because it sits in the middle of everything and it's very good at compensating. When the hips don't rotate and the mid-back doesn't extend, the low back quietly picks up the slack. It does that well, for years, until it doesn't.
For desk workers the maths is brutal: car, desk, lunch, desk, car, couch, bed. Across that whole day, how many times did your lower back actually go through its range under any control? Close to zero. Which is exactly why the story is always "it's worse after I've been sitting" and "it loosens up once I get moving."
The gym-goer's week — the one nobody expects
Here's where the second person gets caught out. They are moving. They're just moving in the same lane as everyone else.
A standard push/pull/legs week — bench and press, rows and chin-ups, squats and deadlifts — is almost entirely forward and back, both sides at once, upright, through the middle of the range.
What's missing:
Rotation. Almost none — and the trunk work that happens is anti-rotation, teaching the spine to resist turning, never to turn well.
Side bend and lateral loading. Rare.
Single-leg work. Rare. Lifting on both legs lets the strong side hide the weak one.
End-range positions. Deep hip flexion, hip internal rotation, full overhead reach — mostly untouched.
Getting down to the floor and back up. Almost never after the warm-up.
So the training is hard, but it isn't varied. You've built a big engine that only knows one gear. Then you twist to lift something out of the boot at an awkward angle and the back goes — not because you're weak, but because that position is one you've never trained.
Strong and stiff is still stiff.
Why resting it doesn't fix it
Fair enough for a day or two of an angry flare-up. Past that, rest sets up the next one — tolerance drops fast and rebuilds slowly, so you return to the same demands with less capacity than before. That's why episode three arrives faster than episode two did.
When researchers look at what actually stops low back pain recurring, exercise is the intervention that keeps showing up. And no single style wins — Pilates, strength, motor control, McKenzie all land in much the same place. The answer was never to find the one correct exercise. It's to stop doing the same handful forever.
What variety actually looks like
You don't need to bin your program. You need to widen it.
Through the day — five minutes total, spread out: cat–cow, standing extensions after long stints of sitting, 90/90 hip rotations, and open books for the rotation you're not getting anywhere else. Change position every 30–45 minutes.
In the gym — keep your main lifts, bolt these on: loaded rotation (cable chops, landmine rotations), single-leg work (split squats, single-leg RDLs), suitcase carries, lateral work (side planks, Copenhagens), and ground-based movement like get-ups. Two or three of those rotated through your existing sessions changes the picture.
And walk. Thirty minutes most days. Underrated and free.
When to get it looked at
Book in with a health professional if you've got pain that's severe or clearly worsening, numbness or weakness travelling down a leg, unexplained weight loss or fever, a significant fall or crash, or pain that hasn't shifted after 4–6 weeks. Any change in bladder or bowel control, or numbness through the saddle region, needs urgent attention.
Most low back pain doesn't need a scan. Disc bulges and degeneration show up constantly in people with no pain at all.
Sore lower back that keeps coming back?
At Myotherapy PRO in Moorabbin, we don't do the "see how you go" approach. Our assessment process looks at your strength, your mobility and the way your week is actually loaded — then combines hands-on treatment with exercise rehab and load management, so you leave knowing why it happened and what's missing.
Serving Moorabbin, Cheltenham, Bentleigh, Highett, Hampton and Sandringham.
📍 13 Wren Road, Moorabbin (inside Bayside Strength and Recovery) 📞 0413 749 552
This article is general information, not individual medical advice. If your pain is severe, worsening, or accompanied by any of the red flags above, get assessed.