u/No_Blueberry1209

18 months ago I was a powerlifter. I'd been training for a few months and in prep for my first comp. Deadlift was my lift. I pushed it too far in training, 240kg for a double, accumulated fatigue from a brutal program, and my SI joint and QL gave out. The pain didn't go away.

Week one I thought it was just recovery. Week four I started to worry. Month three I was googling things I shouldn't have been googling. I did everything right. Physio. Rest. Mobility work. Ice. Heat. Every protocol I could find. But nothing helped

What broke me wasn't just the pain. It was that nobody could tell me why it wasn't getting better. I had the scans. I had the diagnosis. I had the treatment plan. I still had the pain. So I went down a rabbit hole. I started reading the actual research. Not fitness articles. Not physio blogs. Published studies on why chronic pain persists long after tissue has healed. Why two people with identical scans can have completely different outcomes. Why the nervous system keeps producing pain signals even when the original injury is gone.

What I found changed everything. The pain science literature is decades ahead of standard treatment. Most people in chronic pain are being managed with protocols designed for acute injury. It's not the physio's fault. It's a system problem. When I applied what I learned the nervous system retraining, the graded exposure, the specific language around pain, my pain started moving for the first time in months. I'm back to squatting over 200kg and deadlifting 240kg.

But I never forgot what those months felt like. The helplessness. The feeling that your body had become your enemy. The way it quietly takes everything from you.

I started coaching people because I kept meeting others who were still there. Stuck in that place I got out of. If you've been in pain for months or years, tried the standard route, and still aren't getting better, I want to talk to you. Not to sell you anything tonight. Just to understand your situation.

Drop a comment or DM me. I read everything.

18 months ago I was a powerlifter. I'd been training for a few months and in prep for my first comp. Deadlift was my lift. I pushed it too far in training, 240kg for a double, accumulated fatigue from a brutal program, and my SI joint and QL gave out. The pain didn't go away.

Week one I thought it was just recovery. Week four I started to worry. Month three I was googling things I shouldn't have been googling. I did everything right. Physio. Rest. Mobility work. Ice. Heat. Every protocol I could find. But nothing helped

What broke me wasn't just the pain. It was that nobody could tell me why it wasn't getting better. I had the scans. I had the diagnosis. I had the treatment plan. I still had the pain. So I went down a rabbit hole. I started reading the actual research. Not fitness articles. Not physio blogs. Published studies on why chronic pain persists long after tissue has healed. Why two people with identical scans can have completely different outcomes. Why the nervous system keeps producing pain signals even when the original injury is gone.

What I found changed everything. The pain science literature is decades ahead of standard treatment. Most people in chronic pain are being managed with protocols designed for acute injury. It's not the physio's fault. It's a system problem. When I applied what I learned the nervous system retraining, the graded exposure, the specific language around pain, my pain started moving for the first time in months. I'm back to squatting over 200kg and deadlifting 240kg.

But I never forgot what those months felt like. The helplessness. The feeling that your body had become your enemy. The way it quietly takes everything from you.

I started coaching people because I kept meeting others who were still there. Stuck in that place I got out of. If you've been in pain for months or years, tried the standard route, and still aren't getting better, I want to talk to you. Not to sell you anything tonight. Just to understand your situation.

Drop a comment or DM me. I read everything.

18 months ago I was a powerlifter. I'd been training for a few months and in prep for my first comp. Deadlift was my lift. I pushed it too far in training, 240kg for a double, accumulated fatigue from a brutal program, and my SI joint and QL gave out. The pain didn't go away.

Week one I thought it was just recovery. Week four I started to worry. Month three I was googling things I shouldn't have been googling. I did everything right. Physio. Rest. Mobility work. Ice. Heat. Every protocol I could find. But nothing helped

What broke me wasn't just the pain. It was that nobody could tell me why it wasn't getting better. I had the scans. I had the diagnosis. I had the treatment plan. I still had the pain. So I went down a rabbit hole. I started reading the actual research. Not fitness articles. Not physio blogs. Published studies on why chronic pain persists long after tissue has healed. Why two people with identical scans can have completely different outcomes. Why the nervous system keeps producing pain signals even when the original injury is gone.

What I found changed everything. The pain science literature is decades ahead of standard treatment. Most people in chronic pain are being managed with protocols designed for acute injury. It's not the physio's fault. It's a system problem. When I applied what I learned the nervous system retraining, the graded exposure, the specific language around pain, my pain started moving for the first time in months. I'm back to squatting over 200kg and deadlifting 240kg.

But I never forgot what those months felt like. The helplessness. The feeling that your body had become your enemy. The way it quietly takes everything from you.

I started coaching people because I kept meeting others who were still there. Stuck in that place I got out of. If you've been in pain for months or years, tried the standard route, and still aren't getting better, I want to talk to you. Not to sell you anything tonight. Just to understand your situation.

Drop a comment or DM me. I read everything.

A randomised controlled trial published in the PAIN Journal (2023) examined what happens to inflammatory markers and pain sensitivity after sleep disruption in healthy adults.

The findings were significant.

Just two nights of disrupted slow-wave sleep produced measurable activation of cellular inflammation through TLR-4 stimulated monocytic proinflammatory cytokine production. The same disruption directly lowered pain thresholds. Participants reported significantly higher pain sensitivity after disrupted sleep compared to normal sleep.

The mechanism is neurobiological not psychological. Sleep disruption activates the same inflammatory pathways, IL-6, TNF-α that are elevated in chronic pain conditions.

What the data showed:

Sleep condition	Pain threshold	Inflammatory markers
Normal sleep	Baseline	Baseline
2 nights disrupted	Significantly lower	Significantly elevated
Recovery sleep	Partially restored	Partially restored

The researchers concluded that the relationship between sleep and pain is bidirectional and operates through measurable molecular mechanisms, not psychological ones.

A separate 2024 study (Klyne & Hall, Sleep) found that poor sleep cooccurs with chronic pain in up to 90% of cases. Sleeping fewer than 6.55 hours per day is independently associated with significantly higher chronic LBP risk regardless of other lifestyle factors.

This raises a question most pain management plans ignore completely:

If sleep disruption measurably increases inflammation and lowers pain thresholds through the same pathways that drive chronic pain, why isn't sleep quality treated as a primary clinical intervention rather than a lifestyle suggestion?

For those managing chronic back pain or any chronic pain condition; how much do you think sleep is affecting your symptoms? And has anyone actually had a healthcare provider address sleep as part of their treatment plan?

Sources: PAIN Journal RCT (2023): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36988613/ Klyne & Hall (2024), Sleep: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38462932/

A systematic review published in the American Journal of Neuroradiology (Brinjikji et al., 2015) analysed MRI findings from 3,110 people who had no back pain symptoms whatsoever. The goal of the study was simple; find out how common spinal "abnormalities" actually are in people who feel completely fine.

The results were surprising.

Disc degeneration in pain-free people by age:

• 20s: 37%
• 30s: 52%
• 40s: 68%
• 50s: 80%
• 60s: 88%
• 70s: 93%
• 80s: 96%

Disc bulges in pain-free people by age:

• 20s: 30%
• 30s: 40%
• 40s: 56%
• 50s: 67%
• 60s: 74%
• 70s: 77%
• 80s: 84%

Disc protrusions, facet degeneration, and spondylolisthesis showed similar patterns and all found frequently in people reporting zero pain.

The researchers concluded that these findings may represent normal age-related changes rather than pathological ones, and that imaging findings alone cannot be used to explain a patient's pain.

To put it plainly. The majority of people walking around right now with no back pain at all would show these exact same findings on an MRI.

This raises an important question that the study itself doesn't answer but that this community might have thoughts on:

If these structural findings are this common in people without pain, what actually explains chronic back pain in people who do have it?

Genuinely curious what people here think, especially those who've been given a diagnosis based on imaging.

Source: Brinjikji et al. (2015), AJNR Am J Neuroradiol. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25430861/