"Treat Your Own Back" by Robin McKenzie was recommended to me by a physiotherapist and my grandfather. General advice to consult your own GP or physiotherapist applies.

http://www.amazon.com/Treat-Your-Back-Robin-McKenzie/dp/0958...

Many will do McKenzie Method work ($10-15 book on Amazon, Treat Your Own Back) for lumbar pain in flexion. It is very specifically good for that and that alone, which is the most common form of low back pain. I found a lot of relief using the tools in the book (yoga-type postures) and weight lifting.

I can warmly recommend this book for treating back pain and posture problems: [1].

[1] Robin A. McKenzie, "Treat Your Own Back".

There are about 5 key stretching exercises for your back that you should consider.

See the book "Treat your own back"

When I injured my back 20 years ago I found them quite helpful in recuperating.

I'm in a similar situation, and here are some thoughts:

How quickly do you increase your training volume? Do you have enough rest and recovery time?

When you first start feeling injured, do you stop, and rest a week or two, or do you continue through the initial pain?

For running, it's commonly known that you shouldn't increase your distance by more than 10% per week. For me, if I find that increasing 10% per week causes injury but if I increase only 6% per week, I'm ok.

Do you warm up and stretch? Do you do strength training or rehabilitation exercises? What about core strength?

I found a great massage therapist who points out issues with my body and recommends stretches to help fix some of them. (I can give you a recommendation if you are in SF)

Are you sure you have the correct form for the exercises? Maybe work with a personal trainer? I biked for years with a bike way too small for me. Only when I went to get my bike fit, and got a different one did pain go away.

Have you read up and gotten a good understanding of your injuries? I was better able to understand and manage some injuries when I read "Treat Your Own Rotator Cuff" and "Treat Your Own Back".

How carefully do you track your exercise? I tracked my exercise for a year and discovered that I was 3x more likely to be injured after any given workout if I had done X minutes of lower body exercise in the past Y days so I cut back and had less injuries.

If you find any good solutions, please respond to the thread and let us know!

I recommend studying the short book "Treat Your Own Back" by Robin McKenzie and also finding a physical therapist familiar with his techniques. I was in similar distress and it was fairly quickly resolved by these techniques and I have also observed these techniques being effective for several other people. Physicians in the US are not trained in physical therapy yet physical therapists in the US are only allowed to apply physician-prescribed treatments! This can lead to some bizarre Catch-22 situations until you find a highly experienced physical therapist who can work with you. Checking if they use the "McKenzie methods" is a touchstone.

Yeah, "clear physical mechanism" is a hole I could drive a truck through. Clear to whom? And what does "clear" have to do with "verified through rigorous scientific exploration of this and competing hypotheses"? As Mencken said, "Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."

My experience with most serious medical things is that doctors have a clear general-audience explanation, because part of their job is making patients feel like they understand what's going on. But if you get into the details, the good doctors will say, "Well, actually, the picture is much murkier, but here's what we know based on studies X, Y, and Z, but there's a lot yet to learn."

Back pain in particular is an area of open dispute. Many people have many theories, all of them very hard to test. When I was dealing with back pain, a spine-center doctor recommended a book called "Treat Your Own Back" [1]. It was hugely helpful to me. And in it, the doctor explains that he hit upon his method because a patient came in, used a piece of equipment that was set up totally the wrong way, and said, "Gosh, doc, that was great!" It led him to reexamine what he had been taught about backs, coming up with a different "clear physical mechanism" to explain a common class of pain.

That we are still figuring something out does not mean it's psychosomatic. It doesn't mean it's not, but a doctor suggesting otherwise is doing the medical equivalent of "god of the gaps" theology, where anything mysterious is attributed to your preferred cause.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Treat-Your-Back-Robin-McKenzie/dp/095...

In “Treat Your Own Back” (https://www.amazon.com/Treat-Your-Back-Robin-McKenzie/dp/098...), the author—a physiotherapist—accidentally leaves a back pain patient face down on an examination table with their back slightly hyperextended (i.e. head and upper back slightly above prone position). They were horrified that they’d harmed the patient, but instead the patient felt completely relieved of their pain. This is the story of how the McKenzie method (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKenzie_method) was discovered. Lying prone is the core position of the method (in addition to progressive back extensions), and it actually works surprisingly well for me.