🚨 GOLFERS READ THIS 🚨
Your low back isn’t built to rotate. When your mid back and hips don’t turn, it gets forced to anyway.
Comment “TURN” and I’ll send you the golfer rotation screen we use in clinic.
The golf swing is a rotation sport.
Your lumbar spine is built mostly for bending and extending. Very little of your turn is supposed to come from there.
Your thoracic spine and hips are where the rotation should live.
When your mid back is stiff, your low back makes up the difference.
When your lead hip can’t rotate into the downswing, your low back makes up the difference again.
Now multiply that by every swing, every range session, every 18.
Stretching the low back doesn’t fix that. Restoring rotation above and below it gives the low back less work to do.
→ Thoracic rotation you can control at end range
→ Lead hip internal rotation
→ Then load it at swing speed
Pain after golf is usually a load distribution problem, not a damaged back.
Every back is different. If it’s persistent, get it assessed.
Ref: Vad et al., Am J Sports Med, 2004
Your hamstrings have an alibi.
Save this and run the test tonight.
Most golfers with back pain get told to stretch their hamstrings. In a study of young elite golfers, hamstring length was not linked to back pain. Neither was hip extension strength. Neither were tight hip flexors.
What was linked: a side plank gap. Golfers whose sides differed by more than 12.5 seconds were the ones reporting back pain.
Golf only rotates one way. Thousands of swings in the same direction. The side that cannot keep up is the side that fades first.
Run it yourself:
→ Forearm side plank, feet stacked, hips high
→ Hold until your hips drop
→ Time both sides
→ The number is not the point. The gap is.
That is a link, not proof. It was a preliminary study. Which is why we test before we treat.
Comment “GOLF” for the 4 test home screen we use on every golfer.
Send this to the guy in your foursome who stretches his hamstrings on the first tee.
If the test brings on your back pain, stop and get it assessed.
Source: Evans et al., Physical Therapy in Sport 2005
Your hip flexors aren’t tight. They’re weak.
Comment “HIP” and I’ll send you the full progression with sets, reps, and when to move up.
Stretching feels great for an afternoon. Then the pinch at the front of your hip comes back on the next run, sprint, or heavy squat.
Sitting all day doesn’t shorten your hip flexors. It leaves them unloaded. Then you ask them to drive a knee, kick, or sprint and they can’t produce the force you need.
Your iliopsoas is the main muscle that lifts your thigh above hip height. Almost nobody trains it there.
The fix is load, not length.
Save this. Send it to the friend who stretches their hip flexors every day and still hurts.
→ SL hip flexor isometrics
Knee up, push into resistance, hold. Your entry point for finding a load you tolerate.
→ Half kneel knee raises
Control hip flexion without your low back doing the work.
→ Standing cable knee drives
Loaded, fast, and above 90°. This is where running and sprinting live.
→ Paralette straight leg alternating raises
Long lever, full hip flexion, trunk locked. Harder than it looks.
→ Hip flexor sit ups
Loaded through the full range. The capacity finisher.
Move up a level when the next morning feels the same or better.
General education, not individual advice. Hip pain that won’t settle needs an assessment.
Weak glutes didn’t cause your knee pain.
When researchers measured hip strength BEFORE people got hurt, it didn’t predict who developed front-of-knee pain. In teenagers, stronger hips were actually linked to more risk.
Hip weakness is real in people with knee pain. It just tends to show up after the pain starts.
The muscle that showed up weak first was the quad. And an irritated knee reflexively turns it down, which is why it doesn’t come back on its own.
Hip work still reduces pain. It’s just not the root cause.
Comment “QUAD” and I’ll send you the quad loading progression we use for front-of-knee pain.
Send this to whoever’s still blaming their glutes.
Sources: Rathleff et al., BJSM 2014 · Neal et al., BJSM 2019 · Rice & McNair, Semin Arthritis Rheum 2010
General education, not individual medical advice. Persistent knee pain needs an assessment.
Years of hip pinching. Now squatting pain free.
She’d played through it for 2 years. A pinch at the bottom of every squat. It flared on cuts, on long passes, on every hard session.
She’d rested it. Stretched it. Rolled it. It always came back the second she got back on the pitch.
What nobody had done was actually find the cause.
In her assessment we tested the whole chain, not just the spot that hurt:
→ How her hip moved and controlled at end range
→ What her pelvis and trunk were doing in the squat
→ What the joints above and below were contributing
The finding: her hip was being asked to work in a position she couldn’t control yet.
So we didn’t chase the pinch. We retrained her patterns, built control first, then loaded it.
Result: pain free at the bottom of her squat. Back on the pitch without bracing for it.
Pain that keeps coming back usually has a reason no one has found yet.
Tap the link in bio to book your free Discovery Visit.
60 minutes. You leave knowing what’s wrong and why.
Rest doesn’t build a tendon. Load does.
Comment “TENDON” and I’ll send you the full 12-week Achilles progression.
4 exercises, and why each one is in there:
CALF RAISES — knee straight and knee bent. This is the whole program, not the warm-up. Heavy, 3 seconds up, 3 seconds down. If you slowed the tempo and didn’t add weight, you’re doing calf raises in slow motion, not loading a tendon.
DEFICIT CALF RAISE ISOMETRIC — an entry point when heavy reps aren’t tolerated yet. Find a hold you can own, not a hold that hurts. Midportion only — if your pain is right on the heel bone, keep the heel at or above neutral.
REVERSE LUNGES — the Achilles isn’t the only tissue that failed. Single-leg strength through the quad and glute changes how much the calf has to absorb every step.
TIB RAISES — your anterior tib is the brake on how fast your shin travels over your foot. Weak brake, faster dorsiflexion, higher strain rate through the tendon.
Pain up to 5/10 while you load is fine. It has to be back to baseline the next morning.
Midportion Achilles. General education, not individual medical advice — persistent heel pain needs an assessment.
Nobody who got better waited until they felt ready.
In rehab it shows up as waiting for the pain to be gone before you start loading. But pain leaving isn’t a starting gun. It just means demand dropped to zero — and capacity quietly dropped with it.
Ready isn’t a feeling. It’s a number: what you can tolerate today without it flaring tomorrow.
That number is never zero. Start there.
What have you been waiting to feel ready for?
Your MRI report is a description of tissue. It is not a measurement of your pain.
Comment “SCAN” and I’ll send you the plain-language breakdown of what imaging can and can’t tell you.
In 2023, a team in the Journal of Physiotherapy pooled 39 prospective studies on lumbar MRI to answer one question: does what shows up on the scan predict who has back pain later?
In people with current back pain, they found no evidence that disc height reduction, disc herniation, spinal stenosis or a high-intensity zone predicted long-term outcomes.
Their conclusion was that some findings have weak associations with future pain, and that better studies are needed.
Weak. Not zero.
That distinction matters, and most people online skip it. Imaging still rules out the small number of serious presentations that need a different pathway. It’s an input.
It just isn’t the verdict you’ve been treating it as.
What predicts your next episode better than the scan does: your injury history, what you can currently tolerate under load, and whether that number is moving.
All three are measurable. None of them are in the report.
Han et al., Journal of Physiotherapy, 2023.
Save this for the next time a report hands you a scary word.
Book a Discovery Visit and we’ll find out what your tissue actually tolerates — link in bio.
General education, not individual medical advice. Persistent back pain needs an assessment.
Your patellar tendon does not hurt because it is inflamed.
It hurts because the load you are asking for is bigger than the load it is currently prepared to accept.
Comment “KNEE” and I’ll send the 12 week patellar loading progression.
That gap is also why rest feels like it works and then stops working. Six weeks off lowers the demand. It never raises the capacity. You come back to jumping and cutting with a tendon that tolerates less than it did the day you stopped.
Here is where this hold fits.
Rio and colleagues tested five holds of 45 seconds at roughly 70 percent effort in jumping athletes with patellar tendinopathy and reported an immediate drop in pain that lasted for hours. Small sample, in season athletes, so treat it as a useful tool rather than a law.
Worth knowing: the same idea was tested in Achilles tendinopathy and the pain relief did not replicate. This is a patellar finding, not a tendon finding.
So the hold is not the program. It is the door.
→ 5 holds
→ 45 seconds
→ about 70 percent effort
→ knee bent near 60 degrees, not locked out
Use it before you train, or on days the knee is loud, to buy a window where you can actually load.
Then the real work starts. Heavy, slow, three seconds down and three seconds up, three days a week, twelve weeks minimum. Tendon remodels on a schedule of months.
Pain up to 5 out of 10 while you load is acceptable. It has to be back to baseline by the next morning. If it isn’t, the dose was wrong. Not the exercise.
General education, not individual medical advice. Persistent knee pain needs an assessment.
