Dr. Layne Norton

He has more back pain than I do.

I squat over 600 pounds.

I deadlift over 700 pounds.

And yeah, I get some aches and pains here and there, and I've dealt with some back issues.

But you also got to keep in mind, when you're trying to be the strongest person in your weight category in the entire world for your age, the amount of training dose I need to make progress is going to be almost right next to what is going to overtrain me and increase my risk for acute injury.

And so I've always got to walk that line very carefully.

But in studies looking at lower back pain and lifting, they show it decreases lower back pain.

Because...

One, you decrease your sensitivity to pain because you're progressively loading those tissues.

One of the worst things you can do is to not load tissues because then they do get really sensitive to pain.

And pain is a whole other – like that's another rabbit hole I went down that's – there's so much woo around what causes pain, injury.

We talked about this a little bit.

But yeah, in general, if you lift weights when you get older, you'll still have some pain.

But you'll be strong and less sensitive to that pain than somebody who doesn't.

So I'm not a pain expert, but I've talked to a lot of pain experts.

I've read a lot of the literature and I have my own personal experience as well that lines up with the literature.

And I will say, man, this is something I really changed my mind on for a long period of time.

The stuff I thought reduced pain and injury versus what actually did so different in the research literature and honestly discovering the biopsychosocial model of pain.

was a game changer for me because after I said that squat world record, I went through like seven years of really bad back pain, hip pain that pretty much prevented me from competing.

I wasn't able to get back to worlds until 2022 when I won because 2015, I just got a, I got a silver medal overall.