McKenzie Sports Therapy

Why You Cannot Touch Your Toes, and Whether It Matters

It is one of the few physical tests almost everybody has done. Stand up, bend forward, see how far down you get. People have been measuring themselves against it since school, and a surprising number carry a quiet sense of failure about it decades later. It also comes up constantly in conversations about back pain, usually in the form of somebody assuming that if they could just touch their toes, their back would be fine. The reality is more interesting, and considerably less demanding than most people assume.

Why Your Back Hurts After Deadlifts

It usually goes one of two ways. Either something happened during a set and you knew about it immediately, or nothing happened at all and you woke up the next morning barely able to get out of bed. The second version confuses people more, because there was no moment to point at. You lifted what you always lift, the session felt fine, and now you can hardly tie your shoes. Either way the question is the same. What actually went wrong, and can you keep lifting.