I herniated my disc
It's 9am on a Tuesday.
I'm standing outside the gym, hand on the door, running the same calculation I'd been running for months.
How's the leg today? Is the nerve thing bad enough that I should skip? What if I load the bar and it goes again?
I had a herniated disc. Nerve symptoms shooting down my leg. And every single person I talked to doctors, PTs, well-meaning training partners gave me some version of the same advice:
Stop lifting. Rest. Let it heal. I couldn't do that.
Not because I was being stubborn. Not because I thought I knew better than everyone.
But because training wasn't just something I did. It was how I stayed sane. It was my anchor. The one place where everything else went quiet.
Taking it away didn't feel like recovery.
It felt like losing myself.
So I made a plan.
I was going to rest for six weeks, come back fresh, ease back in, and everything would be fine.
That was the plan.
But six weeks passed and the nerve symptoms were still there. But when I tried to ease back in, the same movements that used to feel automatic now felt like a threat. But the confidence I thought would come back on its own didn't.
I'd done everything right. And I was still standing outside that door, running the same calculation.
That's when something shifted.
I stopped trying to get back to the training I was doing before.
And I started asking a different question entirely.
Not when can I train the way I used to?
But what version of training can my body actually tolerate right now?
I started on the floor. Literally. Basic movements. One side at a time. Learning how to distribute load through the whole system instead of dumping everything into the one place that was already screaming.
And slowly, I mean slowly, no dramatic montage here I worked my way back to the barbell.
Not by ignoring what was happening. Not by pushing through and hoping for the best.
By building a foundation that could actually support what I was asking of it.
The weight came back.
The confidence came back.
The nerve symptoms?
Gone.
Here's what I want you to take from this.
Pain is not a stop sign. It's information. It's your body telling you the current strategy isn't working not that training itself is the problem.
Most people treat those two things as the same. They're not.
You can train through a herniated disc. You can train through nerve pain. You just can't train the same way you were training when it happened. That approach already showed you what it produces.
The goal isn't to push through. The goal isn't to stop either.
The goal is to find the version of training your body can tolerate right now and build from there.
That's not a compromise. That's the whole process.
If you're dealing with something similar, pain that keeps coming back, conflicting advice, the feeling that your body is working against you, reply to this and tell me what's going on.
I read every reply. And sometimes the most useful thing is just having someone who actually understands lifting look at your situation.
Gabe
P.S Missed any of my other posts? Read them here
