Every summer, mountain bikers and road cyclists hobble into our gym complaining of lower back pain. They can’t tough it out anymore. While they claim to “stretch” regularly (their muscles, not their Lycra), their low back pain still hits during or soon after long rides.
If you read our previous column, you know it’s your fault that your body feels old and stiff. That is especially true of cyclists, who are masters at making their backs feel like crap. Studies have estimated that up to 41% of mountain bikers and 58% of road cyclists suffer from low back pain each year.[1] And the more miles you put on a bike each week, the more likely you are to report back pain.[2]
If pedaling a bike is considered a “low impact” activity, why would it cause so many people so much back pain? To sum up decades of research: Joints that don’t move hurt, and joints that can’t move break. Seated pedaling is a repetitive motion that doesn’t move your spine and barely moves your hips.
Everybody trains their joints 24/7. If you spend life seated in chairs, you train your spine and hips not to move. When you bike for three hours, they still don’t move much. After the ride, if you crack a beer and watch a UFC fight (Ben’s preferred entertainment), your joints still haven’t moved.
Even if you stretch your hamstrings — popular but ineffective — you’re not moving the spine or hips through their full ranges of motion. The hips and spine each move in at least seven different ways depending on how you count them. Pedaling hits one type of movement: flexion.
If your hips and lower spine don’t move on the bike or in daily life, they are being trained not to work. As a result, they lose their range of motion, and you lose control over them (i.e., the “principle of reversibility” in our field, better known as “use it or lose it”). The body compensates for their immobility in ways that cause dysfunction, stiffness, and pain until it’s so bad you don’t want to bike.
If you look inside the body of a professional cross-country mountain biker, you can see this. That’s what a 2015 study did.[3] The researchers gathered 14 professional “off-road” cyclists with back pain and 24 controls. Using ultrasound, they measured the thickness of their lateral abdominal muscles (which include the obliques) and lumbar multifidus spinae, which stabilizes the lower spine.
The pro cyclists had significantly less muscle in these two areas compared to controls. They clearly hadn’t moved their spines in ways that build tissue. The researchers also measured the subjects’ hamstring flexibility, and it had no correlation whatsoever with back pain.
Flexibility, the amount of space a joint has to move, is different from mobility, the amount of control you have over that space.
At best, stretching temporarily relieves pain or serves as a pseudo-warmup. If stretching doesn’t fix back pain and flexibility is unrelated to cycling back pain, what will help?
First off, spine and hip mobility. If you can’t move through a slow cat-cow under high tension, flexing your abs and your glutes, moving one vertebra at a time, you don’t have spine mobility. You might think you can do a cat-cow, so video yourself if you suffer from back pain. Notice how part of your back stays flat during the motion. It either doesn’t want to move or can’t move.
If you can’t move the hip relative to the pelvis, you don’t have hip mobility. Your back will try to do the job of your hips, and that will make your back hurt.
Second, trunk tension. If you can’t hold tension in your trunk (aka, torso) while breathing and pedaling, your body will compensate in ways that piss off your back. To access tension, you need some strength and muscle — precisely what the professional cyclists with back pain lacked.
Let’s get something straight: Lifting light weights for sets of 20 reps is best for improving muscular endurance, which you already have from riding your bike. To create strength, you must lift heavy. That means three to five reps per set, and if someone offered you $100,000 to do two more, you couldn’t do it.
If you haven’t lifted recently or haven’t lifted heavily before, for the love of all that’s good — do not pick up heavy weights tomorrow. Work your way up gradually, over several months.
Back pain is not supposed to be part of cycling. Ignoring the pain can turn temporary discomfort into permanent injury. Don’t tough it out.
Ben Van Treese is the co-founder of 100 Year Athlete, and Alex Wetmore, Ph.D, is the director of coaching at Minerstown Park City.
Disclaimer: We are not medical doctors or physical therapists. We are not addressing acute back injuries that require medical diagnosis and treatment. We are not liable for how you use the information in this article. Consult your doctor before doing anything we’ve described.
[1] Garrosa-Martín G, Muniesa CA, Molina-Martín JJ, Diez-Vega I. Low Back Pain in Cycling. Are There Differences between Road and Mountain Biking? Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2023 Feb 21;20(5):3791. doi: 10.3390/ijerph20053791. PMID: 36900802; PMCID: PMC10001301.
[2] Schultz SJ, Gordon SJ. Recreational cyclists: The relationship between low back pain and training characteristics. Int J Exerc Sci. 2010 Jul 15;3(3):79-85. doi: 10.70252/HCFG8805. PMID: 27182332; PMCID: PMC4738893.
[3] Rostami M, Ansari M, Noormohammadpour P, Mansournia MA, Kordi R. Ultrasound assessment of trunk muscles and back flexibility, strength and endurance in off-road cyclists with and without low back pain. J Back Musculoskelet Rehabil. 2015;28(4):635-44. doi: 10.3233/BMR-140559. PMID: 25391328.