My Back Was "Broken" for Six Years. Here's How I Fixed It.
By Dr. Matthew Brown, DPT, CSCS — Founder, Corrective Physical Therapy
I want to tell you something I don't say lightly:
I know what it's like to wake up every single day in pain. To be a former athlete, someone who played basketball his whole life, who prided himself on being able to do anything physically, and to suddenly be told that bending his spine was dangerous. That lifting was off the table. That this was just something he was going to have to manage.
I lived that for six years.
And I'm telling you this not because I want your sympathy, but because I want you to understand something that took me years to figure out, and that I now walk every single patient through before we start working together:
Your back is not broken. It is undertrained.
How My Back Pain Started
I wasn't in a dramatic accident. There was no single moment where everything went wrong. It crept up the way chronic pain usually does, gradually, then suddenly.
As a former collegiate basketball player and kinesiology student, I thought I knew my body. I was active, I trained regularly, and I had the education to understand anatomy and biomechanics. And yet there I was, in my mid-twenties, dealing with low back pain that wouldn't go away no matter what I did.
I did what most people do. I rested. I stretched. I got treatment. I avoided the movements that hurt. I modified my training. I did the exercises my providers gave me. And none of it worked. Not long term.
The pain would ease up for a while, then come roaring back. Every flare-up felt like starting over. I started to wonder if this was just going to be my life now.
What I Was Told
I heard a lot of things during those six years that I now know were wrong, or at least profoundly incomplete. I was told my spine shouldn't bend. I was told to avoid heavy lifting. I was given imaging findings delivered in the kind of language that makes you feel like your back is one wrong move from catastrophe.
Here's what nobody told me: disc findings on an MRI are extraordinarily common in people with absolutely no pain. The structure showing up on a scan doesn't tell you why you're hurting or what you can do about it. It doesn't tell you what your back is capable of. And it definitely doesn't tell you what your future looks like.
Pain does not equal damage. And damage, when it exists, does not dictate your function. I didn't understand any of that yet. So, I kept avoiding. And the avoiding made everything worse.
The Turning Point
It wasn't until I was in my sports residency, deep into advanced training as a physical therapist, that things started to shift. Not because I learned some secret technique or found a magic exercise. But because I finally understood what was actually happening in my body.
The movements I had been avoiding weren't dangerous. They were just things my back had lost the tolerance to handle. And the only way to rebuild that tolerance was to progressively reintroduce those movements, starting at a level my body could manage and building from there.
So, I made a plan. I started at the absolute most basic building blocks. Hip strengthening. Back strengthening. Core stability. General strength work. Nothing heroic. Nothing dramatic. Just consistent, progressive work, month after month.
I had setbacks. There were periods where I hurt again and thought I was back to square one. But the flare-ups weren't as bad, and I came back from them faster each time. The baseline kept improving.
After about a year of that systematic work, I was out of chronic pain completely. I could play basketball again. I could lift. I could do everything I wanted. I still get stiff occasionally if I'm down for a few days sick or sedentary, but that's just the body asking to be loaded. It is not pain. It is not fragility. It is a reminder that the body needs to be used.
What I Want You to Know
I built Corrective Physical Therapy around what I learned during those six years, and what I've learned in the years since treating hundreds of patients who walked in with the same story I had.
The pattern is remarkably consistent. Former athlete. Active adult. Back pain that showed up, didn't go away, and got mismanaged somewhere along the line. Told to avoid, rest, protect. Given passive treatment that provided short-term relief without building any actual capacity. Frustrated, fearful, and starting to believe this is just how it's going to be.
It doesn't have to be. Your MRI is not your verdict. Your age is not your ceiling. The PT that didn't work before doesn't mean no PT will work. It means you haven't had the right plan yet.
What works is progressive loading. Reintroducing the movements your back has been avoiding, slowly and systematically, until your nervous system learns they're safe and your muscles learn they're capable. Building the posterior chain, the core, the hips, all of the structures that support the lumbar spine under real load. And staying consistent long enough to let the adaptation happen.
That's not a quick fix. I won't pretend it is. My recovery took a year of deliberate, progressive work. Most of my patients don't need that long. But it takes commitment to the process.
If you're in it right now, if you're in that place I was in where the pain feels permanent and the future feels smaller than it used to, I want you to hear this directly from someone who has been there:
It gets better. Your body is more resilient than you've been led to believe. And with the right plan, you can get back to doing what you love.
That's exactly what we build at CPT.
Dr. Matthew Brown, DPT, SCS
Founder, Corrective Physical Therapy
Scottsdale & Arcadia, AZ
