If you’ve ever had low back pain that comes and goes — good for a few weeks, then suddenly you’re back on the sidelines — you know the specific kind of frustration that comes with it. It’s not just the pain. It’s the uncertainty. Is this just going to be my back forever? Do I need to change how I train? Am I one deadlift away from something worse?

That fear is common, and it’s usually pointed in the wrong direction — and it’s exactly why we believe testing, not guessing, should be at the center of how our community trains. Three recent case examples make the point better than any explanation could.

Over the past few months, we ran objective force testing on three CrossFit athletes who each had a version of this story: recurring low back pain, multi-week training stoppages with every flare-up, and a growing belief that their back was simply “the problem” — fragile, structurally compromised, maybe even something that needed surgery. One athlete had, in fact, been told surgery might be in their future.

None of them had a hip problem on their radar. All three had one.

The Data

We used a handheld dynamometer to test hip strength bilaterally — comparing left side to right side on movements like prone hip extension and side-lying hip abduction. The goal isn’t to find a “normal” number in isolation; it’s to find asymmetry between sides, because a meaningful left-right gap is one of the most common hidden drivers of chronic low back irritation in athletes who load their spine under real weight.

Here’s what we found:

Athlete 1 — Prone Hip Extension (Long Lever) Left: 40.2 lbs | Right: 33.7 lbs Asymmetry: 16%, left-dominant

Athlete 2 — Hip Abduction, Side-Lying Left: 32.7 lbs | Right: 23.4 lbs Asymmetry: 28%, left-dominant

Athlete 3 — Hip Abduction, Side-Lying Left: 21.8 lbs | Right: 38.0 lbs Asymmetry: 43%, right-dominant

Three athletes, three different movements or magnitudes, three different weak sides. No two patterns looked alike. That’s the point.

Why This Matters More Than It Sounds Like It Should

Hip extension and hip abduction aren’t just “leg exercises.” They’re stability functions. Every time you squat, deadlift, run, or even stand on one leg during a box step-up, your glutes (extension) and glute medius/minimus (abduction) are working to keep your pelvis level and your hips controlled under load.

When one side is meaningfully weaker than the other, the body doesn’t just stop the movement — it finds a workaround. Usually, that workaround is the lumbar spine. The low back picks up rotational and shearing stress that the hip should have been managing. Do that under a barbell, week after week, rep after rep, and you get exactly the pattern all three of these athletes described: pain that flares under load, recovers with rest, and then comes right back once training resumes — because the actual cause was never addressed.

This is also why the pain can feel so mysterious and scary. It’s intermittent. It’s not obviously tied to one incident. It responds to rest, which reinforces the idea that the spine itself is fragile or damaged. But an MRI or an X-ray isn’t going to show a 28% or 43% force deficit between your left and right hip — because that’s not a structural finding. It’s a functional one, and testing is the only way to see it.

From “My Back Is Broken” to “My Hip Is Underprepared”

That reframe changes everything about how you train.

  • Athlete 1, with a 16% asymmetry, is at a level where most coaches would flag it and address it — but it’s a manageable gap, closable with consistent, targeted glute and hamstring work on the weaker side plus movement pattern awareness under load.
  • Athlete 2, at 28%, needed a more deliberate, prioritized correction — direct glute medius/minimus work, isolated from the rest of programming rather than folded in as an afterthought, along with attention to how that side behaves during single-leg stance and gait.
  • Athlete 3, at 43%, represented the largest gap we found — a difference big enough to often show up visibly as a hip hike or trunk lean under single-leg load. Deficits this large usually warrant a closer look at history (previous injury, asymmetric loading from sport, past surgery) alongside a structured, prioritized correction plan.

None of these athletes needed to stop CrossFit. None of them needed to accept “bad back” as a permanent identity. What they needed was a plan built around their actual numbers — not a generic core-strengthening protocol, not blind rest-and-hope, and not, in at least one case, the surgery that had been floated as a next step.

The Takeaway

If you’re dealing with low back pain that keeps circling back no matter how much you rest, foam roll, or strengthen your core in the generic sense, the question worth asking isn’t “what’s wrong with my back.” It’s “what is my back compensating for, and where.”

Objective testing — actual force numbers, side to side, movement by movement — is what turns that question into an answer. It’s the difference between guessing at a program and building one that’s specific to the athlete in front of you. Three athletes, three different weak sides, three different magnitudes of deficit. A generic program would have missed all of it. The testing didn’t.

Without Testing, Training Is a Guessing Game

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: if you don’t know where your actual weaknesses are, every decision you make about your training is a guess. More core work? Maybe. Less volume? Maybe. A different lift entirely? Maybe. You end up chasing symptoms instead of causes — and worse, you start to internalize the pain itself as proof that something is fundamentally wrong with you. That your back is fragile. That you’re one workout away from a setback. That belief is its own kind of injury, and it’s almost always built on incomplete information.

Objective data changes that story. It doesn’t just tell you what to fix — it tells you what isn’t broken. Athletes 1, 2, and 3 didn’t have fragile spines. They had underprepared hips. That distinction is the difference between training with fear and training with a plan.

We’re building toward a full musculoskeletal longevity assessment for exactly this reason — to give our community a way to answer these questions with data instead of guesswork, before pain forces the issue. More on that soon. For now, the takeaway is simple: if something feels “off” and keeps coming back, don’t assume you know why. Test it.

Individual results and asymmetry thresholds vary by athlete, movement, and testing protocol. This post reflects de-identified case data used for educational purposes; any athlete with persistent or worsening pain should be evaluated by a qualified medical or physical therapy professional before beginning a corrective program.

-Will Hylton, PT, DPT, OCS, CSCS,
Clinical Director​ at Better With Physical Therapy

(973) 791-8337 | 306 Main St Ste 12, Madison, NJ 07940