Propel Fitness Journal, Issue 068
I spoke to a lifter last week who’d spent YEARS with a McGill-trained practitioner.
He made real progress out of his acute back pain.
But he found himself stuck. It’s not that the work had failed him.
It’s because somewhere along the way, he the method convinced him his spine wasn’t supposed to move.
McGill Is an Entry Point, Not an Endpoint
Stuart McGill’s work has helped a lot of people get out of acute low back pain.
When I hurt my back in 2017 (which began 2.5 years of chronic pain), I performed the McGill 3 religiously as a daily practice to get blood flowing to my trunk and desensitize my body to daily movement triggers.
It worked tremendously.
His protocols are conservative, structured, and predictable. That’s exactly what some people need in the first few days (or occasionally weeks) after a serious flare.
Credit where it’s due.
But I keep meeting lifters who’ve come through that system and walked out the other side terrified of their own spine.
I call this the back tax. It’s when they can’t possible stop thinking about the position and symptoms of their spine, at all hours of the day.
They brace for grocery bags.
They won’t bend over to tie their shoes.
They’ve been told their spine is a stack of fragile poker chips, and now they move like it.
The fear has outlived the injury.
And the fear is now the bigger problem.
God forbid they even think about lifting weights again.
Your Spine Is Built to Move
Your spine flexes. It extends. It rotates. It side-bends. It does all of this under load, every day, in every human body that isn’t in a cast.
That shouldn’t be a controversial claim. And yet, here we are, in 2026. Where every “best exercise to fix your low back pain” revolves around the side plank, a pallof press, a bird-dog, and other “non-movement movement” strategies.
A spine that can only hold neutral isn’t a recovered spine. It’s a braced spine.
And braced is a short-term strategy, not a way to live.
What Life Actually Asks of You
You reach for something on a low shelf.
You pick your kid up off the floor.
You twist to grab the seatbelt.
You swing a golf club.
You pull a deadlift from the floor and your hips rise faster than your chest and your back rounds a little under 500 pounds. (Yes, I hope everyone who reads this deadlifts 500lbs.)
Every one of those is spinal flexion, extension, or rotation under load.
If your rehab ended at “keep it neutral,” you are not prepared for any of them.
The Fear Is the Injury Now
Pain catastrophizing and fear-avoidance are two of the strongest predictors of long-term disability. Stronger than the imaging. Stronger than the diagnosis.
A spine that’s been taught it’s fragile starts to act fragile.
The nervous system listens.
You guard. You stiffen. You avoid. And the tissues that needed graded exposure to flexion under load never get it — so they never adapt.
You pass rehab. You fail the return to life.
What to Do Instead
Get out of acute pain however you need to. Use the conservative tools when they fit.
Then… graduate.
Cat-cow. Jefferson curls with a light load. Loaded carries with rotation. Deadlifts pulled with intent, not with fear and expectation that the back is “about to give”.
Teach your spine that bending is a thing it does, not a thing it survives.
The goal was never a neutral spine.
The goal was a spine that can handle whatever the day throws at it.
– Dan
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