I'm looking forward to an answer to this too...
Had mild tennis elbow, started lifting a couple weeks ago, and OUCH!
I am laying off the lifting for now, and hoping to let that heal up. Doing some other exercises to strengthen muscles around that area...
Is this a good idea?

I got nothing on this at the moment. I'll ask the more intelligent mod.

:glasses:

Oh, and tagging!

Yeah this is a question best left to someone with sports medicine experiance, though my common sense tells me that you should lay off of it for a while, and possibly use a tennis brace to provide some support in any case.

Personal experiance? My shoulders get tweaked in a really weird way when I put down heavy dumbbells (release my grip). I continue to learn more about it, but at the onset I wasn't being so careful, and it just got more and more sore. I gave it a rest for a solid week just recently actually (zero exercise, maybe a little love making... lol) and that really helped. Now I just focus on not aggravating it.

I wouldn't continue to aggravating it though, it won't get better in that case.

Just checking in to see how you are doing now?

I have experience with back pain... 21 years of experience, actually. (But I am not a doctor, and do not play one on TV or on the internet, so do take this with a grain of salt.)

I would lay off barbell squats and deadlifts for the time being--if there is anything even slightly off about your form, you can damage yourself further, and you do not need that. Once you recover and have no pain, you can introduce them back slowly with the lightest weights, and increase weight slower than the standard progression recommends. And pay special attention to the lower back. You might be overextending or rounding and not realizing it.

What you can do in the meantime to strengthen your back and legs: for legs, try one-legged presses. Yes, on a leg press machine. It is virtually impossible to round your back when you are doing a single-leg press, and you will gain leg strength. For back strength, definitely avoid anything that rounds the back, and even exercises that require you to bend at the hip should be approached with caution. I would stick to push-ups and planks, actually, as they strengthen your core muscles and require decent alignment.

[edit: Do you have a Roman bench at your gym? You could try back extensions, and you can do them while holding an extra weight. But be careful--some people's backs love extensions, and some really hate them. With lower backs, there is no rule that works for everyone, hence it's hard to give advice.]

With lower back injuries, the pain is often nowhere near the injury. It may even be on the other side from where the injury is. You can get "referred pain", or you might be shifting your weight away from the injured side and using your healthier side more, which makes the uninjured side hurt more.

About stretching--I've had mixed results with stretching. One of the worst, howlingly awful back pain incidents I experienced was when I was at the height of my yoga practice coiling into pretzels. I get better results from focusing on alignment and strengthening and working on symmetry. It's very common for one leg to be longer than the other, and leg strength is also often uneven. Over the years, this translates into back pain. That's why I recommended single leg presses--they will help you diagnose uneven development really fast. They are also a low-risk exercise for the back, compared to full compound lifts and regular (double) leg presses. Improperly performed compound lifts and regular leg presses allow you to round the back and compress those lower vertebrae, allow for the sacrum to separate from the iliac crest, and all the other lovely things that cause back agony.

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