Understanding and Preventing Low Back Pain in High School Athletes

Did you know approximately 4 in 10 adolescent athletes experience low back pain each year.

How to Help Prevent Low Back Pain:

• Build Trunk Strength and Control: Incorporate exercises such as dead bugs, bird dogs, side planks, and Pallof presses to develop trunk strength and control.

• Strengthen Your Low Back, Hips, and Glutes: Exercises such as split squats, hip thrusts, and single-leg Romanian deadlifts help develop the strength needed for sprinting, kicking, and changing direction.

• Progress Training Gradually: Avoid sudden increases in training volume, sprinting, repetitive kicking, or lifting intensity. Allow your body time to adapt to increased demands.

• Develop Full-Body Strength: Progressively strengthen your legs, hips, and trunk so your body can tolerate the physical demands of your sport.

• Prioritize Recovery: Get adequate sleep, eat enough to support growth and training, and allow sufficient recovery between demanding practices and competitions.

• Important: Although strength and appropriate training progression can help athletes tolerate sport demands, no exercise program can guarantee prevention of nonspecific back pain or spondylolysis.

  What to Do if You're Dealing With Low Back Pain:

  • Don't Automatically Stop All Activity: For nonspecific low back pain, staying active within your tolerance is generally preferable to prolonged rest. Temporarily modify activities that significantly aggravate your symptoms.

  • Build Strength Progressively: Exercises such as dead bugs, bird dogs, side planks, and glute bridges may be useful starting points, depending on your symptoms.

  • Pay Attention to Persistent Pain With Back Extension: If arching backward, kicking, jumping, or running repeatedly triggers localized back pain, get evaluated by a qualified healthcare professional to assess for a possible pars stress injury.

  • Don't Push Through a Suspected Stress Injury: If spondylolysis is suspected, temporarily stop aggravating sports activities and seek an assessment. Return-to-sport progression should be guided by the diagnosis, symptoms, and clinical findings.

Get Evaluated if Pain Persists or Returns: Repeated episodes of back pain, pain that limits sports participation, or symptoms that fail to improve deserve further assessment. New bowel or bladder dysfunction, saddle numbness, or significant or progressive leg weakness requires urgent medical evaluation.

These exercises are general examples, not a universal treatment plan. Athletes with suspected spondylolysis may need to modify or avoid painful spinal loading and extension until appropriately evaluated.

Want to build a stronger foundation for your sport?

Try these 5 exercises to develop core strength and trunk control!

1. Dead Bugs

2. Bird Dogs

3. Side Planks

4. Pallof Press

5. Hip Thrusts

If you’ve tried rest, stretching, or “waiting it out” and it hasn’t worked, that’s exactly what our injury screens are designed for.

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