The pain was in my back. The problem was in my hips.

For about three years, my lower back hurt. Not every day, and not always badly, but often enough that I started to plan my life around it. I tried pills. I tried running. I tried football, the gym, stretching, and more late-night searches than I’d like to admit.

Most of it helped a little. None of it fixed anything, until I finally understood that I’d been treating the wrong part of my body the whole time.

This is the full story: what I tried, what failed, what finally worked, and where I am now. I’m writing it down because if you’re stuck in the same loop, I hope it saves you some of those three years.

How it started

The honest answer is boring. I sat a lot, and I barely moved.

My chair had no lower-back support, and I spent most of my day in it. Over time the pain crept in. It started just above my hip on the left side and ran all the way down my leg to my foot. Later I learned that path has a name: the sciatic nerve.

The things that didn’t work

Pills

My first move was the sensible one: I went to a doctor. He gave me medication that seemed to loosen my muscles and, I think, dull the pain signals, so I could move normally again, bend forward, and get on with my day.

On the pills, everything felt fine. As soon as they wore off, the pain was back. I believe the idea was that my nervous system was guarding against certain movements, and if the pain was blocked for a while, I’d start moving normally again. It didn’t work that way for me. The pills also made me hallucinate, and they did nothing about the cause. So I stopped.

Running

If medicine couldn’t fix it, maybe fitness could. I started running. On day one I managed 600 metres. Within a couple of months I was running 10 kilometres.

I was proud of that. My back didn’t care. I stopped running.

Football

Then I noticed something odd. When I juggled a ball with my left foot, I felt the pain along the sciatic nerve, but after playing for a while the pain would ease off for a few hours, sometimes a whole day.

So I played more football. And every morning I woke up with the same pain.

The first thing that actually helped

My last idea was the gym. I asked a trainer to teach me some mobility work along with a full-body routine. One of the stretches he showed me was the pigeon stretch.

It was brutal. It pulled right on the nerve, and holding it for even a few seconds was unbelievably painful. My trainer said the goal was two minutes.

But this was the first thing that genuinely worked. After a session I’d be pain-free for a day or two. Not fixed, but it was proof the pain could move, which meant something could be done about it.

A photo and a tilted pelvis

The relief never lasted. A long day of sitting or one bad night’s sleep and the pain was back, and I had no idea why.

So I tried something new. I took a photo of myself, shirtless, and asked ChatGPT what it saw. It noticed something I’d never considered: I had a slight anterior pelvic tilt, meaning my pelvis was tipped forward.

I set the back pain aside and went after the tilt instead, hoping one might fix the other. I trained weighted single-leg Romanian deadlifts, weighted hip thrusts, weighted Bulgarian split squats, and leg extensions.

The tilt improved. Then, for several weeks, I had no back pain at all. By then I’d also got into calisthenics, and dead hangs and pull-ups seemed to decompress my back and help too.

I honestly thought it was over.

The snap

It wasn’t.

One evening at the gym, I was doing an L-sit: you hold yourself up between two bars and lift your legs out straight in front of you. Lifting your legs like that needs real control of your hips and lower back. That evening I tried to lift them a little higher than usual.

I felt something in my lower back go, a kind of snap, or a slip. I didn’t know what the hell had happened. I couldn’t finish my workout. I went home disappointed, a little scared, and asked ChatGPT what was going on.

One of the possibilities it raised stuck with me: weak hip flexors. When I lifted my legs, my hips didn’t have the strength or range to do the job, so my lower back tried to do it for them.

For the next few days I could barely move. I couldn’t even sit. It was the worst pain of the whole three years. I did the pigeon stretch every day, plus clamshells and every other stretch I knew. They helped a bit. But I knew, deep down, that this was more temporary relief, and I was done with temporary relief.

My lower back wasn’t the weak link. It was the part working overtime to cover for my hips.

Training the muscles I’d ignored

Looking back at everything, the pattern finally made sense. My hips were the problem. My left hip flexors were weak and short, my hips lacked internal rotation, and my lower back had spent years compensating for both. I’d been stretching and strengthening everything around the problem, never the problem itself.

As soon as the pain eased enough to move, I bought a set of resistance bands and started training my hip flexors directly:

• Banded knee-ups: driving my knee up towards my stomach, then a bit higher, towards my chest. Two sets, as many reps as I could. I didn’t count.
• Banded side walks.
• Banded hip drives: forward and backward.
• Banded internal rotation: with a band around my leg, pulling it inward across my body, from right towards left.

I did this every other day. Within a few sessions I felt a deep burn I’d never felt before, and a small ache on my left side, deep in my core, somewhere I didn’t know I had muscles. It was my hip flexors, finally doing some work. I felt it faintly on the right too, but the left was much stronger. That was the weak side, the side the pain had always been on.

Then, for a few days, I couldn’t train. I could feel myself sliding backwards. Not into pain exactly, but into the old stiffness. That told me two things: this was working, and I couldn’t stop. So I started again and kept going for several weeks.

That’s when something changed that I still find hard to describe. Bending forward had always been hard for me, and I’d always felt my lower back doing the work. This time I bent forward and went a little further, and my lower back stayed out of it. The movement came from my hips.

I’d never felt that before. It sounds small, but it was life-changing. It felt like I’d discovered a movement my body had forgotten how to make.

I also went back to the pigeon stretch with one change: I put my front leg up on a box. On the floor I’d plateaued. On the box I could work deeper into the stretch, and I did it every single day, working towards a 90-degree angle at the knee. Alongside it I added 90/90 hip stretches.

Short and long, both matter

The last piece was one I’d done before: weighted Bulgarian split squats.

This time they were a different animal. My hip flexors hurt so much that I honestly thought I couldn’t do them. But ChatGPT had explained why they mattered: knee-ups train the hip flexors in a shortened position, while the back leg of a split squat trains them in a lengthened one. To make them both longer and stronger, you need both.

So I did them, painfully, and kept doing them.

Where I am now

I move better than I have in years.

There’s a new connection between my glutes and my feet that I can feel. I used to be slightly duck-footed, my feet turning out as my hips rotated outwards to make up for everything else. That’s slowly reversing. When I play football now, I can feel more pressure through my feet than before, and for a while the inside of my feet ached as if my arches were caving in.

Not long ago, that would have scared me. Now I understand it: my body is rebuilding the way it moves, and new patterns take time to get strong. My anterior pelvic tilt has come back a long way, and I think my posture will keep straightening as this settles.

The journey isn’t finished. I’m still on it. But for the first time in three years I don’t feel like I’m guessing. I feel like I’ve found the answer, and I think a few more months will make me rock solid. I’m stronger than I was before all this started, and it’s still getting better.

If your back hurts too

I don’t know what’s going on in your body, and your imbalances might be different from mine. But here’s what I’d tell someone standing where I stood three years ago:

1. The pain isn’t always where the problem is. My back hurt because my hips weren’t doing their job. Look at the joints above and below the pain.
2. Relief isn’t a fix. Pills, stretches, and even a good game of football made me feel better for a day. If the pain keeps coming back, you haven’t found the cause yet.
3. Look for weak links, not just tight ones. Stretching helped, but strengthening, especially the hip flexors in both shortened and lengthened positions, is what changed things.
4. Check your hips. Internal rotation, hip flexor strength and length, and glutes that actually switch on.
5. Take a photo of your posture. A side-on picture showed me the pelvic tilt I’d never noticed. ChatGPT helped me read it, and a good physio can do the same.
6. Be consistent, and expect discomfort. New burns, aches in new places, and feet that feel strange can all be signs your body is changing. When I stopped for a few days, I felt it.

For reference, this is roughly what my routine looks like now:

It took me three years to figure this out. I’m glad I didn’t give up, because I feel better, I move better, and I am better. If even one person reading this gets there faster than I did, writing it down was worth it.

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I’m not a doctor or a physiotherapist. This is just what worked for me. If your pain comes with numbness, weakness in your legs, or any change in bladder or bowel control, see a doctor straight away. And if you can, get a proper assessment from a physio before starting a new routine.