I Fixed My Lower Back Pain by Changing How I Trained My Core

My name´s Pavol Grman from the DEVA PHYSIOCOACHES Team,

where we help people move better and live pain-free while educating personal trainers, fitness coaches, yoga teachers & physiotherapists to deliver outstanding results.

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I managed to irritate my lower back during two completely different periods of my life.

The first time, I was a professional football player.

I trained almost every day. Football, strength work, conditioning, core training. My body was constantly being pushed.

I became stronger.

But I also became tighter.

At the time, I thought that was normal. Tight muscles felt like strong muscles.

Eventually my lower back started telling me otherwise.

Years later, after my football career had finished, the problem returned.

But this time there was a strange difference.

I wasn't training too much.

I was sitting too much.

More work. More computers. More hours behind a desk.

Two almost opposite lifestyles produced a very similar problem.

And that made me question something I had taken for granted for years:

Maybe lower-back problems aren't always about being too weak, too stiff or too inactive.

Maybe the way the body creates stability matters too.

Like many athletes, I used to associate core training with abdominal strength.

Planks.

Crunches.

Bracing.

Creating tension.

Being able to resist movement.

Those things can absolutely have a place in training.

But they're not the entire story.

The trunk has to stabilise while we breathe, walk, reach, rotate, squat, run and lift.

And one structure became particularly interesting to me:

the diaphragm.

Most people know the diaphragm as our primary breathing muscle.

But respiration isn't its only role.

The diaphragm also participates in postural stabilization.

When its activity is coordinated with the abdominal wall, pelvic floor and other stabilizing structures, we can regulate intra-abdominal pressure — IAP.

Think less about “squeezing the abs” and more about creating an organised pressure system around the trunk.

That's an important distinction.

One of my biggest changes was learning that stability doesn't always require maximal tension.

Sometimes excessive tension is part of the problem.

You can have very strong abdominal muscles and still organise movement poorly.

You can also breathe well while lying on the floor but completely change your strategy when you sit, squat or lift something.

So my training gradually changed.

I became more interested in:

This is where Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization influenced my thinking.

DNS uses principles derived from developmental kinesiology. Early motor development gives us useful models for understanding how posture, breathing and stabilization are organised before increasingly complex movement develops.

Instead of simply asking:

“Which muscle is weak?”

I started asking:

“How is the whole system organising this movement?”

That question changed a lot for me.

A position I still use is the developmental 3-month supine position — often compared with a dead-bug setup.

But the goal isn't simply to hold your legs up and make your abdominal muscles burn.

The position gives you an opportunity to explore something much more useful:

Can you maintain your trunk position?

Can you breathe?

Can you create pressure through the abdominal wall without sucking your stomach in?

Can you move without your lower back taking over?

Can you feel unnecessary tension appearing somewhere else?

That's a very different way of training.

You're not merely completing repetitions.

You're learning to observe how your body solves the task.

And that self-awareness is ultimately what I want people to develop.

As I changed the way I trained, something interesting happened.

I began feeling stronger while using less unnecessary tension.

Movement felt easier.

Breathing felt easier.

Sitting felt different.

My lower back didn't feel as though it had to contribute to every task.

And that's now one of the central principles behind how we teach movement at DEVA.

Sometimes people absolutely need more strength.

But sometimes adding more strength to a poorly coordinated strategy simply gives you a stronger version of the same strategy.

Before asking your body to produce more force, it can be useful to understand how it is creating stability in the first place.

I've created a free practical guide called Core Stability Reset to help you explore these principles yourself.

It introduces diaphragm function, intra-abdominal pressure and a simple developmental position you can use to start observing how your own core works.

It's not about finding one magical exercise.

It's about learning to feel the difference between forcing stability and organising stability.

Download the free Core Stability Reset

And if this topic interests you, my new YouTube video tells the complete story of how changing my approach to core training changed the way I understood my own lower back.