Erin's Journey: Trusting Her Body Again After Chronic Back Pain
When Erin and I first started working together in late 2023, she said something that stuck with me:
“I just want to feel like myself again.”
It wasn’t about numbers. It wasn’t about chasing PRs. It was about freedom.
The freedom to walk into a workout (or walk up to the barbell) without second guessing. The freedom to train hard without fear. The freedom to not spend every week bouncing between flare-ups and frustration.
Her story is similar to those of many other casually ambitious athletes I have worked with or spoken to. Even so, we each have our own unique history, anatomy, and goals.
This means we each need a unique approach that is rooted in finding:
Clarity around what needs to be addressed,
Consistency in routine and progress, and
Confidence in our bodies and our own independence again.
The Road Here Wasn’t Smooth
Erin didn’t grow up playing sports. She didn’t discover fitness until her early 20s, when her mom casually suggested she should “start now, because it only gets harder as you get older.”
That moment kicked off what turned into a full-on lifestyle shift. Running became her entry point. Over time, she built her way up to marathons, found community in Chicago, and realized (like a lot of us do) that movement was about more than just fitness.
But eventually, the miles piled up. So did the aches. She started getting hip pain. Then came the classic frustrating loop: a doctor suggests surgery, a PT throws her on a generic plan, and she’s left wondering what comes next.
Strength training helped for a while.
Then came the back pain.
Erin describes the moment like this:
“I was vacuuming… and my back just said absolutely not.”
Anyone who’s had a back injury knows this moment. You’re not even doing anything dramatic. But your body seizes, and everything changes.
For the next few years, Erin lived in the rehab–training limbo.
She saw PTs who helped her feel a bit better, but didn’t know how to help her lift again. She had trainers/programs who helped her lift heavy and get fitter, but they didn’t know how to navigate pain. And she got stuck… not because she wasn’t trying, but because nobody was guiding her through both… She hadn’t found an approach that helped her bridge the gab between rehab and fitness.
As she put it:
“They don’t know what to do when you say, ‘Deadlifts hurt my back.’ They just tell you not to deadlift… but what if I want to lift heavy shit again?”
What Made Her Reach Out
By 2023, Erin was frustrated. She wasn’t lifting like she used to. Running didn’t feel great, either. Every week felt like a guessing game of “Will this hurt today?”
She told me:
“I needed someone who understood both. I didn’t want just a PT or just a coach. I needed someone who could help me figure out how to move again… not just get out of pain, but actually train.”
That’s where we started… not with barbell lifts or big numbers but with conversations, patterning, trial and error, and consistency.
What Changed
From the outside, Erin’s progress might not look flashy. But if you’ve ever been through a long rehab journey, you know how big even the small wins really are.
She doesn’t catastrophize pain anymore.
She doesn’t spiral when a workout doesn’t go perfectly.
She adapts. She adjusts. She figures it out.
And she does it with a kind of self-confidence that only comes from doing the hard internal work.
Here’s how she put it:
“One of the biggest things I’ve learned is just not to panic when something hurts.”
“I used to think: ‘Well that’s it. I’ll never deadlift again. Now, I know it might just be a bad day. It doesn’t mean everything is broken.”
Erin’s also learned how to modify and self-correct. If something doesn’t feel right, she knows how to adjust her prep, change her pace, or shift the movement, without needing permission.
When I asked Erin to think back to when we first started, she said:
“I remember thinking, ‘Why am I doing banded hip hinges instead of barbell deadlifts?’ But now I get it. That work gave me the foundation I needed. It’s not flashy, but it worked.”
Beyond the Pain
This is what moving beyond pain looks like in real life. It’s not that pain disappears forever. It’s that it no longer controls the show.
You stop fearing it. You stop revolving your decisions around it. You start living and training with freedom again.
That’s what Erin has done. And it’s been a privilege to walk alongside her while she rebuilt the trust in her body, her training, and her process.
Because what we’re really doing here isn’t just rehab or performance.
We’re helping people think, move, train, and live with purpose, with clarity, and without fear.
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