Why Does My Cycling Back Pain Keep Coming Back After Treatment? What Springfield Spin Class Regulars Should Know

You've been dealing with this for months now. You get an adjustment, feel great for a few days, and then somewhere around minute 30 of your Thursday morning class at Sit and Spin Studio, it's back. That familiar ache in your lower back, the stiffness that makes you dread the high-resistance climbs. You're doing everything right, so why does the relief never stick?

Here's the short answer: your treatment is probably addressing the symptom (tight, angry muscles) but not the actual cause (your deep spinal stabilizers went offline and never came back). After an initial back injury, a specific muscle called the multifidus gets neurologically "turned off" by your brain as a protective response. The problem? It doesn't automatically turn back on when the pain goes away. So your body compensates with bigger muscles that weren't designed for the job, and those muscles eventually burn out. This is why you keep getting temporary relief. The adjustment or massage relaxes the overworked compensators, but nobody is retraining the stabilizers that should be doing the work in the first place.

Let's break down exactly why this happens and what actually fixes it.

The Relief-Regression Cycle (And Why You're Stuck In It)

What we see at 417 Performance is a frustratingly common pattern. Someone comes in after months of back pain that's been treated elsewhere. They've had adjustments, maybe some massage, possibly even physical therapy. Each time, they felt better for a few days. Then they went back to class, pushed into a heavy climb, and the pain returned like it never left.

This isn't a failure of those treatments. Adjustments work. Massage works. The problem is what happens after.

This is what we call the "passive care trap." You feel better, assume you're healing, go back to your normal routine, and the same mechanical problem that caused the pain in the first place is still there, waiting to flare up the moment you add load.

The Real Culprit: Your Stabilizers Went Offline

Here's where it gets interesting from a biomechanics perspective. Your spine has two types of muscles working to support it: the big, global movers (like the erector spinae that run up and down your back) and the small, deep stabilizers (like the lumbar multifidus). The big muscles generate force. The small ones control segmental motion, keeping each vertebra stable relative to the one above and below it.

When you initially hurt your back, something important happened that you probably weren't aware of. Your nervous system reflexively "turned down" the activity of the multifidus at the injured level. This is actually a protective response. Your brain was trying to splint the area, to prevent movement that might cause more damage.

The catch? This inhibition doesn't spontaneously resolve when the pain goes away.

Research shows that multifidus dysfunction persists even after pain resolves, contributing to the high recurrence rate of low back pain. Without targeted retraining, the inhibited muscle tissue can be replaced by fat and fibrous tissue over time.

So now you've got a spine that's missing its primary segmental stabilizer. Your body isn't stupid. It finds a workaround. The big erector spinae muscles take over, gripping and guarding to compensate for the lack of deep stability.

Here's the problem: those big muscles weren't designed for this job. They're force producers, not endurance stabilizers. Ask them to hold your spine stable for a 45-minute spin class, and they're going to fatigue, tighten up, and eventually start screaming at you.

Why Indoor Cycling Is Particularly Brutal On This Pattern

The cycling position creates a perfect storm for this dysfunction. You're flexed forward at the hips, loading your spine in a rounded position for an extended period. In a healthy spine, your body has a clever mechanism called the "flexion-relaxation phenomenon" where, at a certain point of forward bend, the back muscles actually relax and let the passive structures (ligaments, fascia) take the load.

But when your deep stabilizers aren't working properly, that handoff never happens. Your erector spinae stay contracted the entire time you're on the bike, burning through their metabolic reserves, accumulating waste products, and generating that familiar aching fatigue.

Add in the resistance climbs where you're pushing against load, the intervals where your heart rate spikes and your breathing becomes shallow (which compromises another key stabilizer, your diaphragm), and the social pressure to keep up with your crew at Cyclebar, and you've got a recipe for chronic, plateaued back pain.

Your Bike Setup Might Be Working Against Your Rehab

Something that often gets overlooked: the spin bike settings that felt fine before your injury might now be aggravating it. This isn't because the settings were wrong. It's because your body has changed.

A few common culprits:

Saddle height too high: If your saddle is even slightly too high, your pelvis rocks side to side with every pedal stroke to reach the bottom. That's lateral flexion and rotation of your lumbar spine, thousands of times per class. At 90 RPM for 45 minutes, that's over 4,000 repetitions of micro-shearing force.

Handlebars too low or far away: This increases the flexion demand on your spine, forcing you to round more through the lower back. Pre-injury, your muscles might have handled this. Post-injury, with your multifidus offline, it's just more load on an already overworked system.

Resistance too high, cadence too low: Heavy grinding at low RPMs creates more torque through your spine than spinning faster at lower resistance. Your back has to work harder to stabilize against each powerful pedal stroke.

What Actually Breaks The Cycle

Fixing a plateaued back injury requires a fundamentally different approach than what got you stuck in the first place. Instead of just chasing the symptom (the tight, painful muscles), we have to restore the underlying stability that's missing.

This happens in phases.

Phase 1: Create The Window (Weeks 1-3)

The first step is still reducing pain and muscle guarding. This might involve adjustments, soft tissue work, or modalities like dry needling or shockwave therapy. The goal is to calm down the alarm system and restore basic mobility.

A randomized controlled trial found that dry needling significantly reduced resting stiffness in the erector spinae muscles of patients with low back pain, creating a window of normalized muscle tone.

But here's the critical difference: we don't stop there. While the window is open, we immediately begin retraining your deep stabilization system.

Phase 2: Rebuild The Foundation (Weeks 4-10)

This is where the real work happens. Using an approach called Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization (DNS), we teach your brain to re-activate the stabilizers it turned off months ago.

DNS is based on something called developmental kinesiology, which is a fancy way of saying we use the same movement patterns that babies naturally develop as they learn to move. These patterns are hardwired into your nervous system. They represent the most efficient, stable way to control your spine. But injury, pain, and years of sitting and cycling have overwritten them with compensatory junk.

A key concept here is intra-abdominal pressure, or IAP. Your core isn't just your abs. It's a pressurized cylinder with your diaphragm as the roof, your pelvic floor as the bottom, and your abdominal wall and spinal muscles as the sides. When this system works correctly, a breath in creates pressure that supports your spine from the inside, like an internal weight belt.

Cyclists often breathe in a way that defeats this mechanism, lifting the chest and sucking in the belly (sometimes called "hourglass syndrome"). This disconnects the diaphragm from the pelvic floor and eliminates the IAP support. Without that hydraulic cushion, your back muscles have to grip harder to compensate.

Phase 3: Load It Up (Timeline Variable)

Once you can maintain stability in controlled positions, we progressively add load and complexity until you can handle the specific demands of cycling. This isn't just "core strengthening" in the traditional sit-ups-and-planks sense. It's teaching your spine to stay stable while your arms and legs move independently, while you breathe hard, while you push against resistance.

The goal is closing the gap between "pain-free at rest" and "able to crush a 45-minute class without flaring up."

When To Consider Advanced Interventions

For some plateaued cases, the standard approach of manual therapy plus exercise isn't enough to break through. The tissues are too irritated, the muscles too locked up, or the neural patterns too ingrained. That's when we consider escalating to modalities that can provide a stronger biological stimulus.

Dry needling uses thin filament needles inserted into trigger points or taut bands in the muscle. When the needle hits its target, it triggers an involuntary twitch response that essentially "resets" the electrical activity of the muscle fibers. For the deep multifidus that manual therapy can't easily reach, this provides a direct interface with the problem.

Shockwave therapy uses acoustic waves to stimulate healing in chronic, stubborn soft tissue injuries. It works through mechanotransduction (the physical force stimulates cells to release growth factors), promotes new blood vessel formation in areas with poor circulation, and provides an analgesic effect that can break pain cycles.

A systematic review of 632 patients found that shockwave therapy provided significant reductions in pain and improved function in chronic low back pain, with benefits lasting at least 12 weeks.

These aren't magic bullets. They're tools that, when combined with the corrective exercise work, can accelerate progress in cases that have been stuck for a long time.

Red Flags: When Back Pain Isn't Just Back Pain

Before we wrap up, a word of caution. The vast majority of cycling-related back pain is mechanical in nature, treatable with the approach we've described. But there are a few situations where something else might be going on.

The Path Forward

Here's the bottom line: if you've been treating your back pain for months and keep hitting the same wall, the problem probably isn't that you need more of the same treatment. The problem is that nobody has addressed why your spine lost its stability in the first place.

The adjustment creates the window. The DNS work fills it with new motor patterns. The advanced modalities break through stubborn tissue when needed. And gradually, your spine learns to stabilize itself again, the way it was designed to.

It's not a quick fix. Rewiring motor patterns that have been running for months takes time, typically 6-12 weeks of consistent work. But it's a fix that actually lasts, so you can get back to your Tuesday and Thursday crews without watching the clock and wondering when your back is going to give out.

Sources

Freeman MD, Woodham MA, Woodham AW. The role of the lumbar multifidus in chronic low back pain: a review. PM R. 2010;2(2):142-146. Full text

Koppenhaver SL, Weaver AM, Randall TL, et al. Effect of dry needling on lumbar muscle stiffness in patients with low back pain: A double blind, randomized controlled trial using shear wave elastography. J Man Manip Ther. 2021;30(3):154-164. Full text

Liu K, Zhang Q, Chen L, et al. Efficacy and safety of extracorporeal shockwave therapy in chronic low back pain: a systematic review and meta-analysis of 632 patients. J Orthop Surg Res. 2023;18(1):455. Full text