Comment by MichaelRo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MichaelRo | Hacker News Reader

Only time I'm laying awake at 4 AM and thinking about bad choices is when my back hurts so much from having stupidly strained it a few days before that it's better to stay up half asleep and desperately tired than lay in bed awaken by back pain.

So one advice: take care of your back. It's easy to sprain it, hard to heal it back. You're a developer who mostly sits all day, not a pit worker handling a pickaxe all day. Beware especially of overloading your back due to unavoidable social situations. A friend asks you to help him move the furniture. A stranger asks you to help him pick up his handicapped spouse who felt to the ground. Some neighbors decide to do maintenance work around the block themselves (because they enjoy it but you don't) and make you feel guilty if you don't join the communal effort with a pickaxe (literally, that's what happened to me two days ago and now I'm agonizing with back pain).

Protect your back at the cost of being rude or a jerk.

I highly recommend strength training. To anyone. But especially us developers.

Big compound lifts like squats, deadlifts, rows etc all hit a lot of muscle and posterior groups and have made my back bullet proof.

It doesn't take a lot of equipment - any commercial gym with a power rack, or BYO home gym with a rack and barbell will do. Start with a simple program like Starting Strength and then pivot to something more intermediate friendly when you get there like 531. You can run these programs for decades.

Even moreso, I'd recommend bodyweight exercises and long hikes. Humans aren't quite built to do repetitive heavy lifting movements. We're built to jog, to climb, to pull ourselves up a tree or wall, and hike long distances.

Best thing is, you can do it pretty much wherever you live!

Make sure you walk. I've had a pretty serious back injury about 15 years ago which included surgery. I still MTB, I go to the gym and deadlift and squat. But the foundation of all of that is walking a lot.

Yes, I do that fairly regularly. Walking exercises a lot of muscles just to fight gravity and keep posture. Laying in bed also causes muscles to relax which isn't ideal when the back is out of line. Like, laying in bed "relaxing" meant essentially agony for my back while "exercising" by walking made the pain completely disappear. I can tell it's not a bad sprain so it'll be completely gone in two or three days but walking is an essential part of the healing process, I know from experience.

Back pain has plagued me for many years. Something that has helped me is Foundation Training. You can find a lot of the exercises on youtube.

After passed 50, I started to do non competitive long distance running (jogging). With proper running form, it builds up core muscles and endurance naturally. And I do my coding either standing up or lying down on the couch, avoiding sitting as much as possible.

Take it easy and go slowly.

You should go to the gym and do yoga so your core isn’t so weak. If you can’t even pick up a person or move a couch you have some serious strength problems.

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