Where I am today (October 2026)
As of this writing, I'm about three and a half years into sustained recovery. During that time, I've completed a second Master's degree, rebuilt my social life, and regained an amount of energy that would have seemed unimaginable during my years of chronic pain.
I swim 4.7 km weekly and train in the gym three times a week. I'm back to deadlifting, squatting and bench pressing. I've gone kayaking for hours at a time, and if I need to sprint for a bus or run somewhere because I'm late, I don't think twice about it.
More importantly, my life no longer revolves around my back. I can go days, weeks and months without thinking about it.
I haven't yet returned to skiing—the activity associated with my major relapse—but I'm planning to.
For eight years, I couldn't imagine reaching this point.
This is how I got here.
How I herniated my L5-S1 disc (2013-2015)
I herniated my L5-S1 disc after two years of powerlifting with poor form—“buttwinks” on barbell back squats, and deadlifts performed with a fully rounded lower back.
Despite sometimes feeling sore after training, back pain didn’t first hit me while I powerlifted.
The immediate events that led up to the first bolt of pain were an intensely stressful confrontation late one night with an aggressive, steroid-addled bouncer who threatened to beat me up after seeing me talking to a woman.
That kind of threat was not entirely new to my nervous system. As a child, I'd grown up with unpredictable parental anger and violence. Fear and hypervigilance were familiar states.
The day after the confrontation the raw rage he had uncaged fuelled me to push myself harder than usual in the gym. While I don’t remember hearing a sound, I remember wondering if something had taken a hit during training.
The day after I felt that first bolt of pain which woke me up in shock and befuddlement during the night, I went to the hospital and had an x-ray done. Upon inspection, the attending nurse told me that nothing was the matter, and not to worry. She told me I could resume training, after prescibing some light pain medication.
But training was never the same again.
Slowly but surely, the pain began taking up more and more space in my life. Initially mild, its increasing pervasiveness led to worry and anxiety. It made me steadily retreat from social life.
NYE 2015 was a perfect example: I tried to be present, dance and have fun with my brother and friends, but the back pain kept me scanning my body for danger.
In early 2016 I went to see an osteopath, who, after performing his manipulations, told me to get an MRI done, which revealed I had an L5-S1 herniation. Once he had the scans, he told me: “You will never lift weights again – strength training is destructive by design. You should stop all physical exercise forthwith.”
When conservative treatment wasn’t enough (2016)
I stopped the gym and the osteopath told me to start physiotherapy.
At the physio clinic, the leading MD told me: “You will live with this pain for the rest of your life.” More meds were prescribed, as well as a bevy of exercises and massages, and a hot water bottle.
My aunt, a paediatrician, recommended I take up swimming, which I did.
Like the pain meds and massages, the effect of swimming was initially to decrease the pain somewhat, before it came back with a vengeance.
I went to see a chiropractor with similar results.
I had back pain from sunrise to sunset by this point.
The changes I’d made at home, of purchasing a new coil-only thicker mattress which turned out to be super hard, placing it directly on the floor, made sleep worse.
I would eat my meals from the kitchen counter standing to avoid sitting.
I would check my face in the mirror in the mornings, and the eye bags from poor sleep, during which I would feel pain, I would take as proof that I had done irreversible damage to myself.
My parents put me in touch with an orthopaedic surgeon, a spine specialist.
I went to see him, and he prescribed stronger pain medication which, again, initially abated the pain somewhat, before losing its effect as I got used to it.
During a later consult, around May/June 2016, he suggested I undergo spinal surgery. He said this was worth considering, due to my constant canceling of travel plans as a consequence of ever-present back pain.
Seeing a way out of that hell, I bit the bullet.
My L5-S1 partial laminectomy and discectomy (2016)
The surgery took place in October 2016.
I tried not to think about it until I was literally in a gown lying on a gurney being taken down in an elevator by nurses to the operating theatre.
When I regained consciousness the deed had been done. The doc told me it had gone well.
I spent a day or two in the hospital being fed by IV and eventually with actual food.
My parents brought me a thickset hardback when they came to visit and I noticed that simply holding it while I read gave me back pain.
The nurse told me, before letting me go, that I shouldn’t sit during convalescence, and merely stand or lie down. My mother purchased a toilet booster seat.
For the next month or so, I convalesced at my parents’ house and did as the nurse prescribed.
I became terrified of moving my spine; toothpaste would drool down my mouth as I brushed my teeth since I avoided bending my back. Walking was slow for the same reason.
About a month later I went back home and slowly resumed normal life. I purchased a bed.
I went back to the swimming pool but initially only walked, then slowly started swimming again. Only crawl, front and back.
And I started going to a better, private, physiotherapy clinic, and doing more exercises and massages. I would take pain medication when there were flare-ups.
And slowly but surely, I began to improve.
By January 2017, I started being able to sleep entire nights without pain, and spend entire days without it too. Nevertheless, I couldn’t carry anything heavy, and my groceries would be brought to my kitchen counter on the fourth floor.
Reinjuring my back after surgery (February 2017)
Someone who worked at a restaurant where I would take clients had told me, back when I was still contemplating back surgery, that he knew people who’d undergone such procedures, and that you only got one shot at healing. If you missed it, the pain would never leave you.
But in February 2017, feeling that I had my life back, my brother and I went on a ski trip to Bosnia.
I chose to ignore sombre premonitions, such as the fact that I got back pain when I tried on a pair of ski boots in the shopping mall in Lisbon where I was spending money on new and expensive ski gear like trousers, goggles, and synthetic undergarments.
My brother carried the luggage, as I was still unable to carry any weight.
We stayed in Sarajevo for a few days before being driven to the ski resort in Jahorina. We stayed in a beautiful chalet in the mountains.
We went to the ski rental and as soon as I put on the ski boots the pain came back. Then I strapped on the skis, took the lift, and as I started skiing down the slope, the back pain increased in severity.
I wanted to believe that I was ok, and that going for the pain meds again would allow me to sleep it off that night. Only they didn’t – sleep was fractured and painful once more. The next day I tried bigfoot or skiblades, the mini-skis, thinking that due to their inferior weight my back wouldn’t be so adversely affected. I was wrong.
So I booked a full-body massage in the resort, hoping that that would bring me back to no pain. It didn’t.
For the rest of the holiday, my brother snowboarded alone while I binge-watched movies on my laptop in the chalet while the fire crackled. I slowly began breaking down mentally.
On the plane ride back to Lisbon I had a total breakdown, my self-talk became super negative, and I believed that I had done irreversible damage to my back.
When I arrived back in Lisbon and rebooted physiotherapy, pain meds, and tried swimming again I hit a wall: I couldn’t swim without back pain.
This was my lowest point: when I thought I wouldn’t heal my back and I’d live with chronic back pain for the rest of my life.
Six more years of chronic back pain (2017-2023)
In spring/early summer 2017 I was broken.
I carried a heavy weight on my shoulders: the notion that I had lost the only chance I had at healing my back by messing up recovery after the spinal surgery.
Somehow, the idea of spinal fusion surgery materialised. If I’d botched the first one, perhaps a second one, where rods and screws were inserted into my spine, would be the salve I’d been looking for?
As luck would have it, I would be counseled against spinal fusion surgery, initially by consulting with several medical professionals, later thanks to some who I met as clients during my work, and lastly when I went to Canada to spend time training with a Czech-Canadian athlete who’d broken his back and healed it with a sui generis method of his own.
That was the first time I’d seen the inside of a gym in 3 years (2016-2019). But a few months after returning from Vancouver I reinjured my back by doing weighted crunches and from that point on his method lost its effect.
And so the spinal fusion surgery, which was even booked (!) with another orthopaedic surgeon friend of my parents, never took place.
Along the way, I organised my entire life around avoiding back pain.
Meanwhile, years of avoiding physical exertion were leaving me progressively weaker and more deconditioned—the opposite of the physical resilience I would eventually need to rebuild.
I stopped carrying virtually any weight. I sat with one foot tucked up against my glute because I believed it kept my back straighter. I slept with my legs propped on a pile of pillows to keep my lumbar spine in what I considered the correct position. I wore gel-soled sneakers virtually 24/7. For two years, I even experimented with a quasi-carnivore diet.
I became compulsive about walking. If I'd been sitting with friends for 30 minutes, I'd get up and stand in the toilet until I decided enough time had passed for me to sit again. At work, I'd take laps around the office, attracting odd glances from colleagues. By mid-afternoon I was often so spent that I'd shut my laptop—even during a meeting if necessary—and go walking because I believed sitting any longer would worsen my back.
Eventually I kept an almost Inquisitorial diet-and-pain diary, recording what I ate, how I'd sat, how I'd moved and anything else that might explain a flare-up. I was trying to identify every deviation from what I thought was the correct path to healing.
Almost everything about that path, I would eventually discover, was wrong.
What finally changed my recovery (April 2023)
One thing I did right throughout those years: I never stopped searching. I kept reading, experimenting and trying new approaches. After a few medical professionals told me from 2017 onwards that recovery was still possible, I never completely gave up on it.
But sustained recovery only began when I discovered a side of chronic pain I had largely ignored: the psychological one. My attention was drawn to it when I fortuitously stumbled upon Phil Snell’s Fix Your Own Back online course and signed up for it.
Through Snell, I was introduced to the idea that persistent pain could involve a nervous system that had become increasingly sensitised, producing pain in response to movements that weren't necessarily causing new damage.
Phil Snell mentioned John Sarno. Something resonated, so I sought out Sarno’s books. And as I read them, and learned about Tension Myositis Syndrome – and statements of his such as that back pain was a “pathological emotion akin to depression” – I began to feel the pressure lifting and the pain easing.
Snell also recommended Curable. I downloaded the app and began working through its exercises and listening to Laura Seago's interviews with pain specialists. One idea in particular stayed with me: structural abnormalities on scans don't map neatly onto pain. Disc degeneration and herniations can appear in people without symptoms, while severe pain can exist without an obvious structural explanation.
For years I had interpreted virtually every painful sensation as evidence that something inside my back was being damaged. Gradually, that certainty began to crumble.
Expressive writing forced me to confront things I hadn't associated with my back at all. I realised, among other things, that I was far more of a people-pleaser than the assertive image I had of myself suggested, and that I had considerable difficulty saying no.
The exercises proved sufficiently useful that I signed up for Curable's group therapy programme. Curable group therapy inspired me to take up jogging again, after a 10-year hiatus. The feeling, as I ran down the boulevard, was indescribable. I felt free.
That night, as I turned in bed using the correct sleep posture Snell had taught me, pain that I had learned to be slightly skeptical about began coursing through my back. Instead of worrying that running had been deleterious, and lying awake for the rest of the night, I tried speaking to my amygdala, to my nervous system.
I told it “It’s okay, you’re going to be okay. I don’t need your pain signals anymore – I can take it from here.” I knew 5 minutes of running was not in any way damaging to my body.
To my astonishment, it worked.
Then I breathed in and out for 5 seconds each and eventually went back to sleep.
Rebuilding trust in my back (May-July 2023)
That jogging night was a watershed moment.
Another came after I increased the number of repetitions on the kettlebell box squat with a sumo deadlift pattern too suddenly. Pain flared up again and sleep was once more a shambles.
I sent Snell a video showing the form I’d used during the exercise, and we booked a videocall. Having reviewed it and found nothing wrong with my form, he told me that what I was experiencing was most likely top-down, or psychosomatic pain, rather than evidence that I’d injured my back again.
He ended the call with a prescription I’ll never forget: “Here’s my doctor’s scrip: go play, man.”
And so I went back to it.
As I became aware that recovery wasn’t linear, flare-ups stopped being so worrisome. More importantly, I started having longer periods without pain, and longer periods in which I simply didn’t think about my back.
Returning to lifting after years of back pain (August 2023)
Changing how I thought about pain didn't mean abandoning the physical side of recovery. Quite the opposite. At the same time that I was learning to stop treating every pain signal as evidence of damage, I was progressively asking my body to do more.
After some time doing the kettlebell box squat with a sumo deadlift pattern to strengthen my core, together with the Big Three I’d already been doing before discovering Snell, and push-ups, which I had finally been able to do, and then increase volume considerably, I went back to the gym.
I was still slightly apprehensive when I first returned to the gym, where I hadn’t been for 3 years (2020-2023). One of my worries was how I’d be able to sit without a back support in between sets.
I began by doing barbell bench press with very low weights. I also took up pull-ups again.
It didn't take long for me to discover that I could sit between sets, with my feet planted and my knees at roughly ninety degrees, without any back support—and nothing terrible happened.
Instead, rest in between sets allowed me to feel the endorphins and pleasure chemicals course through my body.
As I spent more time feeling good in my body, this offset and dedramatized the moments when I didn’t, for instance during flare-ups. They reduced in severity and frequency, and by 2024 were mostly a thing of the past.
As my confidence and strength increased, I replaced the kettlebell box squat with trap-bar deadlifts, and added dumbbell Bulgarian split squats to work on my glutes.
For someone who had once been told never to lift weights again, loading a deadlift pattern again carried a significance beyond the weight itself.
One thing I learnt in Curable group therapy stuck with me: extremely slow progression, so as not to overwhelm my nervous system.
That also meant abandoning the mentality with which I'd approached powerlifting in my twenties. I have the rest of my life to get stronger. No more ego.
Conclusion
For years, I thought recovery meant finding the right treatment that would finally fix whatever was damaged in my back. What ultimately worked for me was rebuilding physical capacity while gradually dismantling the fear, hypervigilance and beliefs about damage that had accumulated around the pain.
That doesn't mean I've returned to living exactly as I did before my back problems began. I haven't. I have systems in place. I exercise consistently, I'm thoughtful about how I sleep and train, and although I can sit for as long as I need to, I still prefer not to remain seated for unnecessarily long stretches. I also keep my spine in a neutral position for the most part, always avoiding bad postures.
The difference is that I no longer think consciously about these things. They've become habits running on autopilot, in the background.
And so most of the time, I don’t think about my back at all.