Edward’s Back Pain Recovery: From Oil Rig Worker to Pain-Free Movement – Complete Guide for 2025

📖 Read Time: 12 Minutes | 🎯 Difficulty: All Levels | ⛽ Focus: Back Pain Relief & Mobility

Meet Edward

Add that he has been training with weights for 16 years and started also teaching yoga. At first, it seems like his weightlifting training helps in taking care of his body. Soon, Edward felt its drawbacks that heavily affected both of his work.

• Edward has been experiencing injuries, regular lower back pains and a limited range of motion because of immobility.
• He feels tired and too exhausted for his work after his weight lifting sessions.
• He finds it inconvenient developing his own workout program when he has so many responsibilities already.

Edward decided that this isn’t the approach he wanted for his fitness journey. Calisthenics is the answer since it allows him to feel a sense of personal achievement when learning a skill. The next question was what program should he follow.

After some incompatible tries with other apps, a friend of his recommended The Movement Athlete Academy. That’s when he changed his life.

Now, Edward is really taking care of his body even with the everyday stress he faces with his physical workload. He said goodbye to his body pains and can now move freely as he wishes. He still gets stronger and even prepares his joints in the long run. All of these at the comforts of a tap on his mobile phone.

Here’s Edward’s story:

👉👉Weightlifting doesn’t help with work

“Because I’ve been teaching yoga for 18 months now. I’ve found after a year of teaching yoga that sometimes it was just too hard after doing a big weight session.”

Edward has a pretty good experience with yoga. He would also like to build muscle for aesthetics purposes and of course, muscle allows for strength growth. As said earlier, he has been training with weights for 16 years. That has stopped now. Why? Because of the conflict weight lifting brings to his work.

Aside from working at an oil rig (Which is already very physically and mentally exhaustive), he works also as a yoga teacher. A heavy weight lifting session doesn’t go well for his body when he needs to teach yoga because he’s already too tired from the former exercise.

If you want to maximize your gains in the gym, you really need to push it hard. Unfortunately, this leaves your body too tired for any other physical activity. Not to mention you’ll already feel DOMS (Delayed On-set Muscle Soreness) which will make your muscles ache for a day or two. With DOMS, I doubt that you can even properly stretch out your arms.

Imagine you need to carry something heavy for work, but your arms hurt like their going to fall out of their sockets with just a tad pressure applied to them. The pain Edward experienced troubled him in his yoga classes and in the oil rig.

Edward’s immobility can be attributed to his weight lifting. To be fair, weight lifting does not worsen your mobility. It actually improves it! So should Edward blame for his situation? It’s still weightlifting.

Improper form with weight lifting generates these stiff joints and muscles. (5 Easy ways to start mobility training) The risk is always there. Even if you’re 100% sure you’re doing the exercises right, you really can’t tell because all of a sudden, the pain will hit you like a truck.

A better approach to fitness is the remedy that Edward found.

❌Regular visits of pain

Training with weights, especially if you’re the one making your own workout program, is prone to muscle imbalances. There could be lagging muscles that aren’t trained that much or not at all. The lower back and spinal muscles (also the legs) are the common victims of this issue.

When you have lagging lower back muscles, they have a hard time supporting your developing body because of your weight lifting training. They can’t keep up with the muscles you build because they aren’t being trained as well.

From free trial to 1 year 🔐

“I was looking for a bodyweight app. One of my other mates had tried it from the free trial. So I got onto it and then I really liked it. So I paid for the year membership. I love it. I found results real quick too.”

Edward asked for a recommendation from a friend. Fortunately, he was referred to none other than The Movement Athlete Academy.

He got into the 7-day free trial period and when straight to a year membership access. He finally has gotten the results he was looking for.

Free to move. Free from pain. Getting stronger, more mobile, and healthier in a stress-free and care-free approach.

WEIGHTLIFTING🏋️‍♀️ VS CALISTHENICS 🤸‍♀️

“Whereas with body weight, there’s less injury I’ve noticed than lifting heavyweight. The definition I’m getting, I’m not getting as much size, but the size isn’t as important as mobility for myself.”

Edward now enjoys the lower risks of injuries. With calisthenics, you’re only dealing with your bodyweight and maneuvering your body in the given space and accessible equipment in order to change the difficulty of the exercises.

Where is weight lifting, you’re dealing with loads that could be higher than your bodyweight. Other than with the obvious risks of getting slammed by a barbell or dumbbell that’s too heavy for you, heavier weights bring risks of breaking form.

And as we said earlier (5 Easy ways to start mobility training), breaking form with weights delivers you to the world of immobility and the house of pain.

On another note, calisthenics does not deliver the immediate size you can gain from weightlifting but it offers you mobility.

“A huge difference in mobility.”

The mobility you can from calisthenics translates very well to yoga and even outside the fitness realm. Mobility offers you freedom from joint paints due to limitations and restrictions in your movement.

When you’re mobile, you can move freely without a care in the world. What’s also important is that it helps you maintain your youth in your movement as you battle the inevitable effects of age.

Even though Edward has two very physically demanding jobs; one at the oil rig and as a yoga instructor, he still finds the time to workout. He shifted from lifting weights to calisthenics because he enjoys much more benefits from the process and results of the latter’s approach.

Here are just some of the benefits he is now enjoying because of training calisthenics through The Movement Athlete Academy:

• Still getting stronger
• More fitness attributes are trained such as balance, endurance, and muscle definition
• He has fewer risks of injuries
• Gains personal achievement through skill training
• He has now a rock-solid core
• He enjoys a wide variation of progressions
• Care-free and stress-free program design
• Freedom from pain and freedom to move in the long run
• And more importantly, the app helps him to consistently train to consistently make gains

At the end of the day, what you need is to train with an approach that keeps you consistent, motivated and gets you closer to your goals in a fun way for you.

Edward happens to find this with The Movement Athlete Academy. How about you? Have you tried the app?

Give it a try and let us know what you think! 💪💪

Reference:
Schoenfeld, B. J., Contreras, B., Krieger, J., Grgic, J., Delcastillo, K., Belliard, R., & Alto, A. (2019). Resistance Training Volume Enhances Muscle Hypertrophy but Not Strength in Trained Men. Medicine and science in sports and exercise, 51(1), 94–103. doi:10.1249/MSS.0000000000001764