If exercising means you strain muscles to grow them, why does straining your back hurt it instead of making it stronger?
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When you exercise a muscle, you’re subjecting it to some amount of stress that it needs to increase its ability to continue doing. When you hurt your back from awkward motions it isn’t meant to make under load or an excessive/ sudden load, you’re putting stress not only into the muscles but also the other parts of your back like the connective tissues, the discs in the spine, etc or in some cases pinching nerves between tensed muscles. These other tissues don’t heal the same way muscle tissue does. It can be much slower or sometimes that relatively small amount of damage just never heals in a way that makes it like it was before the damage. Muscle is really good at healing quickly, but other soft tissues aren’t quite so good at it things like nerves, cartilage, and ligaments are really bad at it and tendons can be kinda bad at it sometimes too.
Long story short, the motions you make when straining your back are most likely not the motions your back is designed to make under load. Moving it in a motion it wasn’t designed to while under load risks damaging more than just the muscle.
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