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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You don’t strain muscles to grow them, you stress them. A ‘Strain’ in regards to muscle is it’s own identifiable thing. The definition of a strain is some level of tearing. They are graded (I, II, and III) by the percentage of tearing that occurs. This *is* an injury.
HOWEVER. Strains often occur with normal physical training, but they are not necessary to grown the muscle.
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.
Back is a general term.
Your spine is obviously not a muscle. Yes there are muscles in your back, but back injuries aren’t generally muscular.
If you strain a muscle in your arm enough to hurt it or a ligament, you will try to use it less so you feel less pain.
If you strain a muscle in your back the same way, it’s much harder to walk around and not use your back muscles so it will constantly pain you unless you sit or lie down until it heals.
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