Kellie’s Story: From Modified F45 Workouts to Back at Five Days a Week, Pain-Free

Active in: F45 Training  |  Condition: Recurring lower back pain that had progressively worsened  |  Outcome: Back to 5 days a week of unmodified F45 workouts, pain-free — and staying that way after discharge

The Problem

When Kellie came to RXN Performance, she was already tired of chasing the same back pain in circles. She’d tried other chiropractors. She’d tried physical therapy. The pain always came back, and by the time she reached out to us it had gotten noticeably worse.

The real-world impact showed up in her training. She’d been an F45 regular — 5 days a week. By the time she started with us she was down to 2 days a week, modifying almost every movement, and constantly worried mid-workout that her back was about to flare up. Her sessions had become an exercise in avoidance rather than actual training.

She wasn’t looking for another round of temporary relief. She wanted the problem fixed.

What Kellie Had Already Tried

• Previous chiropractic care
• Physical therapy

Both had helped short-term. Neither had gotten her out of the cycle. If anything, the pattern was heading the wrong direction — the pain was becoming more frequent and more limiting, not less.

What We Found in the Assessment

The movement assessment told a clearer story than “her back hurts.” Two upstream drivers were doing the actual work:

• Limited left hip internal rotation. When one hip can’t rotate inward properly, everything that requires hip mechanics — squatting, hinging, single-leg loading, lateral movement — has to steal that motion from somewhere else. Almost always, the somewhere-else is the lumbar spine.
• A small issue at the left knee. Not big on its own, but combined with the hip restriction it changed how her whole left side loaded during F45’s lower-body movements.

The downstream effect was consistent and predictable: Kellie was shifting load into the right side of her lower back on every session that involved squatting, deadlifting, or lunging. Weeks of that compensation, workout after workout, is exactly the kind of pattern that generates recurring low back pain — even when nothing structural is wrong with the spine itself.

Note what wasn’t the problem: her lumbar spine. That’s why treating the back had produced only short-term relief before.

The Treatment Plan

Two priorities, worked in parallel:

• Restore left hip internal rotation. Joint mobility work combined with targeted loading so the new range would actually hold under real training conditions.
• Address the left knee mechanics and build strength through the surrounding pattern so her left side could carry its share of the load again.

Once those two pieces were addressed, we progressively rebuilt her tolerance for the movements she’d been avoiding at F45. The training got harder as her mechanics got better. That’s the sequence that matters — not “get out of pain, then think about training later.”

The Outcome

Kellie went from 2 modified days a week at F45 to 5 unmodified days a week, pain-free. She stopped negotiating with her back mid-workout. She stopped skipping movements.

The most useful metric isn’t just that she got there. It’s that she stayed there after we discharged her. Nothing came back. That’s the point of the model — we don’t want you dependent on ongoing visits to stay out of pain. We want the mechanics rebuilt well enough that you carry it forward on your own.

“I was dealing with intense lower back pain for over a month — just walking or standing for more than 10 minutes was unbearable. Ryan not only helped relieve the pain, but he also focused on strengthening the surrounding muscles to prevent it from coming back. This wasn’t just a quick fix — it was a long-term solution. Now I’m back to working out, walking, and living pain-free. Huge thank you to Ryan for helping me get my life (and back!) on track!”

— Kellie, RXN Performance patient (Google review)

Why This Worked When Other Care Hadn’t

The chiropractors and PTs Kellie had seen weren’t wrong — they were just treating the loud joint instead of the quiet driver. Adjustments and rehab focused on the lumbar spine give temporary relief because they’re addressing the symptom. Kellie’s actual problem was upstream: a left hip that couldn’t rotate and a left knee that couldn’t participate. Until those two issues got fixed, her spine was going to keep paying for it — no matter how many times someone worked on her back directly.

At RXN Performance, every recurring lower back pain case starts with a full movement assessment for exactly this reason. If the driver isn’t in the same room as the symptom, you’ll never resolve it by treating where it hurts.

Could This Work For You?

If you’ve been dealing with recurring back pain that keeps coming back despite other care — especially if you’ve had to scale your training around it — a movement assessment is the right next step. We’ll figure out whether the same up-the-chain pattern that drove Kellie’s case is driving yours, and if it isn’t, we’ll be straight about what is.

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Written by Dr. Ryan Giniel, D.C., founder of RXN Performance in Uptown Dallas. More about Dr. Ryan →