2025 Australian Volleyball Development Tour. Aaron Tay, centre row, far left.

Volleyball back pain.

If you’re a volleyball athlete dealing with low back tightness, fatigue, or pain, you’re not alone. It’s one of the most common issues we see in both youth and national pathway players. Volleyball demands explosive movement, rotation, and repetition. This adds up over time if your body can’t keep up.

What’s causing your volleyball back pain?

It’s rarely just one thing! Volleyball back pain in athletes is usually a mix of:

• Poor recovery between sessions
• Relative overload or too much increase in training volume
• Muscle fatigue, weakness or imbalances
• Movement control issues
• Past injuries e..g stress reactions, fractures, or pars defects

And here’s the tricky part – we’re not always sure which came first. Did the weakness cause the pain, or did the pain cause the weakness? A classic chicken and egg problem!

Volleyball Back Pain Patterns

Star Physio have been looking after the best volleyball athletes in Australia since 1997! We have been trusted with the annual screening of all Volleyball WA youth athletes as well as the Perth Steel Volleyball Teams. Our many years of screening show that athletes with a history of low back pain often have:

• Poor control and reported difficulty in a single leg squat or bridge
• Side plank differences between left and right sides
• Shorter than normative prone plank times for athlete age & weight
• Increased hitting reps over a short span of time
• Deconditioned from holidays/off season

Our experienced clinicians can identify these issues. From there we will help guide injury prevention, rehabilitation, and return to performance targeted training.

What about Stress Fractures?

Bone loading is part of sport. Appropriate loading of bone makes us stronger and resilient to injury. Overloading of bone, like any other tissue in the body can lead to pain and damage. Growing bodies are more susceptible to bony injury as the skeletal system does not fully mature for most of us until our 20s.

Identifying bony change in volleyball back pain may be important. Evidence however shows us that many growing athletes show bony change or bone oedema on MRI, even when they have no pain!

Often when health professionals see these changes in an athlete with lower back pain, the immediate instruction is prolonged rest. This is seldom necessary and the MRI changes may be completely incidental findings! Complete rest causes weakness, reduces fitness, detraining and sometimes an increase in pain!

Get a second opinion from an expert at Star Physio if you have been told you need extended time away from volleyball or your chosen sport because of your scan findings. Correct management and modification of training program can keep you on the court and get you back to your best sooner! Combine this with appropriate exercises and we can help you get rid of your pain while making you a better volleyball athlete!

The Star Physio approach to Volleyball Back Pain

Our volleyball specific screening includes a pilot Modified Biering-Sørensen Test with 20% bodyweight resistance. It gives a quicker, more realistic picture of your back endurance during actual gameplay. Star Physio will be collecting data from Western Australian volleyball players, including the state youth teams and Perth Steel athletes to help better understand the relationship between lower back endurance and pain.

We also use other McGill Core Endurance tests – side planks, prone planks – where normative values have been established in both general populations and athletic cohorts, offering useful benchmarks for comparison. These are backed by solid research and used across high-performance programs.

These tests are part of how we keep players strong, balanced, and game-ready. This is essential, whether that’s for club, state, or national squad selection. As part of the extended team working with Volleyball Australia pathway athletes, we’re proud to bring the same high-performance standards to our WA athletes!

If you’re dealing with low back pain, don’t wait! Book in with Aaron or one of the other Star Physio experts soon. If you’re pain-free, you’re welcome to reach out for screening and advice. We offer our volleyball specific screening to all volleyball athletes keen to minimise injury and maximise performance, regardless of whether you are a state or national team .

Star Physio are here to help motivated athletes move better, play longer, and stay pain-free! We can also help your better, understand what pain is safe to play through.

You can read more about Star Physios work with Volleyball here.

Aaron Tay leads Australian Volleyball Team Stretching