Lifting and hemorrhoids in Montreal: change, not stop
People who train come in expecting to be told to stop, and that is almost never the right advice. The mechanism points at how you breathe under load rather than at whether you should be under load at all.
A heavy lift is usually done braced, which means holding your breath against a closed throat to stiffen the trunk. That raises pressure inside the abdomen, and that pressure is the same thing straining on a toilet produces. The load is not the variable; the breath-holding under it is.
Which reframes the whole conversation rather usefully. It is the same mechanism as the one that already applies to you in the bathroom, simply arriving from a different direction, and it responds to a change in technique rather than to abandoning the activity altogether.
That makes this much closer to the straining argument than to anything dietary at all. Toilet habits covers the other route to exactly the same pressure, why they come back covers why pressure is the whole recurrence story, and conservative care covers the rest.
Training in Montreal
What to change
Adjusting training in Montreal, not quitting
Breathe through the reps
Rather than holding one long brace across a whole set. This is the single change with the mechanism behind it.
Reconsider maximal attempts
Not training itself. The heaviest single attempts are where bracing is hardest to avoid, and they are also optional.
Keep training otherwise
Giving up exercise has its own costs and is almost never the advice that fits what is actually going on.
Fix the bathroom side too
Because the same pressure arrives from both directions, and only one of them is anybody else’s business.
No weight limit
Why no weight threshold appears
There is no number of kilograms on this page above which hemorrhoids become likely. Nothing in the research behind this site establishes one, and a threshold invented to sound authoritative would either frighten people away from useful training or reassure them about a technique problem.
The variable that has a mechanism behind it is the breath rather than the bar. Someone bracing hard against a moderate weight is doing more of the relevant thing than someone breathing steadily through a heavy one, so a weight limit would be measuring entirely the wrong quantity anyway.
For what the sources do and do not actually settle here, the evidence guide is the honest version of it. What the evidence says covers the general policy on this, conservative care covers the levers that are supported, and aftercare covers training after a procedure.
BracingThe mechanism
Rarely rightAdvice to stop training
NoneWeight threshold here
Related
Where the same pressure shows up in Montreal
The other route to the same mechanism, the recurrence argument, and what to do after a procedure.
What people who train ask, usually braced for being told to give it up.
Almost never. The mechanism points at holding your breath under load rather than at the load itself, so the useful change is in how you breathe through a set rather than whether you train.
There is no sourced weight threshold, so none is printed here. Someone bracing hard against a moderate weight is doing more of the relevant thing than someone breathing through a heavy one.
Those are where bracing is hardest to avoid, and they are also the most optional part of most training. Reconsidering them is a smaller sacrifice than stopping altogether.
Nothing in the sources behind this site addresses belts specifically, so no claim is made either way. The breath-holding is the mechanism, whatever is around your waist while it happens.
Leave heavy lifting for a bit and keep the rest. The aftercare page covers the days afterwards, and the review appointment is the place to ask about your specific training.
Not by this mechanism, which is about bracing rather than exertion. Running and cycling do not involve holding your breath against a closed throat in the way a heavy lift does.
Lifting
The breath, not the bar
Bracing is the mechanism
Holding your breath against a closed throat raises abdominal pressure, which is what straining also does.
Change, do not quit
Giving up training has its own costs and is almost never the advice that fits what is going on.
No weight limit
None was sourced, and a threshold would measure the wrong quantity, because the breath is the variable.
Same pressure, two routes
The bathroom and the barbell arrive at the same mechanism, and one of them is cheaper to fix.
