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Exercise and lifting
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.
Bracing
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.
What to change
Rather than holding one long brace across a whole set. This is the single change with the mechanism behind it.
Not training itself. The heaviest single attempts are where bracing is hardest to avoid, and they are also optional.
Giving up exercise has its own costs and is almost never the advice that fits what is actually going on.
Because the same pressure arrives from both directions, and only one of them is anybody else’s business.
No weight limit
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.
Related
The other route to the same mechanism, the recurrence argument, and what to do after a procedure.
The other route to the same abdominal pressure, and the cheaper one to fix.
Learn moreWhy pressure rather than tissue is the whole recurrence story.
Learn moreWhat to leave alone for a bit once something has been treated.
Learn moreThe three levers that are actually supported by the sources.
Learn moreCommon questions
What people who train ask, usually braced for being told to give it up.
I lift weights and was told elsewhere to stop. They said change the breathing and the loading, not the sport. That worked.
The advice on lifting was specific and practical. Nothing about giving up what I do.
They explained how straining during a lift matches straining on the toilet and what to change in both.
Back to training two weeks after banding with the modifications they described. No problems since.
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Nobody here will open with telling you to give up exercise. Tell us what you lift and how you breathe through it, and we will work from there.
If something does need leaving alone for a while, you will be told what and roughly why.