Hip rotation during high efforts

Hey,
I am fighting long term with some left sided, muscular lower back pain which is hard to localize. I don’t notice it during riding, just when moving my hip around at home.
I had many theories what might cause it but with little conclusions so far.

One of them is the way I rotate my hip very much backwards during high intensity efforts, which makes my back taking over some part of the force generation.
If I force myself to avoid that and therefore keeping my hip rotated forward and my back much more hollow, the strain goes away from my lower back and my upper quads seem to take over a much bigger portion of the work. I bascially can only hold this very briefly, as my quads are nowhere near to being adapted to that.
If I would know that this would help controlling that lower back issue, I’d try to work on it to maintain this position more regularly.

So I wonder what you are doing during high efforts? Rotate you hip forward and work more with your quads? Or backwards to let your back take over?
Any educated opinion an what is more correct or better?

Thank you!

Do you have a leg length difference? It’s common, and typically results in sitting somewhat wonky on the saddle (for example shifting more to one side or rotating more to one side). If so, a solution is to change the height of your shoe on the shorter side, either with shims between the cleat and sole, or with a footbed inside the shoe.

Or if you had some sort of injury on one side (hip/knee/ankle), you couldnhave reduced mobility on that side. For example if you had a tighter hamstring on one side, you might compensate by rotating to open the hip more on that side. If that’s the case, mobility work / stretching might help.

Also, if you set your bike up, set it up for the shorter or less flexible side.

I believe my legs are equally long but due to many years of boxing in northpath stance my lower body is an asymetric mess, shortened left calf and hip flexor which I also feel on the bike.
And I adjusted my position in favor of the problematic left side to still have good control of the pedal there.
So yea, thats probably part of the cause and not sure if it could be corrected with almost 50y.

Therefore my doubt/question if it would not be better to just rotate my hip more forward and therefore move more strain from my lower back to my quads.

Yes? Your quads are stronger muscles, and you’d want to avoid rounding your back too much. But it could also be something that could be helped with changing how your bike is setup (especially if it’s one-sided), in which case a bike fitter might help.

Lastly I believe that at some point of a long, hard effort, something has got to give. Lower back pain seems quite common, looking at the amount of pros that stretch their back during races. Maybe it’s just a sign that your back muscles still need to adapt.

That’s not the case at all unfortunately. As I tried to explain, if I rotate my hips forward to shift strain from the lower back to the quads, the latter give up during high efforts pretty quickly.
I would probaboy need to adapt pretty long term to change that and I wonder if it’s worth it.