He was attempting to make a few college buddies smile. He succeeded, never knowing the cost would be intermittent misery for nearly a quarter century.

Kevin Young, a fine art teacher and a friend of mine, shared the backstory to his bad back story not so long ago. I smiled, not because I took pleasure in his periodic pain, but because he had found relief by following the Fitness Master's favorite prescription.Without it ever being prescribed to him.Last week, you read how research cited in Time magazine's June 5 feature article by Alexandra Sifferlin, "The Weight Loss Trap," asserts what I first speculated more than 30 years ago: that no two people turn food into energy - or stored fat -in quite the same way.As a result, the most effective diet for you has to be individualized, something that can only be achieved through what is quickly becoming this column's catchphrase: experimentation, experimentation, experimentation.Such experimentation - assuming it's prudent experimentation - can also abate or even eliminate some other health and fitness problems, such as Kevin Young's bad back.To understand just how, put yourself in Kevin's place.Imagine driving golf balls at a driving range in a bit of a summertime drizzle. College-aged and carrying the air of indestructibility that comes with such youth, you decide to make your buddies laugh by taking a really exaggerated, goofy golf swing.Maybe because the drizzle has made the astroturf mat slick or maybe because your footwear is flip-flops, but you slip on the follow-through. You fall to a knee, experiencing a degree of pain you've never experienced before. Its sharpness scares the daylights out of you, but you tough it out and somehow get home.The resiliency of youth allows you to recover fairly quickly and without ever seeing a doctor. The naivety and arrogance of it leads you to believe that your time in hell is over, that it will never happen again.Until it does. About one year later.But the recurrence makes sense, as do all those that follow. A change in temperature, an unusual movement, and voila - the sort of pain that forces your hands to find support and beads sweat across your forehead. The painful pattern continues, becomes nearly as predictable and regular as the change of seasons.And the seasons just keep changing. You marry. Buy a house. Have three children.Years pass, you find yourself on a ladder reaching for a wire and - oh boy! - a stabbing pain that keeps you from breathing deeply sends you to the emergency room. Recovery takes longer this time. You know you need a chiropractor or surgery or something.You settle on the something. And that means taking matters into your own hands.You try strengthening the back and the supporting musculature through Pilates. A few of the movements in particular really help. Unfortunately, the workouts take time - time that you'd rather spend on the house and the kids - so the workouts die out in a couple of months.Shortly afterward, you have this thought: Doing a few dozen pushups doesn't take much time at all. And the plank position required to perform them properly is somewhat similar to the Pilates movement that felt the best on your back.So you drop to the floor even though your back feels a bit sore, knock out a few dozen reps, and - voila - your back feels better immediately. Maybe the position releases the pressure on the disks, or maybe it keeps inflamed muscles from pressing against nerves, or maybe the relief results from some sort of placebo effect.You're not quite sure why this is working - neither does your buddy at work who knows a thing or two about these matters - but who cares?You just know your back feels better, so you keep experimenting with your "pushups prescription" to keep it that way.Eventually, you settle on an every-other-day regimen in the morning where you maintain perfect form and go by feel. Most often you do three sets of 12, but sometimes instinct tells you to abandon that.Sometimes, increasing the rep speed along with the number of reps feels good. Sometimes, when your back doesn't feel so good, you drop to your knees and pump out "girly" pushups.Whatever. Because whatever it takes to keep your back pain at bay is whatever you'll do.********In short, my repeated suggestions for you to experiment endlessly as a way to optimize your health and fitness could fall on deaf ears if I always use my own examples. Many people - including more than a few readers, I'm sure - find my approach to health and fitness extreme and impractical.But Kevin Young's isn't. He's healthy, fairly fit, far from an over-the-top fanatic, and far more like you than I'll ever be. Yet without any prodding from me, he experimented, experimented, and experimented until he virtually eliminated a recurring major health malady.You can too if need be. Trust me.