Back Pain and Exercise

Back Pain Can Make You Really Miserable!

I am completely out of shape… I haven’t been to the gym in 9 months, and I did it on purpose!

I went back to the gym this morning and did a really wimpy workout.

I’ve been working with a new chiropractor, and she advised me to stop working out.  The reason made sense to me.  She was working on my muscles in an attempt to help my ever worsening scoliosis, and she needed to isolate the state of my back relative only to what she was doing.  If I had a problem during the week or did well, it needed to be clear that whatever happened was because of her work on my back.  If I were working out and had a bad week, it would be impossible to know if I had done something at the gym or if it was something she had done in her therapy.

Back in 2007, I had gone to see a conventional back specialist because of my back pain.  He slapped an x-ray of one of his patients, an 80 year old woman, up on the light box next to the x-ray of my spine and said, “We can do this for you, too.”  “This” was a rod and pins in my back to straighten the worsening curve in my spine.

I declined the offer of surgery.  My goal is to stay as far away from convention medicine and surgeries as possible.

Since then, I’ve been on a mission to solve/alleviate/improve the condition of my back and to manage my chronic back pain.  This ranged from chiropractic treatments to acupuncture to Back Book Camp (twice) to a program that helped me quite a bit at Lose The Back Pain.  In spite of my efforts, I was still in pain with no real improvement in my condition; no change in the structure of my spine.  There was temporary alleviation of the pain from time to time, but the condition continued to worsen.

Quite by accident I was introduced to a new chiropractor.  It’s funny how things happen…  At my office, we had hired a new administrator; I had just come back from a horrible, tortured flight back from a conference in Las Vegas; I was complaining in my office about my unbearable back pain courtesy of weather problems with the flight that turned a 5 hour trip into a 13 hour ordeal.

Our new administrator appeared at my desk with the name and number of her chiropractor.  She said this chiropractor used massage in her treatment of back issues.  I was pretty desperate… wearing a back brace a lot of the time to help me stand up at this point, and really moving through the day from sitting down to sitting down.  My time standing up was as brief and as orchestrated and productive as possible as it didn’t last very long.

I began seeing this new chiropractor, and much as my new way of eating opened up a new world of being freed from depression, this new doctor began to slowly free me from back pain.

Today, I haven’t had a chiropractic adjustment in about nine months, and my spine is not as badly curved.  Hard to believe, but her work on my muscles has allowed my spine to be less pulled out and the resulting muscle spasms are mostly gone.  It’s been a remarkable journey.

Along the way though, I’ve lost a lot of muscle tone.  This does not make me happy, and I don’t like the way I feel in that respect.

Today, I returned to the gym.  What a wimpy workout though!  My doctor suggested I just remind my muscles they are there, so that’s where I began.  I did a very watered down combination of my Back Boot Camp protocol and the exercises I learned at LosetheBackPain.com.

Before, I was leg pressing well over 100 pounds; today I started with 30!  I am determined to come back and regain my strength and my muscle tone.  It will take a while as I have to add weight and repetitions very slowly so I don’t hurt myself.  I’m someone who tends to go gangbusters at something and not be reasonable.  I hurt myself; I have to stop; I have to heal; I have to begin again.

This time I’m really trying to be smart and patient with myself and with my back.

This is not unlike losing weight, changing your diet or incorporating any new behavior that really benefits you long term.  It’s ok to take baby steps as long as you keep moving in the right direction, and if you screw up, don’t give up.  Begin again.

In short, I’m trying to take my own advice…

Helping You Live Healthier in a Major Way!

Cheryl A Major, CNWC