Fitness Carter

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Indoorsman plus yoga equals back pain - Yakima Herald-Republic


My father has a bad back that has required multiple surgeries. My younger brother has a bad back that forces him to lie still on the floor for days at a time. I had my first serious back pain when I was about 12. We are a family of bad backs.


And the thing about back pain, as opposed to a sprained ankle or tennis elbow, is that there’s no way to mitigate it while still going through your day-to-day life. You can’t NOT use your back. It hurts to stand, but it hurts even more to sit. Kneeling? Ha! Forget about it. Even lying down is uncomfortable. That’s why my brother, whose back has historically been even worse than mine, is always given an actual bed when we visit my parents at the same time, relegating me to a futon.


But, anyway, yeah, I’ve had back pain a couple of times a year every year since I was a kid. And this most recent case might be the worst yet. As opposed to most back-pain episodes, which crop up at random for seemingly no reason, I know exactly what caused this problem: I was doing yoga.


I was mostly doing it because, at least in the past, it has helped my back feel better. But it turns out that when you don’t really know how to do yoga and you push yourself a little too hard too fast, you can get hurt. So there I was, bent over and twisted when I felt a very sharp, immediate pain.


Because I am an idiot, and because I never feel comfortable at the yoga place — everyone else is in deep, peaceful meditation, while I grunt and wobble from side to side trying to maintain balance — I didn’t say anything. I just kept doing the yoga to the best of my already limited ability.


By the next morning, I could barely move. Later that day, my doctor explained that I had somehow gotten my sacroiliac joint out of alignment. I nodded, pretending I had heard those words before and knew what they meant, and he prescribed a bunch of stretches to help it get back into alignment. Oh, and muscle relaxers. Blessed, miraculous muscle relaxers.


That was more than a week ago now, and it has gotten better. This despite some unwise decisions on my part (chopping wood, lifting heavy things, wrestling with my dogs). Now I’m at the point at which the baseline pain isn’t so bad, just an ache and some stiffness. But when I bend the wrong way, or if I sit for too long, that pain flares up. It feels like the lower right of my back is being eaten by piranhas whose jaws are on fire.


And I know that even when this pain is entirely gone, my back is still going to be bad. All the yoga and core-strengthening workouts and stretching in the world won’t change the fact that every once in a while I am going to have back pain. This is my life now, as it is for my father and brother.


On the plus side, I wrote this column on the same day I flew home to Michigan for a late family Christmas, and I think maybe this time my back pain is bad enough to compete with my brother for a claim on a real bed.


— The Indoorsman


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