Back health learnings
Although I am no professional, I have learned a good portion in the past three years that I turned on the health and fitness light switch (burned off 20% body fat in 2009, aka 50 lbs), which because of that processes I have become conscious of ways to self-treat my back, shoulder, and leg foot pain troubles.
You are welcome to leave comments here if you like
or just gleam from my learning if you have time to read this.
My friend Jerry has overcome significant back damage and pain from his early years of dirt motorcycle racing crashes using what he/I have learned from the “Texas Back Institute” in the DFW area (and their book “Back In Shape”); and some other folk’s book called “Trigger Point Therapy.” Both are regarded well, and variants are used to treat normal people as well as athletes. What me and my friend have learned is something that does sadden me that so many of my friends have gone under the knife to fix discs, fuse bone, or carpel tunnel; which often was not the last treatment prescription after several other preventative/restorative items are used as suggested by Texas Back Institute and Trigger Point folks. Some top hitting preventative/restorative items I try to incorporate into life as much as possible include stretching, exercise, deep tissue massage/trigger point therapy, and changing positions and standing at the desk job. For back health exercise to overcome my potential for Sciatica, I focus on increasing core strength via appropriate (if/any) amount of weight for squats and dead-lifts, and also since the abdomen is a huge player to fortify back strength I use various non-flexion (non-spin bending) core/abdominal exercises. What I have become very conscious of is as we age and over/under use our body knotted up muscles form. These are called trigger points and cause imbalances in the skeletal/muscular system, which sometimes happens without associated pain. Most often, knotted muscles pinch nerves or over-stress compensating muscles that triggers the body to kick-in basic pain response mechanisms in a way that the pain very often be felt in an area away from the knotted muscle (i.e. my foot arch pain is relieved by massaging calf muscles). Trigger point therapy is unique in that it is a self (or assisted) deep tissue massage treatment of something very physical, overactive knotty muscle fibers that need specific deep massage to smooth out tenderly sore and knotted muscle fiber.
Bottom line, sometimes early attention can mitigate or avoid the practice of using the knife to treat ruptured discs and pinched nerve pain sensations when the abdominal core muscles are strengthened, knotted muscles are smoothed out with deep tissue massage, and stretches are used to lengthen muscles shortened from overuse/underuse.
Hope to help, and certainly hoping for your quick recovery.
p.s. this article will be revised with links to the resources.
Go Massive for your Physique Delta
Brian
