My Recent Back Pain Story
My last two posts have been about:
1. Moving even while experiencing pain
2. The immediate three thoughts that come to mind when reacting to a pain experience and how crucial they are.
I want to share with you a personal recent pain experience applying those two concepts. I hurt my back three weeks ago lifting a kettlebell off the floor that was not unusually heavy for me. Looking back, it’s not horribly surprising if I look at all the other factors affecting my body in that moment (because pain is caused by many different factors). I was rushing the workout because I had limited time, I was distracted and therefore not paying complete attention, I hadn’t lifted weights in two weeks, and I was feeling pretty emotionally low that week. On top of that, I had been experiencing unexplainable on and off back tension since October. I went to lift the kettlebell for my second repetition and I felt a strong, quick, and vast sensation across my low back and sacrum—one that was new to me in intensity and immediacy. Here were my first three thoughts.
1. Shit, that’s more intense than I’ve felt before.
2. WTF just happened?
3. Fine, let’s just walk it out and roll it out.
Let me expand on what these thoughts really meant.
I was taken aback by the fact that this was a new, quite painful sensation. There are the beginnings of a panicked reaction here for me.
I was pissed. It felt really out of the blue. I wasn’t lifting anything unusual or particularly difficult. I was also doing this workout to help myself get out of my emotional funk and now it felt like that had worked against me.
My reaction becomes more rational, logical, and solution oriented. The next doable step is to calm my nerves. I know that panic increases the pain experience and its after effects. I know that this moment isn’t the time to analyze things. I know that walking and breathing almost always works in these situations.
So I walked around my space, took deep breaths and I immediately began to calm down. It didn’t exacerbate the pain to walk and actually dissipated it a bit. I started testing what hurt and what didn’t—I assumed the role of a explorer of my own body. I would bend over— that didn’t feel good. I would sit—that was relieving — and then I would try getting up which didn’t feel so great. I grabbed a lacrosse ball and started rolling it out on the floor. Providing novel input (proprioception in this case) to the area can help change the output (pain). I also grabbed a soda can from the fridge and placed it on my back as well. The cold from the can plus the pressure from the ball could maybe provide input from two different sensory pathways. I played with gentle pelvic movements on the floor to keep from the whole area stiffening in a protective response. About 10 minutes later, I decided to continue my workout. I changed out the kettlebell I was using for a much lighter one, and I changed the exercise to a smilier one I felt I was willing to try. I tried one very slow, very mindful squat. The back pain was there but it felt doable. I proceeded to finish my workout—slower pace, less intensity than I had planned, but I did it.
I acted in a way that addressed each of those initial reactionary thoughts.
Pain intensity: What felt really intense and scary initially, about an 8 out of 10 on a pain scale, was now a 5 or 6 out of 10.
Out of control: I felt out of control and confused at what happened. What could have been an end to my workout and therefore an end to any exercise the rest of the week turned into me choosing to finish my workout in a way that felt manageable. This made me feel in control, it made me feel hopeful, and it made me feel like I hadn’t just wasted an hour of my day.
Needing to stay rational and objective: My immediate action reflected respect for my body—slowing down and breathing so as to calm down and make smart choices. This allowed me to then assess with an open mind what I could and could not do. I could have chosen to catastrophize mentally and immobilize physically without going through this process. But I assessed first, and then chose an appropriate course of action. Calming my nerves as that first step was as essential to decreasing the pain as was using the ball and soda can for sensory feedback.
It took about a week for the pain to completely go away. My 1, 2, 3 process had an immediate effect on the following moments of that incident as well as the following days. The intensity of pain kept reducing, I continued to move and exercise in ways that made sense, and I reached out to my support system —I texted two colleague friends and met with my own movement coach who helped me see some asymmetries in my movement patterns that might be contributing to these bouts of pain. Don’t get me wrong, I was absolutely frustrated, but I didn’t let my frustration rule the way forward.
To be completely honest though, throughout this experience I was really hard on myself. You see, I have been experiencing low back tension on and off since October, but I wasn’t expecting it to come back forcefully like it did. When it did, I felt like a fraud. Here I am, a movement coach selling myself as someone who helps others with their pain, and I can’t seem to figure out what’s going on with my back. Then a wonderful friend and colleague had to remind me of my own business model! My ethos is NOT that pain doesn’t exist, will never happen, or can be totally avoided. It is NOT that I have all the answers to why we have the pain we have. What I try to convey through my work with clients and in these writings is that pain is multifaceted, it is impermanent, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve damaged anything in there, and it doesn’t mean you should stop moving. Pain is not the enemy, it’s the teacher.
Can I ensure this won’t happen again? No. Will it always be that quick to go away? Maybe not. But the process will be similar: avoid catastrophization, continue to move in ways that I can, find support, and learn something about my body from the experience.
keep moving.