There are all types of pain in life. The pain from heartache after love lost. The pain that comes along with learning a hard lesson. The pain when you put everything into something, and it didn't end the way you thought it would. Those types of pain help you grow and often discover yourself along the healing path. Then there is the pain that rips you out of your sleep in the dead of night. The pain that makes you drip sweat from your brow and seizes your breath. That physical pain is the type of pain where you get help because your body is telling you in the most outright way that you need more than just a few Advil and some time off.
In my twenties, I thought in the sense of invincibility. If I were injured, it would be in a moment when I faced a grueling soul-sucking challenge that pushed me beyond my limit. In my thirties, I found that sense of invincibility shattered when all it took to bring my physical prowess to a halt was a sock. This sock was just like any ordinary sock. Black. Low-cut. Cheap. Despite how deceptively ordinary it was, it caused a level of physical pain that I hadn't experienced in years. The act of picking this sock off the bedroom floor turned out to be the moment where my body told me the motion of bending forward was no longer acceptable. My entire back froze like ice, and my lungs could barely fill as the surrounding muscles squeezed them to the point of near suffocation. My body's response to a motion that it feared would further damage my spine was to constrict my muscles to ensure that no further movement would occur. Consequently, this little black sock triggered what would be a cascading number of problems that resulted in the start of multiple levels of tiered treatment.
In my blindness, I ignored every warning sign of a spine injury and greeted fragility as my sense of invincibility stayed on the floor with that black cheap low-cut sock. Unfortunately, my path to injury was riddled with warning signs, lousy technique, overwork, and lack of self-care. When we choose to ignore our bodies and what it tells us, we tend to bear the consequence of our selective blindness. My body warned me with tingling in my foot, loss of strength in my leg, and an ache in my lower back before it chose to inform me with pure rage that my spine was injured. My salvation from my spine's slow de-gradation was in treatment that I delayed because I thought a little pain meant a little growth. When your body shows you pain, you show it some love, and sometimes that love is getting to the nearest doctor, especially when your start to tingle in places that have no right to be tingling.
To prevent future injuries, I needed to lay down some ground rules:
1) Warm-up with cardio and stretching.
2) Cool-down with stretching and light cardio.
3) Incorporate yoga and full-body stretching into your workout schedule.
4) Take a rest day every third or fourth day of continuous exercise.
5) Vary your exercise and cardio routines to ensure you never overwork a single group of muscles. For example, just because you can run every day doesn't mean you should.
6) Use proper form and technique while avoiding un-proven or abnormal exercises because they are a part of a fad.
7) Get help early and often regarding minor re-occurring pain, especially if it's near or in your joint.
8) It's alright to be sore; it's not okay to have your muscles throbbing.
9) Treat yourself to a massage, roll out your muscles on a foam roller, or run a massage gun over your body multiple times a week, if not every day.
10) Hit the sauna or take a hot bath once a week.
11) Never turn down an x-ray or MRI.
12) If you have a demanding event that requires a certain fitness level, train for it.
No matter our age, we eventually pay the price of our younger selves. I will deal with back pain to some degree for the remainder of my life because I, as a younger man, chose to delay concerns, and my body eventually forced me to pay attention. Fortunately, this doesn't have to be you. Our lives are not sprints but marathons. If we destroy ourselves in the initial parts of our lives by ignoring the need for our bodies to recover, we won't stay fit and healthy in the later phases of our lives when it matters the most. No one wants to be the person that looks back and thinks that if I had only got my back treated then, I might not be getting surgery now.
It's hard to rise when we are injured.
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