[quote]AndrewBolinger wrote:
I was unable to squat or deadlift for over a year due to a deadlift injury. The pain was located right on the base of the spine, with alot of tightness in my left spinal erector. After I injured it, it seemed to just progressively get worse. It became much more simple to reaggrivate the injury, and at the peak of my problem I reinjured my back playing raquetball. I am also from canada, and because of that, an MRI is out of the picture.
Our health care system is far too crappy to allow someone with chronic pain to get an MRI within an acceptable time period, unless you get very lucky. Doctors usually don’t really care very much about your problems, and usually send you away with a reccomendation to a bad PT or nothing at all. It was a pretty grim situation for me!
However, what really solved my problem came from a very unexpected source. I made a big effort to think positively, and to just start believing that my back would heal, or was already healed. This change in my thinking made a huge difference, and now after a year of being unable to pick up any weight i’m right back into the heavy deadlifting with no pain whatsoever! Positive thinking can make much more of a difference than you would ever imagine.
I also had a bit of residual muscle tightness in the general area of the injury when it mysteriously disappeared. I found that even self-myofascial release quickly disposed of that. I reccomend trying this, but remember not to neglect other areas in your body. The fascial system is linked throughout your whole body, so a problem-contributing muscle could be located on your abs, glutes, hamstrings, or anywhere else.
Other individuals had told me that myofascial release practitioners were a very effective solution to their respective back problems. For example, I had a cousin with a pretty bad herniated disc. She went through several courses of PT, but after years of pain myofascial release allowed her to heal completely.
Unfortunately during my painful year I wasn’t able to locate a decent one in my area, so I wouldn’t be able to confirm this through personal experience. It’s definitely worth a shot. No amount of money saved is worth what back pain can do to your life. Good luck![/quote]
You make excellent points. myofascial release appears to work wonders for a lot of people. Honestly, I do not know much about its application at all. I found the reverse hypers work incredibly well. Does this fall into the category of myofascial release? If it doesn’t, maybe it should, lol.
To the OP, I am not totally anti-PT, but I’ve just had bad experiences with them. As long as the person is qualified and doesn’t make you do stupid things that don’t appear to be releated, you should be fine. Just be careful. If the guy can help, thats epic.
I know here in the States, trying to find ANYONE who knows much about SI is difficult. Most docs want to put metal plates in or send you to a PT which in many cases can be entirely wrong and exacerbate the injury.
My mother’s SI was injured by a PT so badly, she was bound to a wheelchair for about a year. The PT was doing ankle rehab for her and starting moving her entire leg. The PT was a freaking idiot and shouldn’t be allowed the practice. She had to travel to one of three places in the US that did experimental SI joint surgery. The one she went to in Florida was doing a study that she was included int. Lucky for her, the surgery was a success and she’s doing things that wouldn’t be possible w/o surgery.
I want to put this information out there, not for those of us who get pain from lifting, but for anyone or those who know someone with an SI joint problem that will NOT be corrected by any form of therapy. If anyone does need information, I can provide it via PM.
Back to the topic. I would like to say that with SI, every SI injury appears to be individual in terms of healing time, how the injury occurred and can be re-visited. When I re-injured my back 2 weeks ago, I was squatting and while in the hole, I shifted my entire torso back and forth too much and it set off the injury. I have a long torso and lean forward a bit, although not to the point of falling over, no matter how heavy the weight. I was a bit too upright and that was the cause of my injury. Form is always key and understanding what you did is seriously half the battle.