A bad habit is any repeated pattern that leads to an injury or prevents recovery from an injury. I’ve often wondered, “Why do people develop bad habits?” until I began noticing it happening to me. Recently I began standing on and locking my left leg. This can cause my pelvis to rotate or create one side higher than the other. There really is no physical reason for me to do this other than to give my left leg a rest. But the consequences are not worth the rest and I have to remain vigilant in correcting this persistent bad habit.

Some other bad habits I’ve been running into lately are clients who are overtraining. Instead of taking a rest day after an 18-mile run, they’ll bike up Vail pass. In their mind, because it’s not running it is like an “active” rest. When I call them on this behavior, they’ll typically shrug it off as their Type-A drive. I know many people who are Type-A but still do not overtrain. Often there is something deeper at work here that needs to be addressed before the overtraining leads to more injuries.

A new client of mine with a decades-long history of back pain and painkillers swears that I’m helping them. “Did you take any painkillers today?” I’ll ask?
“Yes, of course” is their response.
“Then I don’t believe I’m helping you” I replied.
My goal for this client is to be off painkillers. I know I can make that happen from a corrective standpoint but there are other factors involved-the biggest being their need (for whatever reason) to continue taking the painkillers.

Do these three stories have a common thread? Perhaps. My guess is that ultimately we need to look deeply at our reasons for doing things whether it is the development of an innocent weight shift, overtraining or taking medications when, perhaps they are not needed. Easier said than done but if it’s going to happen, attention needs to be focussed on the behaviors to understand them.

Rick

During my seminars, I’m often questioned by people about how my approach to fixing back pain will help them. After all, they have a herniated disk, spinal stenosis, bulging disk, spondylolisthesis (insert your diagnosis here). In my experience these diagnoses are actually signs of the causes of back pain, not the causes themselves. A large portion of people with bulging disks don’t experience any pain, so the bulging disk isn’t necessarily the culprit. It’s what is causing the bulging disk that we should be concerned about.

Let’s forget for a while all the anatomy of the spine. Forget about the names of nerves, disks, muscles etc and let’s just think about how the spine has to function. It has to be able to bend forward or flex as in when we bend down to pick something up. It needs to straighten back up or extend. It needs to sidebend as when we are sitting at a desk and reach into a drawer. And it needs to rotate such as when we play sports like tennis, swimming, baseball or just about any other sport there is. Postural control falls along the continuum of these motions or functions.

That’s four things but we’re going to narrow that down to three because sidebending and rotation occur together. So really we need to make sure that our spine flexes, extends and rotates correctly. This lies at the heart of how I treat back pain. Correcting clients’ control of these motions, including the woman from the first post, is how I fix pain.

There is something called Wolff’s Law which says that bones react to stresses placed on them. The corollary to this is Davis’ Law which addresses how soft tissue responds to stresses placed on them. Regardless of whose law you are discussing, the body’s tissues respond to abnormal forces placed on them or to the lack of forces placed on them.

So, if our spines are not moving correctly, these stresses are placed on the bones and tissues. Eventually these can cause some of the diagnoses mentioned at the beginning of this post. Rather than treat the tissue that is hurting, I focus on the movements or function of the system in question. When corrected, pain goes away. It would be nice to know if the actual disk bulges go away too but I do not have access to that type of research and so have to suffice with eliminating the pain.

In my next post, I’ll discuss the mental aspect to fixing your pain. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to write.

Rick Olderman MS, PT, CPT

My name is Rick Olderman. I am a physical therapist, personal trainer and Pilates instructor working in Denver, CO. I’ve worked with countless patients and clients with back pain and wanted to share some observations which help me treat pain more efficiently and effectively. I’ll also cover weight training, cardio and Pilates concepts.

Currently I’m working with a woman with severe spinal stenosis (narrowing of the spinal canal), spondylolisthesis (small spinal fracture) and an extra lumbar vertebra. She has been in pain for more than a decade, has been to specialists, therapists, accupuncturists, Pilates instructors -you name it. In three sessions her pain was 75% relieved and now rarely returns. We are just beginning on a weight training program and she’s eating it up!

It didn’t always work out this way. Often it was hit or miss whether I could help my back clients. However now I’m just over 90% successful in eliminating back pain these last few years. There’s no weird technique involved, instead I apply my understanding of anatomy,biomechanics and function to help people. In fact I rarely do any hands-on work aside from assessments. My approach is to teach people to fix themselves, thereby ensuring the fix will be longer lasting than by passive means such as adjustments or manipulations.

In the next posts (this is the first blog I’ve ever done), I’ll go into more detail as to how I look at the body and treat it as well as how I apply that to Pilates and weight training. I’ll be curious whether anyone actually reads this so if you are, please drop me a line and let me know. If there is something you’d like to discuss specifically (including other topics or injuries of the body), let me know that too and I’ll try to help you with it.

Thanks,

Rick