It suggests simple tests to discover exactly where your pain is coming from and then appropriate exercises to mechanically strengthen the right area and a few workarounds to avoid stressing that area in regular life e.g. alternate ways to pick up light items from the floor.
McGillcs big three are three simple exercises that are generally good for those with no patience for ordering a book and intros to them can be found all over YouTube.
I went to physical therapy for two months because that’s all insurance would pay for. My spine was weak and lacked stability. They had me doing stretches for back mobility and core strengthening. I continued that when insurance ran out and added in a lot of walking and other light weights and calisthenics.
It’s been a long journey and I’m only half way to where I was. The worst part is I did it to myself by becoming sedentary for to many years.
I can’t tell you to do this because I don’t know your medical history, but slowly working your way up to medium weight training can also be a game changer. Re: squats, Romanian deadlifts, pull ups, dead hangs.
Mine was because I have the posture of a lump of VERY wet clay.
Also, losing weight helped a lot - less to carry around and hold in the right places.
Eliminated my back pain and led to a bunch of other non obvious life improvements.
The absolutely liberating feeling that comes with the noob gains is incredible. Knowing you can lift those weights, safely, without injury, was an incredible experience for me. I topped off at a hair below 100kg squats before life got in the way.
It's been a couple years, now, and honestly I wish I'd made the change sooner. I haven't lost any functional strength, and my recovery is a lot smoother. Haven't had any injury since, either.
The only change I've made is two train only twice a week, rather than three or four times. Thinking of doing the split in Radically Simple Muscle, though, where it is 2 heavy compound lift days per week and a 3rd bodybuilding/machine day.
I now rotate between high rep (sets of 20 rep max) and medium weight weeks (sets of 8-12 reps). My joints haven’t ached in a while and I’ve become much less prone to random muscle tweaks. Mike Isreatel has an excellent intro to high rep training [0]. It produces pumps and mind-muscle connection like nothing else!
I actually went too far into the high rep/volume training direction for several months, but realized I needed to reincorporate medium weight lifts when I started losing a bit of grip strength. I am now super content with my current rotation cycle!
I admit, though, unless you compete killing yourself for 6 months to go from 250kg deadlift to 252.5kg is probably not worth the effort.
Lower: lose weight, get moving, strengthen hips, glutes and calves.
Upper: lose weight, get moving, strengthen chest, lats, core
so see your doctor
This in itself is a very interesting observation. I've always been inclined to fast during times of pain and anxiety, and honestly it kind of works? Could well be part of meditative fasting's popularity throughout history.
I got the idea from a book, and it worked
When I ate again, it came back, but I was definitely relieved of pain for awhile. Thankfully the whole episode subsided after about 6 weeks, but it was comforting to know that I could turn it off by fasting.
(Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, and I have no experience with eating disorders.)
For example, most headaches I have - drinking a glass of water usually fixes it.
Maybe feed a cold, starve a fever. And now starve lower back pain?
The bigger opportunity here may be not to dismiss pain as being in the head, but recognizing that when it is, treating the suspected source is not the best route, or maybe not in isolation.
Trigeminal Neuralgia is one of them. The condition is just... pain. Lot's of pain. More pain than anyone should ever have to go through. When I have episodes, I often feel awe that it's even possible for someone to feel such an incredible amount of pain.
Challenges in life help to shape you, make you who you are. But I do feel that this particular challenge was one where it would have been nice to have learned the same lessons some other way. I hope sincerely that treatment based on this research can help.
My (painful) solution was to get a chiropractor to force movement into my spine and other areas. Pain level 11-10. Slowly thing changed but not enough for my satisfaction. Today I play 2 hours of badminton once a week, train with weights every day and do Dragon Flags to few days a week, go out into the mountains twice a week. Now I'm almost totally pain free and at 67 I can't expect perfection but you never know. By the way this is all done with no medication or painkillers.
I keep coming back to cervical disc issues that don’t heal and continue to worsen. Exercise like jogging can worsen things. Lifting, pt stretching, walking, and no improvements.
I could take a pill but it wouldn’t let me know my limits and I would definitely overextend myself then probably make things worse at a faster pace.
[This research also suggests that behavioral interventions such as exercise, meditation, and cognitive behavioral therapy may influence how these brain circuits fire, just as hunger and fear did in the lab.
“We’ve shown that this circuit is flexible, it can be dialed up or down,” he says. “So, the future isn’t just about designing a pill. It’s also about asking how behavior, training, and lifestyle can change the way these neurons encode pain.”]
Due to said age it was VERY hard to find a doctor willing to replace my hip, EVEN THOUGH I had 2 failed repairs, and had to resort to opioids to sleep.
And long-term opioid usage (not abuse!) can cause higher the risk of persistent pain after a total hip arthroplasty.
Thankfully this is not the case for me. But it was a big concern in this journey.
There's really no understating the pain, it is not "2 dimensional", which is what I would use to describe every other form of pain I have experienced. It has a shape with immense depth and detail.
Then I got a pretty severe concussion and I mentioned to my doctor at one of the checkups months afterwards that I haven't had any since, they casually threw out "it's entirely possible you're still experiencing them and you just can't feel them now". Scared the hell out of me, but what're you gonna do? They did eventually come back. If we figure it out in my lifetime I'll be damn impressed.
All that said, I wouldn't want to turn pain off. It's important to learn to live with and through it, whatever the source might be, if it cannot be fixed.
“That told us the brain must have a built-in way of prioritizing urgent survival needs over pain, and we wanted to find the neurons responsible for that switch,” says Goldstein."
There are some books about walking putting illness into remission. A famous one is "The Salt Path" where someone with "corticobasal degeneration" brain disease was positively impacted by their walk. (Although the claims are in doubt now because the main author wasn't truthful about other aspects of their walk)
Anyway walking probably a real positive overall!
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I have another. Hanging (dead hang) from a pullup bar or staircase. It fixes it. 30 seconds every day, or 3 sets of 30 seconds
"A documentary that follows the largest fMRI randomized controlled trial challenging conventional wisdom about chronic pain, and revolutionizing treatment for millions."
Explains how these neurons get wired to fire when there is no physical stimulus causing the pain. Similar to phantom limb syndrome.
There's a book called The Way Out, which documents the technique used in the study featured in the Pain Brain Film above.
I can fully attest to this technique. It 100% works. I had chronic neck and back pain for 20 years. I thought it was my desk, I thought it was my posture, thought it was my chair. Nope, it was my mind.
I certainly hope that this or another path of research leads to a new generation of therapies that don't depend on opioids and are more effective than current alternatives.
1) Ever escalating doses of NSAIDs / acetaminophen and the associated long term health effects of that.
2) Long term opioid management which will leave you treated like a drug seeker by anyone who isn’t your pain doctor and may or may not also require long term escalation and has its own health concerns and complicates your use of other medications. And god help you if you don’t like your pain doctor because changing them is a whole different world of suspicion and poor treatment.
3) Various physical interventions like nerve ablations or back surgery or steroid injections which come with a host of other risks and also tend to be both expensive and temporary.
We need societal frameworks for empathy and care.
Nothing is ever so easy as just, just, just do this one thing.
I see through people who treat me different because of my pain.
My most effective treatment for headaches is imitrex but you have to time it correctly and I really hate how it makes my body feel.