I am in my 40s, so it is time to talk about my neck, my back. Most specifically my back. Not the other things. IYKYK.
I had an injection in my spine a couple of months back. Needles to say, I didn’t enjoy it. There was a local anaesthetic or I probably would have leapt clean through the CT scanner, trailing a hypodermic and a grimly-clinging doctor, but I could still feel the needle scraping along my hip-bone. Just because there’s no actual pain doesn’t mean there’s no sensation, and there is a lot of pressure when that big needle sinks in the eight or so centimetres it needs to go to curve around your spine and into the bit that has arthritis, apparently.
I’ve never had consistent lower back pain until this year, when it got quite bad to the point that it was travelling down one or more of my legs. I visited an escalating chain of doctors until the specialist said I had arthritis in one of my vertebra. Fun! He said there are two ways you can get this sort of thing: by doing too much work or sitting on your butt too much. I am in the latter category; my career of chair-based keyboard-punching has set me up nicely for an arthritic arse. Potential treatments: nothing, a CT-guided injection in the spine which – with an uncomfortable degree of ambivalence, the doctor said “might help” – and surgery that he simultaneously said he was happy to do and did not recommend.
I chose the middle path, and went with the injection.
Did it work? Well, it definitely did something, and by that I mean “it gave me a one-week migraine.”
I haven’t had a headache like that before and I hope not to have one again. I do get migraines sometimes but not like this: the only thing that could touch it was specialist migraine medications called triptans, and they just kind of gave it a gentle caress for an hour before ushering the headache back in. Other painkillers bounced off it like popcorn thrown at armour plate. Apparently this is common with needles in the vicinity of anything that has cerebrospinal fluid? No-one told me until afterwards.
The back pain did eventually settle down, which was possibly the steroid injection doing its work, but the doctor had warned me that it’d be temporary, and last week it flared up again. I briefly considered hopping on the specialist carousel again, thought “bugger that” and visited an osteopath.
The thing osteopaths would like you to know is that they are not chiropractors. This was enough for me; I despise chiropractors, and I decided against looking too hard into osteopathy lest I find something I didn’t like. There is lots of stuff that osteopaths (and physiotherapists for that matter) do that is… contested, I suppose, but at this point I was sore enough to leave my scepticism on the hook. I figured at the least I’d get a good back rub.
I did. It was the best kind of back rub: the kind that good-hurts so much it felt almost religious. I also got some advice that seemed both wildly impossible but turned out to be great and that has actually fixed me up better than anything else.
I mentioned to the osteo that I wanted to get my back sorted so I could start weightlifting again – I stopped the gym because the baby had me sleep deprived so much I worried I’d fall asleep on the bench-press – and she said “you need to stop bending over.”
I said that wasn’t very likely because of all the kids lying around my place that seem to need picking up a lot of the time, and she explained that no, I need to stop bending over, and suddenly it made sense.
I’d been picking things up the way most of us do it, which is bend at the waist, legs straight-ish. Sometimes I’d do a funky ballet-looking move where I’d bend over but stick out my left leg (I am not sure why. Balance?) The fact that my back screamed in pain when I bent from the waist or spent thirty minutes looming over my daughter’s crib and patting her back so she’d fall asleep hadn’t really been registering. I needed to bend over, so I did it.
Except I didn’t, and neither do you.
There’s another way to get things off the ground and it’s popping a squat. But, as the osteo explained, if you have bad form while squatting (and then loading up with a weight, like a bar or a squirming almost-two-year-old who is about to play a game of What If I Lunged Forward Really Hard, Like Fully Leapt Out Of Your Arms, Just To See What Happens?) and go down with your weight on your toes, your spine is still getting involved. The muscles around your spine aren’t particularly big, and loading a flexible structure where each component is the size of a curled finger and whose primary purpose is to house a bundle of extremely sensitive nerves with the full weight of your upper body is a bad idea.
Instead, you can delegate the job to the largest muscle in your body; your gigantic, under-appreciated ass.
Anyone who’s been given the unhelpful advice “lift with your legs, not your back!”1 – this is what I’m talking about. Except it’s more like lifting with your ass – your posterior chain, really. It’s how you lift at the gym, because it’s how you have to lift at the gym if you don’t want your fellow fitness enthusiasts to hear the faint pop and screams of agony that come from a vertebra imploding during an improperly-done squat.
In gym-language, they call it “lifting with good form.”
To lift with your ass: from a standing position, keeping your back straight, you begin by sticking out your ass in a comical fashion. This is called the hip-hinge. As your hips go back you sink groundwards, with your weight on your heels. Picking up the thing works in reverse fashion; weight a bit more on your heels – the instinct will be to go up on your toes, don’t – and use your tremendous ass to head back up.
What’s weird about this is that if you’ve never done it or haven’t done it for a while you won’t know what muscles are working and it can feel very weird. This is because of a lack of proprioception, which I’ve written about before; it’s essentially the interior knowledge of what the different bits of your body are up to. Unfortunately nerves and muscles can be forgetful, and if you live in your head a lot and type for a living it’s only natural that your ass stops remembering where it is and that it’s intended to do more than sitting.
I have been doing these very intentional lifts very assiduously for a few days now whenever I need to pick up toys or boxes or a rapidly moving toddler on one of her several thousand daily attempted trips down the Forbidden Hallway where the Interesting Electrical Switches are, and the improvement has been absurd. Something in me likes moving this way, in the same way that I liked weightlifting; instead of the snarl of agony I’d been ignoring when I bent from the waist, I get a “hey, that was interesting. Do it again.”
So I will. And hopefully a return to the gym is on the horizon.
Want to try the hip-hinge, aka lifting with your ass? Here is a video, which is also a free and extremely good fitness regime if you feel like following along.
Casey Johnston, the Swole Woman, already wrote about this, because of course she did. I recommend reading her, as always.
Where have I been, by the way? Busy! I’m working on a project that’s taken up pretty much every spare bit of mental energy that’s not reserved for client work. If it works out – and my mental Magic 8 Ball is set to Signs Point To Yes, I won’t say any more than that – I will be well beyond stoked and you’ll be hearing from me a lot more often. Which would be nice! I like writing things for you guys. On that note, please leave a comment. I like those even more. Talk about your neck and your back if you like. Not the other ones.
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- An earlier version of this post had this bit backwards. “Lifting with your back, not your legs” is what I was doing and it’s wrong, in case the rest of the post didn’t make that clear. ↩︎
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