Bad Timing

Whereas a Red Flag is an aberration from basic spine pain requiring care apart from SpineFITyoga, bad timing is a temporary exacerbation within the usual degenerative cascade of events causing basic spine pain for which SpineFITyoga is still designed to fix. Albeit bad timing requires increased patience and care early on. Bad timing is also a matter of degree, which ranges from having overstretched some ligaments after a day bent over gardening (for which you may not need any rest at all before starting SpineFITyoga) to where you just got whiplash in a car accident, or you just herniated a disc bending over to empty a dryer. In the worser cases the resulting pain and stiffness in the neck or back can be extreme, likely with numbness, tingling and/or more pain referring down an arm or leg. In such situations you might be looking at the exercises of F5 (Muscle-5), even O5 (Posture-5), and thinking, “no way.†So what then?

Example: Whiplash

To a degree you need to be patient, and hard as it may seem, be positive because things almost always get better from here. If you were just involved in a car accident, and x-rays show nothing is broken, you can expect pain to last a variable number of weeks, but time is your friend. Whiplash is not the result of poor posture, but now that muscles and ligaments in the spine are sprained and strained, poor posture will impair healing. As such educating yourself about the everyday CAUSES OF SPINE PAIN, though they weren’t your cause, will be of much use in creating an optimal healing environment. Regrettably there isn’t a lot you can do to rush healing and much of what people (including therapists) do to make spine pain better turns out to make it worse. Stretching? No, not a good idea. 

So educating yourself about the above causes will help you avoid common pitfalls, not to mention saving you hundreds or thousands of dollars on treatments that are marginal at best. Next reading the USER RULES will give you an idea of how to start SpineFITyoga gently and safely. I would suggest P5 at first using the stick as a guide to keeping things neutral. Only when you can do all of P5 perfectly without any increase in pain would I start F5, again keeping the user rules foremost. Particularly rules 4 and 6. As time allows for healing you’ll be able work towards more steady progress. It’s worth keeping in mind that in the middle of a flare up, doing absolutely nothing is counterproductive, but so is trying to force progress. There is a limit to how fast chemical reactions of healing in the body take place that likely can’t be accelerated, but you certainly can get in their way and mess things up either by being unaware of what hinders healing, or trying too hard, even with good exercises like SpineFITyoga. A ballpark guess as to when you should be starting P5 would be after 1-3 weeks post injury and F5 4-8 weeks post injury. 

Example: Freshly Herniated Disc

According to radiologic research, herniating a disc in the neck or back can be so uneventful that you don’t even notice, but frequently it will gather all of your attention. Likely sending you to the ER, for which x-rays (which show only bone) will come back normal. An MRI will likely show, what we already expected, the nucleus of your disc protruding rearward, often causing much pain and inflammation. If it’s your neck it could easily be irritating nerves going to and from your arm on same side as the herniation. Likewise if it’s a lumbar herniation pain, numbness and tingling might be traveling down one of your legs. Should you get an MRI? Generally not, so long as Red Flags #9 and #10 are not raised, an MRI only shows what we all expected to see anyway, and what it shows does not affect how you should treat it.

Herniated discs are almost always a case of the straw that broke the camel’s back. Thus you may think “it came out of nowhere,†or think it was when you bent over “that one time†but research very strongly suggests it’s from repeated and long held bending and twisting of the spine. And “that one time†you bent over to unplug a vacuum was really the 20,000th time you bent over that way, bending at your waist and not your hips. So even more so than the whiplash example, you need to cognitively know the CAUSES OF SPINE PAIN, learn to avoid them. Learn the USER RULES of SpineFITyoga, and if pain is severe rest for a short time, rest with a neutral spine, watch the videos of P5 to see what a neutral spine is, then gradually practice being able to do so, and don’t expect it to be as easy as you think. Research has found people with herniated discs have lesser trunk/hip coordination. It’s not known if the lack of coordination is the cause or result of the herniation but I expect the relationship is bidirectional. As with whiplash, once you can do P5 properly, with the stick at first, without increasing your pain, perhaps after 4-8 weeks start F5 at L1 to build strength and stamina. As the pain comes down you can go harder, and as you build strength pain should continue to come down. But again, don’t rush, progress using pain as your guide, emphasizing USER RULES 4 and 6. When pain is gone and you are getting 100% of goals at L2 you will know you are doing great.

Good news for herniated discs is your body should reabsorb the material, thus unpinching the painful nerves over time. The bad news that disc will be evermore a little flatter, and ligaments spanning it a little looser, so SpineFITyoga, particularly F5 is important to better stabilize that segment going forward.

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