Originally Posted by
abheerao
Hi Patrick,
thanks again for the useful info on Rehab and pain. I will defo look up those....I have started swimming as that seems to give me relief. I am also incorporating a daily core strengthening and stability regimen over the last 6 months. Did you try a recumbent at all or not bother? I have been through multitude of physios but did you find any specific stability exercises that started making a difference to your chronic back pain?
I am glad you are back relatively pain free but it must have been a miserable few years in pain. I can't believe that doctors, physios etc tell us that 'you have DDD...learn to live with pain'...
Hopefully, there will be more research on this over the coming years.
Abhi
A good guide is: If something gives you relief, do it. If something causes you pain (more than a 2 or 3 out of 10), don’t do it.
I gave up cycling for about two years and was prepared to give it up permanently if needed. It wasn’t helping me get better, actually making me worse due to my specific injury causes by lumbar flexion (forward bending). I never tried a recumbent due to cost and feeling that it wouldn’t help my situation.
There actually has been a lot of research (mainly by people like Moseley and Butler on the neuroscience of pain, and McGill on the biomechanics to suss out pain generators and avoid them), but the medical establishment has been slow to respect the research — perhaps because it is much more lucrative to give people endless physical therapy (that often doesn’t help), surgery (spine surgeons are huge money makers for hospitals with suboptimal results), or drugs. (The truth is any number of things may help someone, sometimes due to the placebo effect, so I don’t criticize something if it works. But much of mainstream back pain care is random and ineffective.)
My go-to exercises were the McGill Big 3 (bird dog, side and front plank), clamshells, focused abdominal breathing, as well as activity and movement changes to avoid triggering micro movements that were often painful.
Good luck! If you wish to converse further or I missed something, feel free to email me (it’s my username here @ gmail) as I don’t use this forum much anymore.