Hi, I’m Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical therapy. Did you just come back from your doctor’s appointment with your MRI report? That does confirm your worries, that you do have a herniated disc in your lower back, and now you’re wondering if you have to give up working out. You also could be worried that if you went back to working out, you would hurt yourself or make things worse, but then maybe you want to go work out because you think it’ll make it better, but you don’t even know where to start.
You could be bouncing back and forth between both of these thoughts. Like many, many of my clients, so many of my clients who have come to me with an MRI report that says they either have a disc bulge or a herniated disc. They’re absolutely devastated because they’re afraid that they will never be able to work out at the level that they had been or work out at.
Some people are coming in, in so much pain, they’re afraid to breathe heavily. The idea of working out seems like a very distant and far off event. Wherever you’re starting, if you’re curious, if you have to give up working out because of your herniated disc, in this video I’m gonna talk to you about why you should not be giving up working out because of a herniated disc. In this video, we’re gonna talk about the anatomy of your spine, what it functionally means to have a herniation or a disc bulge.
Then we’re gonna talk about why it is so important for your spine health to be working out. Then we’re gonna talk about the ways to get back to working out as safely as possible and as fast as possible. So let’s get started.
Back pain is one of those very, very scary things. It is often impressive to hear clients retell stories of these really devastating injuries, knee injuries and hip injuries. There doesn’t seem to be nearly as much anxiety and pain associated with those as a back injury. I think that’s because our spine is so important to our whole body. Our spine houses our spinal cord, and so it needs to be very, very safe.
Our spinal cord is housed by bones and then a whole lot of ligaments and a whole lot of muscles. Our body has done a lot to make sure that our spinal cord is very safe. Anything that happens, any injury that jeopardizes that or puts that in any kind of risk has a lot of physiological effects and they don’t go away quickly. They take a long time, which can increase the anxiety of what’s making it and why is it getting worse?
It’s just a very intense injury. So if we think about how amazing our spine is, it’s supposed to keep that spinal cord stable, but we’re still able to move and twist. So how does something stable that’s supposed to be very rigid also allow us to be this bendy, so to speak, right? That brings us to how it’s all put together. We’re specifically talking about the lower back, right?
We have five bones in our spine, they’re called vertebral bodies, they’re bones. Then we have disks in between those. Those are called intervertebral discs. Those are key because without the disc, we wouldn’t be able to bend. It would be bone on, bone on bone on bone. Not only would we really not be able to bend, but we’d have to walk really softly because those disks are one of the things that allow those bones to move. It compresses because there’s a little bit of a liquid in there, inside the disks that allows it to compress and then bounce back, compress and then bounce back.
This is also why we naturally shrink when we get older because the water or the liquid inside naturally slowly dehydrates as we get a little bit older. Isn’t that something to look forward to?
Now the herniation or the disc bulge occurs when there’s either a really long force, it’s something that’s held, for a long period of time on that disc at an angle. So effectively, if I smush this part of the disc down, then the back end has more pressure on it and it can cause a little bubble. If we think of our vertebral discs as a jelly donut, then if we just smushed the jelly donut straight down, it stays its same shape, but if we press it more on one side, we can create a bubble on the other, side of that disc, the donut.
As long as the jelly is still inside the donut, all we’ve created is a disc bulge. There can be varying sizes, but it’s still just a bulge. The moment that jelly comes out of the donut is a disc herniation. It means that the disc has actually ruptured the liquid is outside of the disc. That is the more severe version of a disc bulge. That is a whole lot of fancy terms and a lot of anatomy, but what does that mean functionally for you?
Now, as you sit here trying to get back to working out. Very simply, it means your spine is not stable. The caveat to that is that the disc bulge is more the symptom of your spine not being stable, not the cause. What I mean by that is that the fact that your spine was able to be bent in such a position that would’ve caused the injury means that something, some mechanism failed and the the spine actually bent beyond its normal capacity or what your body likes for it to be able to do.
The resulting injury is this disc bulge or herniation. Now you might be thinking, well I know that I did it when I was deadlifting, and I know that very well could happen. I’d have to listen to your story to figure that out. Just in our everyday life, we put a lot of stress on our lower back that we don’t even think about.
If you sit on your couch and watch Netflix, sitting in that comfy position where your back is really rounded and you’re kind of slumped down and you’re there for a really long time, that actually puts a whole lot of stress on your back because you’re completely reversing the natural curve and that adds compression. Another thing that we don’t think about is how many times you pick stuff off the ground. If I drop a pencil, I bend over and pick it up, I drop my phone, which happens at least twice a day, then I’m gonna bend over, I’m not gonna do a squat to pick up my phone.
I’m just gonna bend over and allow my back to completely arch and then I’m gonna come right back up. Well, depending on how often you do that, or maybe what you’ve been doing for that week, it could have just hit fatigue. That’s when you have these injuries occur, that’s when the stresses are happening. Then the question is, my spine is unstable, what do I do with that?
Well, that’s where the exercises come in. Exercises are a great way to be intentional about either stretching things, making things stronger, or making sure that they’re doing what you want them to do because it’s an intentional time to do it.
You can’t really think about how to move while you’re chasing your three year old or you’re trying to run a marathon. That’s just too intense. You’re paying attention to other things, but spending your time doing exercises is your intentional time to learn how to move.
Exercises are great for increasing your hip flexibility, which is key. If your hips are stiff, then your back has to do more moving. So if you’re able to bend more at your waist, then your lower back doesn’t have to flex as much to do everything in your life, like putting away dishes, brushing your teeth, right, you, you do bend forward when you do that.
The other thing it helps you do is strengthen your hips. Again, the stronger your hips are, the less strong your back has to be. It gives you a little bit of support, helps you train your abdominal muscles, and it helps you to get all those things to work well together.
The other thing that’s great is that if you’re practicing squats, lunges and deadlifts, those are all the same things that we do throughout our day. They’re functional movements that help us train for the rest of our day, so exercises are great. There are other benefits; it releases wonderful, happy hormones, they improve your mood, compression and recoiling of just walking around the rhythmic movements of our arms going, all those things are great for our spine.
So exercises are amazing for spine health and overall health. So that being said, I also know that it’s very overwhelming if you go look on the internet, you are gonna find hundreds of articles that give you a thousand different points of view on what you should be doing, what the best exercises are, what the best stretches are.
If you have tried those and they haven’t worked or you’re in that position where you just keep researching because you’re not really sure where to jump off. You want to know what the fastest and safest way to get you back to working out at the level that you were before you were injured, then my suggestion is to give me a call, because this is exactly what I do every day. I help active adults get back to working out without having back pain and without being worried that they’re going to injure themselves or that they will further injure themselves.
After having a diagnosis of a disc bulge, it is a very scary process to go from hearing that news to figuring out how to integrate that information back into your life. With each one of my clients, we start with the evaluation. We find out exactly what your body is doing and what you can do right now, what kind of strength you have, what kind of flexibility you have, how stable you are. We go from that to find out what your goal is and we figure out the path to get from A to B.
The only thing that we are worried about is making sure that you achieve your goal safely and without the fear and anxiety that you are going to cause further injury to your spine. If that is the type of service that you’re looking for, I’m going to leave a button below that says, “ask about cost and availability”. You just fill out a quick form and my office will take the information from that form and give you a call back.
If you are still at the very beginning of this research project and you’re still trying to figure out what you think may or may not be helpful, I have put my best tips for back pain in an e-book and I will leave a link for that here. Underneath my ebook is called “How to Keep your Back from going Out more often than you Do”. It has some tips for things that you can do specifically at your house to get you started so that you can see some positive changes before we even talk.
So if that is what sounds good to you, then simply click the link below, you’ll fill out a form and then you’ll check your inbox because that’s where it’ll be sent until we have an opportunity to speak. I hope you are having a great day. Bye.
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If you are still searching and would like something to help guide you, Then click the button below to get a copy of my e-book “How to Keep your Back from going Out more often than you Do’.
MEDICAL DISCLAIMER:
All information on this website is intended for instruction and informational purposes only. The authors are not responsible for any harm or injury that may result. Significant injury risk is possible if you do not follow due diligence and seek suitable professional advice about your injury. No guarantees of specific results are expressly made or implied on this website.
