Member
Using prowler to alleviate low back/sciatic injury
The story for those of you who were not there is that I tweaked my low back right when I was warming up on Friday night with overhead squats using a broomstick, because my left hamstring and calf suddenly developed a deep ache, and the bottom of my left foot started to "zap". Even though I intellectually know how it presents, I'm personally unfamiliar with how sciatic pain feels, and I'm as prone to magical thinking when it comes to my own self as anyone else, so I chalked it up to layoff woes (it was my first time under the bar since my brain surgery earlier this year). I did that because I wanted to chalk it up to layoff woes. Woe is me for being a hard-head.
Saturday, Tom C. gently helped me accept that it was probably a disc/nerve problem, so I talked to Rip about it. He immediately recognized it as a sciatic thing. He adjusted me on Saturday night, dug around in my low back and hip a bit, and I felt much much better. Slept Saturday night without pain.
Sunday morning, I was feeling good so decided to warm up for squats and see how it felt. I stood up from the first warmup with the empty bar and realized I had fucked something up big time. Severe, deep, aching pain down the hamstring and calf through the heel/Achilles area, and tingling in the heel and bottom of the foot. It was bad enough that it was difficult to pick my foot up properly while walking.
Rip adjusted me again, but it didn't help much this time. Then he put me on the treadmill and instructed me to do it at a speed at which I could take really long strides. I tried it for a while but it made me really unhappy. It hurt a lot to do it.
----------start here if you don't care about background--------------
So I reported back to Rip, who then declared he was going to put me on the prowler.
Yes, my first thought was "WTF?!". But it was Rip, who knows way more about this than I do, and whom I trust to care about my back. And after I thought about it a bit, I realized it didn't seem that nuts after all. He had me hold the posts at the top, brace my elbows into my lats, and take very long strides.
After the first two 50-yard pushes, even with no weight on the thing, I walked back into WFAC to get some water, and I felt a dramatic difference. One of the other coaches noticed immediately and said, "Your gait is totally different now". Rip then put a very modest amount of weight on the prowler, since the point wasn't to condition me but to help me get the structures in the hip moving naturally. After 8 more 50 yard pushes, I stopped and felt like I might actually make it home through a day of air travel without killing someone or myself.
I actually feel better than anyone who could barely walk two days ago has a right to feel. There's still pain, but I can function around it for daily tasks, and walking and sleeping are completely normal and pain-free (granted, I have a talented feline masseur and I live on a concrete and asphalt block that poses few challenges once I'm out on the street).
Note that the solution is not magic. Sitting still sucks big time, particularly the part where I stop sitting and have to get up, and when I go up or down stairs, people give me a wide berth because I turn into a gimp with Tourettes. But it's very effective for delivering a much larger dose of relief than one would expect, and I have no doubt it provided a significant shortcut on the path to recovering from this very annoyingly timed injury.
So I wanted to post about this, Rip, because I think it's an important thing for coaches and lifters to know and something that probably wouldn't occur to most of them, and because I wanted to discuss a bit more what the mechanism was for delivering such dramatic relief because I don't quite understand what it might be.
Member
So the pain from Sciatica can first manifest itself with low low low weights (with the injury having been caused earlier)?
My Sciatica pain started (after I had a back injury) when I was doing bird dog exercise thingy with like 1-2 pounds.
Does it hurt to bend at the hip forwards (like to touch your toes)? If so, why are doing prowlers bad, where you are bending forward at the hips?
TMPHBITEU
Sciatica IS THE NAME OF THE PAIN. Not the cause of the pain.
If you wiggle your injured spine around in unnatural ways, it may aggravate it.
Don't bend forward at the hips when you push the prowler.
Member
I'm glad your doing better Simma,
So you think the underlying root cause is your layoff, or do you think that this is a pre-existing before surgery injury?
On a related note. I recently had a layoff of about 6 weeks and have been trying to get back into a consistent routine. The first two workouts were a bitch, but a good learning experience. I made a few observations, perhaps they are relatable.
1) I didn't totally forget how to squat, my form wasn't terrible and my depth was good, however, I was very loose. Even being conscious of this didn't help much, I just could not get as tight as I was used too.
2) even though my form was acceptable and I started at what I thought was a light enough weight, my low back; specifically around the sacroiliac, got insanely pissed off after 2 work sets.
3) the gap between my belt less and belted squat numbers grew significantly. The difference was shocking. My last belt less warm up felt unbelievably heavy and at that point I thought I had significantly overestimated my working weight. When I belted up for my last warm up though the bar felt amazingly light. Before, I would notice a difference of course, but it was much less dramatic.
I haven't pulled out the prowler yet (I haven't been able to get to it through all the crap in my garage until recently), but I'll have to give that a go.
Anyone else have a similar experience?
Member
I am really pleased to hear you are better, spar. I can definitely commiserate with you. Let me tell you a story.
Years ago, I had the smallest little 'pop' in my low back, so small I didn't hardly even thought about it, for about 1/10th of a second. The sciatica that roared down my left hamstring was pain I had previously been unable to fathom. Pain to the point of throwing up every few minutes for a few days, which finally dropped to a few times per day after a month. The pain was from my low back, around L5 down to my foot.
A few hours of that and I went to my local Doc who shot me up with something that made me sleep for 72 hours or so, but when I woke up, the pain was as bad as ever. I'll never forget what happened next. I went back to the Doc and he told me, after a call to a surgeon, that they could get me in at the end of August to check me out. That was at the beginning of August and I was at the point pain wise, where I couldn't imagine the next second, let alone the next minute or the next day. A month of pain like that was something I couldn't fathom.
So I went to the local chiropractor who I'd went to in the distant past and he put me on a table that articulated in the middle, fastened my feet down and then started working the table. It went from side to side, up and down and also stretched me. He was so gentle moving that table, of course, I had also thrown up from the pain a few seconds before putting me on the table.
Until the day I die I will never forget what happened. After a little swinging back and forth, then up and down, he continued and then started stretching things a little. Then I felt a pop in my low back that, the only way I can explain it, was like pulling a plug from a bathtub. The pain started draining away just like water. I'd say by the time I left his office, 80% of the pain was gone, but the pinched nerve was damaged bad enough that it took another year or two before the rest of the pain dissipated. One of the more awful experiences of my life.
I'm glad the prowler is working so well for you. Sciatica is no fun, it can be nearly life ending, I know my pain was so bad that a few terrible thoughts actually crossed my mind. It is one of the reasons I am so sold on the ab wheel, my low back pain has been less than 10% of what it used to be. I'm terribly pleased to see the prowler is doing the same for you.
Member
Thanks.Originally Posted by rumblefish
My lay opinion is that there is a 100% chance the layoff didn't help.
I had my first ever back injury a few weeks before my surgery. So it never really got proper rehab. I imagine getting injured and then going through a lengthy detraining period is probably a big contributor to this, especially since I injured myself working with a load that would have been very light even for a more severely detrained person. That said, I don't know. Could be a freak occurrence. The previous injury felt very different. All the pain was in the back, and there was no radicular pain. I thought it might have been a QL strain/spasm type thing. This time around, there is zero back pain and lots of radicular pain, numbness, tingling, etc. strongly suggestive of something unpleasant going on around S1. But I haven't had any imaging done, so I don't know.
I doubt I could forget how to squat at this point. Tom saw me doing the warmup set on Sunday and noticed nothing wrong with form.
Before this year, I had a bulletproof back. I was primarily concerned with my knees and my brain when I made the decision to ease into things very slowly and start with ridiculously light weights.
I've always used the belt very sparingly, so I don't know. I imagine I'll make more use of it now as I come back.
Brazilian Car Jack
It has been my personal experience that people get back pain more often doing very light shit than lifting heavy barbells. Just last week, my back started hurting with me with 465 lbs on my back. It happened when I was walking out, no pain during the set but back was feeling shitty way before that (it wasn't caused by the squatting). Silly stuff aggravates it more than serious stuff. My take is that even if you're lifting heavy shit, if you're doing your Valsalva right and your form is good, your spine is much more safe than say twisting in weird ways with no protective mechanisms whatsoever (like reaching back while sitting to pick up a pen that fell down or something).
Member
You don't bend forward at the hips when you do this.
Member
Sorry to hear about your injury.
I remember when I pinched my sciatic nerve a few years ago doing light weight half squats and dumb stretches. It was nowhere near the pain you or Oldster described. The pain I had radiated only down to my knee. As I understand it, the lower the pain radiates, for instance as you described “through the heel/Achilles area”, the greater it is. Have you considered or are doing any kind of stretches? Many stretches being unhealthy and unnatural for the lower back and spine in general, there are a few that can greatly alleviate pain. After a lot of searching and digging around, the ONLY two stretches that I found helpful for the pain I was experiencing were:
1. This one. Another picture. Whenever my nerve was acting up, usually in the morning upon waking up or while sitting for long periods of time, I would do this stretch and feel immediate relief.
2. And this one.. I'd do this stretch while at work and sitting. It's simple and effective and offers some relief.
Basically they both stretch the piriformis muscle. I'm skeptical of any other stretches, yoga poses and such because they were basically the cause of my pain, along with improper lifting technique (pre SS).
It took me about a month to feel better and walk down a flight of stairs without waddling down, and felt no pain within three months.
I hope you feel better soon.
Member
I had the same progression. When I injured my back, there was no Sciatica pain, I and the chiro I went to thought a sprain/spasm type issue or SI injury. Cue several months later, when doing the bird dog, bam, Sciatica.
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