Another spondylolisthesis thread
Hi Rip,
Have read through a few threads here on spondylolisthesis and your thoughts on continuing to train with it. I was diagnosed with a gr. I/II myself at L5/S1 a few years ago, and had a successful decompression surgery over 1.5 years ago to relieve significant and debilitating sciatica due to the slippage and stenosis. As background, I have been doing CF since 2007 and did several cycles of SS in 2009 as I was pretty weak overall in my lifts and was still relatively new to squatting and deadlifting. It was awesome and I made decent progress. Since my surgery, I rehabbed and gradually built back up to heavy lifting (against my doc's advice, of course) and have been feeling awesome. In fact, I feel so much better when I lift I can't even believe it, though admittedly I don't do a lot of deadlifting as I had the same (mistaken) perception that it increased the shear loading between segments. I do squat and clean a fair bit and occasionally do 1RM's, though not usually.
My question relates to a post you made in '08 about oly and spondy: http://startingstrength.com/resource...ogramming.html
I assume based on more recent threads that you're still in favor of the main SS lifts, but do you still have the same opinion of olympic lifting 8 years later, i.e. that the ballistic lifts for a spondy are a bad idea? I have fallen in love with olympic lifting and it doesn't invoke any pain, etc. I can't really find much in the medical literature about increase in slippage of a spondy in adulthood, though it doesn't seem to be studied very closely, and certainly not for weightlifters who continue to lift after their prime. There is some material about increase in slippage corresponding with further degeneration of the disk, but not a traumatic, sudden big slippage without a trauma.
Thanks for your thoughts.