Tag Archives: Spinal stability

What a Flooded Basement can Tell You About Back Pain. No, Seriously.

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So unfortunately I wasn’t able to put up any kind of post yesterday, for the simple reason that I got home on Tuesday night to the ever-joyous site of 2 inches of standing water in my basement. Apparently my sump pump decided to give me the big “Eff You!!” and take off for a few hours and stop pulling water out of the floor and sending it along its happy way straight to hell.

Here’s a graphic re-enactment of how my day went during the discovery of this event.

I get home all sunshine and happiness, because to be honest it was a pretty good day. I had a good BM, trained some pretty cool clients, got a good lift in, no problem.

I went to the top of the stairs leading to the basement because I had to put away my suitcase from the weekend.

….But what’s this? I noticed the carpet was kinda shiny and dark. Almost…..like it’s……..wet!!!

Son of a bitch!!!

So after an emergency call to Roto Rooter and figuring out that my sump is a piece of Jillian Michaels, bailing water out of my basement and throwing it across my lawn, and having my ass a cold bath because the flood knocked out my hot water tank’s pilot light and soaked the thermal coupler, I got to thinking about whether there was a lesson to be learned from this epic failure.

Of course there was!!

What I didn’t mention was the fact that about a week ago Edmonton was hit with about 4 days straight of rain, which is as much as we normally get in a year. Let’s imagine the house was a human body, and the sump pump was any part of the body exposed to stress, for this example we’ll use a spinal motion segment mad up of two vertebrae and a disc. Under normal rainfall amounts, the sump works like a hot damn, pumping water out before it can become an issue. However, in times where the water fall is way higher than the handling capacity of the sump, the pump gets overwhelmed and starts coughing up blood from getting the kidneys worked over and hits the mat for the ten-count.

Let’s take this analogy to the spine. Panjabi et al (1992) put out a couple of landmark studies (I’ll reference part 1 HERE and part 2 HERE), about how the spinal segments can move freely within a specific range of motion called the neutral zone with minimal resistance from the passive restraint of the spinal and ligamentous structures.

Injury tends to happen if this neutral zone gets stretched out to become larger than normal, or in other words, to become unstable. Essentially, each vertebral segment has the ability to move only so far within a range of motion. Occasionally a segment may lock up and force another segment to pick up the slack and move farther than it normally would. This increased demand on the neutral zone of this segment can lead to increased pressure on the ligaments, vertebrae and discs of the spine, which means all sorts of bad things for the person who is now in crippling pain, much like any male who gets dragged to a Twilight premiere by his lady-friend.

As a back-up to the spinal passive system there is the muscular active system, which generates tension and resists segments being stretched beyond their neutral zones. The downside to this is we treat our bodies like a pinata and keep hammering it with low-level extended force applications, like sitting at a desk and hunching the hell out of it like we’re going to give ourselves Will Ferrel’s yoga move “The Smiling Cobra.”

Pushing the spine slowly into this flexion bias will increase the neutral zone of motion that the spinal segment can move through before the muscular support system will even begin to kick in to help save the day. So the day that you decide to bend over and tie your shoes where you’ve never had a problem bending forward and tying your shoes will now result in a big increase in pressure on the disc pushing backwards into your spinal canal, and will more than likely increase the chance of herniation since the muscles aren’t going to be available to kick in and provide more of a support system to prevent untimely doom.

Much like the way my house has a weeping tile around the perimeter to direct rain water away from the house (passive system) as well as a sump pump inside the house to pull water away and into the drain (active system), if there’s too much rainfall and an increased demand on the system, the sump has to work extra hard. Eventually, it can’t meet the demand and gives up (fatigue), which leads to the only thing between me and cleaning up my basement being a weak and overloaded weeping tile system, which won’t last.

Now in situations where there’s significant degeneration of the joint or bone spur formation, the range of the neutral zone will decrease, which will also result in pain, but most people under 60 will get into trouble by having too much movement of their spine, which is where core stability training comes into play.

Now core stability training doesn’t mean balancing on a stability ball with one foot while curling a dumbell and pressing an elastic and reciting pi to 15 decimal places, and it sure as shit doesn’t mean doing something as dumb as this:

I think she would get more from curling her water bottle. What are those she’s holding? One’s?? Sweet holy God pick up a fiver and break a sweat for once, would ya sweetie??

Anyways, before I go on a rant about stupidity, for the purpose of this situation, spinal stability means the body’s ability to resist being deformed in a specific direction while maintaining its’ position within the neutral zone due to active muscular contractions. In other words, we push, pull or try to bend the spine with some sort of heavy resistance, and our core works like a boss and takes care of the joint.

Sure, deadlifts and squats are great core stability exercises, but at a certain point, axial loading on an unstable spine will probably result in some sort of tipping and deformation that causes a strain on the passive system, and leads to injury. In these cases, you need to work on the ability to stabilize through saggital, frontal and transverse planes versus through axial loading.

Some of the best examples of spinal stability include exercises like a pallof press, and a more basic one such as a stability ball rollout.

The key to both of these movements is resisting the impulse applied to the body to cause it to deform against the direction of resistance. Because of the nature of the active and passive sub-systems involved in spinal structure and support, movements like these will be crazy better for your core strength and spine health than performing any kind of crunch.

I got most of this info from a really cool book I’m reading right now, called Therapeutic Exercise for Spinal Segmental Stabilization in Low Back Pain.

This is one of those books that spine geeks like me have to duck and cover from due to all the knowledge bombs being thrown around, so if you want to get your geek on with spinal stability, check it out HERE.

So this Canada Day Long Weekend I’m gonna do four things. 1. Work in my yard and do some weeding. 2. Lift heavy shit to make my active support system stronger. 3. Get my cousin to come and install a new bad-ass sump pump in my basement so that I can handle a big rainfall without having to drag out my unmentionables to dry off the next time we get a few inches of rain in a few days. 4. Rent a carpet steamer to get that “Pau Gasol’s gym bag” smell out of the basement. Do I know how to party, or what?

The Best Exercises You Will Ever Do: Spinal Stability Series

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Something kinda unnerving happened today. For a little background info, I tend to go to Starbucks occasionally. And by occasionally, I mean habitually, every day. It’s bordering on obsession. Lindsay always bugs me about it, but I tend to shrug it off. I mean, I have a card to get cheaper drinks, my own cup, and I’ve even bought books on the subject of the Starbucks Experience, but I wouldn’t think I had any sort of problem or anything with the amount of Starbucks I get.

Then this morning came. I go for my morning skinny caramel latte (shut your mouth, it is SO a man’s drink!!!), and the people working there had a Christmas card for me. With my name on it and everything!! While the gesture was one that was both touching and slightly unusual, it got me thinking,

Jeez, do I really go there enough that I get a Christmas card out of it??

I may have a problem. Oh well, it could be worse, I guess. As far as addictions go, I figure it’s a pretty good one to have.

The Exercise: Spinal Stability Series.

This is actually a composite of 6 different exercises rolled into one circuit. How fantastic is that!!?!? The basic premise for doing this series, especially if you have an office job, is to try to create some lumbar stability while increasing the amount of pelvic and thoracic muscle integration as possible. As mentioned in a previous post about joint-by-joint training, people with low back pain tend to have hypermobility in their lumbar spine, coupled with low mobility in their pelvis and thoracic spine. This series looks to re-establish that lumbar stability, especially if the person is currently in pain or very deconditioned.

Exercise 1: Plank Alternating Leg Raises

Nothing can develop stability and core strength quite like a plank, and doing it with a changing base of support like this just ups the ante significantly. A key to remember is to make sure the pelvis remains stable the entire time, try not to look like a really bad version of a Shakira video, and keep those hips in place, because we all know they don’t lie.

Exercise 2: Birddog Arm & leg Extension

This is an adaptation of the classic, where instead of coming back to a neutral position with your arm and knee under your centre of gravity, you keep constant tension through the system by simply touching the hand and foot to the ground. Keeping the spine from rotating and going into a major extension is the biggest battle, so slow and steady wins the race here.

Exercise 3: Prone Foam Lying leg lifts

Way harder than it looks, but it helps to restore proprioception to the deep core muscles, and get the hips to work on dynamic stabilization again. One of the downsides to having any type of back pain is that the pelvic and lumbar proprioceptors tend to go to sleep until the pain goes away. This means an instability becomes further unstable, and can self-perpetuate into more and more back pain until those muscles re-learn how to fire again and build some stability back in. To make this one harder, hold your feet right next to each other, or hold your hands straight over your head.

Exercise 4: Prone Foam Lying 1-arm flye

Nothing will humble someone faster than having them flail and fall all over the place under the power of a 5 pound weight. Plus, if you do it right, you feel like Jean-Claude Van Damme in Bloodsport when he’s doing the splits on the chairs. That’s how in tuned with your own body you’ll become with this one!!!! For coaching tips, JUST DON’T FALL!!! Also, try not to spend too much time checking out the ass of the girl rocking out on the stair climber behind me.

Exercise 5: Stir the Pot

One of Dr. Stuart McGill’s favorite core exercises of all time, she’s a beauty!! Sorry, went all Albertan on you there.

Exercise 6: 1-foot Contralateral cable squat & row

One of my all-time favorites, it works on the posterior spiral fascial connection between the glutes and the opposing lattissimus, building strength across the core without moving the spine into flexion or extension, and resisting rotation. This solves three problems at once: pelvic mobility and strength, thoracic mobility and strength, and lumbar stability. I talk about all of this in Muscle Imbalances Revealed, which you should pick up today, if not for yourself, then for me. Christmas is coming and Lindsay has some things in the Holt Renfrew catalogue circled and highlighted already.

I used this back in spring to help get me through a couple of bulged discs I got when I went to an NSCA conference in Vegas. If you’re wondering, no, it wasn’t from falling down drunk in Cesar’s, it was from the conference itself and me being stoopid.

How to use it:

Let’s say you wake up in the morning with a little bit of stiffness. Not the good kind of stiffness where you want to roll over and say “hi” to your partner, but the bad kind of stiffness that limits your ability. The discs in the spine are hydrophyllic, which means they like water, and when you go for sleepies, they tend to fill up with more water, and eventually stretch themselves to an uncomfortable level. When you wake up in the morning, the stiffness is due to the pressure the water exerts on stretching those little discies out, which means the morning 500 crunches you’re doing could wind up making you herniate a disc or two. If you wake up kind of stiff, working this into the start of your workout will help to get those core muscles firing again, allow the disc height to settle down and relieve some of the tension, and also act as a killer warm-up for any kind of lifting or conditioning circuits.

I use this circuit with pretty much every client who has some level of back pain or injury, sometimes this is the entire workout. It’s a great way to feel ab muscles working, re-establish core strength and stability, and make you feel like a million bucks walking out of the gym.