by Colin Aina
I've been dealing with back pain, spine dysfunction and osteoarthritis in my lumber spine for almost 20 years. As I write this, I have a numb buzzing in my 2nd and 3rd right toes. This may be a surprise to some because I rarely have pain because it rarely causes any.
People get into my line of work for many different reasons, but the underlining theme is to help people and to guide them to a better version of themselves. Besides this and many other reasons, one important motivator for me is to allow people to see that whatever their ailment, disease, or injury, they can still train toward that vision of themselves. In my 15 plus years of training and coaching people, I've listened to people provide excuses as to why they can't do certain things. Some of these excuses are due to not having the will, and many of them are due to being provided misinformation. I can confidently stand on these words and say that the misinformation that people are given is from other health and fitness professionals...and sometimes friends that have no clue as to what they're talking about.
Throughout my career I've become enraged by Orthopedic practitioners telling people that they'll "never be able to do" something or that they "shouldn't" given the issue or ailment that they have. How can you say that to someone!!!!???? When you're summoned to help people, to fix them and to give them hope, how can you confidently know what that person is capable of? I have too much faith in what human beings can do because I've seen what they're able to do after an adverse episode of illness, disease or injury.
Okay, I'll step off of the soap box now!
Being a track and field athlete, one of the scariest things to do is to "pull a hammy"! This is a very common injury that plagues anyone that sprints during their sport. While in high school I was conscious of this and made it a point to work on my flexibility. My teammates and I would manually stretch each others' hammies during warmup. Success was measured by how close one could get their leg to their head while on our back...ahh good times. I don't recall ever having a hamstring strain in high school.
Shockingly, I wasn't introduced to strength training until my freshman year of college. I stuck to my strength coach's programming which incorporated many hamstring/glute specific exercises that I still use to this day. I had a pretty substantial hamstring strain at the USA Junior National Championships. Luckily, it was the last meet of the season anyway (somehow I posted a personal best time). While I was warming up for that race I was on the ground doing a regular seated, static hamstring stretch that I normally do; reaching forward to touch my toes. I felt a little bit of a grab/pop. So, I essentially strained the hamstring by over stretching it...great! I learned a lot that first year and I got drastically faster my sophomore year due to getting much stronger. I had another hamstring strain my junior year at the end of the season the day before the conference championships..Doh!!
Fast forward to 2004 when I graduated college. I started to notice a weird dull, tingling sensation in my sacrum whenever I'd drive for about 30 minutes or more. I didn't think too much of it. I speculated that a few of the hamstring and hip stretches I was doing may be contributing to this ailment. Was I getting too flexible and essentially loosening up my lower back too much? I eliminated a handful of stretches and voila, no more pain or lumbar tingliness. I also focused less on squatting (Monday was “back squat day” for many years) and more on deadlifting. I noticed my back health and overall strength increased. It was also about this time that I was introduced to kettlebells and some other antiquated philosophies of training. The take away benefits from these weren't the tools themselves, but rather the concepts of proper breathing and awareness of tension within the trunk.
I was literally pain free for about 10 years until I had a little accident in November of 2016….
Stay tuned for Part 2.