Strength therapy

Tonight I deadlifted 300lb for a set of 5.

In strength training terms, that's like running a 9:30 mile. Not everyone can do it, but you can throw a rock in your local high school athletic department and hit a dozen guys who can do better. But for me, it's a big deal.

When I was 17 I tore a muscle in my lower back. I had no athletic history, and basically did everything you're not supposed to do with a muscle tear. The pain got progressively worse over the course of several months. It would wake me up at night, and it took up to twenty minutes to get out of bed. I couldn't stand fully upright, and I developed a limp.

More than a year later my family saved up enough to get me an MRI. We didn't have health insurance, so it took a while. Prognosis was that the second degree muscle tear had healed improperly, developed significant scar tissue, and was essentially folded upon itself.

I finally made it into physical therapy during the summer I turned 19. It was eight weeks of hell. The right side of my pelvis sat about 3/4" higher than the left, and was twisted forward about 10 degrees. Therapy was supposed to fix that, and it did, mostly by brute force. Breaking up the scar tissue was the worst part.

But for the three years after that, the injury never really got better. The therapist gave me some stretches to do, and told me to do some core exercises when the pain got really bad. But I was in college and the rec center was intimidating, so I did enough to manage the pain and gritted through it.

Sometimes at night when it was flaring up and I was lying on the floor because my bed felt like a knife in my back I thought about how unfair it was that I had another sixty-odd years of living in pain every day. Other people didn't have to wince whenever they got into a car, or make a plan when they wanted to lie down or stand up. Other people could sneeze or cough without feeling like they'd been hit with an ice pick. It was very, very frustrating.

But one day in spring of 2007, a few months after I graduated college, I felt a flare up coming on while I was sitting at my computer. They always started as a sort of hot tightness just above my hip. And I must have been fed up already that day because I just could not take it anymore. Swearing my head off, I looked up some real exercises and got down on the floor. If I hurt because I was weak, motherfucker, I'm not going to be weak anymore.

A half hour later, I had done 7 situps and 3 pushups. It hurt so much I don't remember much except the last situp. Staring at the ceiling, sun glaring through the window, knowing that moving would hurt that much more, trying to convince myself that doing ONE MORE situp would pay off in the long run. So I did it.

The next day I bought a couple of gallons of water to use as weights because I was too intimidated to buy dumbbells. I told myself that I'd try doing exercises every other day for six weeks, and if things got better, I'd stick with it.

They did, and I did.

I went from bodyweight exercises to dumbbells, dumbbells to machines, machines to barbells. It took a couple of years before I stopped having flare ups on a regular basis. They're still a possibility now; that scar tissue won't go away without surgery, but when they happen I know a routine that smooths them out in one week.

Eight years ago my physical therapist told me to strengthen my core to manage the pain. Tonight I deadlifted 300 pounds, and there was no pain.