Recovering From Back Injury

12:31 AM (of Sunday, October 27th, 2024)

Today is Saturday, October 26th, 2024 and pretty much the worst injury of my life happened to me last night. Yesterday was nothing remarkable, it was just another day at home filled with work and browsing the Internet, doing my dailies.

At night time though, I went out to the gym to work out with Eric and Gus. The last time I did any deadlifts was back in July. I hadn't even been doing deadlifts or working out for a year yet, since my first entry on eadlifts was back in October 25th, 2023, and I did the bar only which is 45 pounds. After a few months, and I would skip some months here and there, by July I was able to do 185 pounds, 5 sets of 3 reps each. My 1 rep max in fact was 250 pounds.

For all the other exercises, since it's been July or August since I last went to the gym, I just picked up from where I left off. I've been to the gym about 3 times now since my hiatus, and even after several months, I never got rusty or did worse than I did back in July / August. I did do some home calisthenics, like 200 push ups a day for a few days, and I guess those kinds of workouts just kept me at the same place.

For deadlifts though, I don't know why I made this wrong calculation, but I had the barbell set to 205 pounds total weight. I don't know why I didn't pick up from 185 pounds or something even lighter. After a warmup set at 135 pounds, I added another 70 pounds to the barbell. Terrible idea. I did 2 sets of 3, and I felt some slight back pain after that. I set it back to 135 pounds and did another set of 3. Oh yeah, and we were doing supersets of sitting calf raises at the same time, I was doing 135 pounds, 3 sets of 15 reps for the sitting calf raises.

So we'd do one set of deadlifts, then do sitting calf raises, then go back to deadlifts, and so on, until we complete 3 sets of each. I felt pretty alright still. We did a few more exercises, a superset of squats and preacher curls, and then a superset of kroc rows and lateral cable raises, lasting around an hour total for all the workouts including the deadlifts and sitting calf raises.

Throughout the exercises I did feel some slight back soreness, but nothing serious. It was really at home last night after eating a meal and then lying down for a bit, that it really hurt to get back up. Something that really freaked me out was in the mirror when I took off my shirt and my body looked crooked leaning towards one side. I was like, did my spine get pushed and adjusted to one side or something? It looked crooked and leaning, like one of my pecs was lower than the other and my stomach tilted towards one side, it looked really odd, and yeah this freaked me out.

Note that for the most part, as I write this now, I've recovered a significant amount from this back injury and back pain. I can now stand in front of the mirror and there is no leaning or crookedness anymore. I think my body was just leaning due to the pain, that there was less pain if I leaned a certain way, so my body did that naturally.

I'm still going to write about the horrible experience I went through, but for the most part, I'd say I'm 60% recovered. There still things I can't do yet, and I still have some back pain, but I've recovered a lot of ability, such as being able to stand, sit, roll, crouch, walk, not perfectly but doable. Yeah I will write about my experience not being able to do any of this. It will be very painful and graphic and I'll write about my views for the future after this.

So last night after eating, I just ate some rice and lentils, a lot of it, no animal body parts since I'm against animal abuse and it's completely unnecessary to kill any animals for food (I have not eaten meat in 11 years). I think I just lied down and watched some anime for a bit after that or something. It's hard to recall.

What I do remember, is that at some point, I had extreme difficulty moving at all. Any kind of movement while lying down in bed hurt my lower back. Even just rotating to turn to one side, an extremely simple movement, hurt. Trying to crawl across the bed, was nearly impossible because the pain was unbearable. I'd have some stuff on the bed like my phone and my laptop, and I had to move around to adjust their placement, and it was so hard. To move across the bed, I rolled, very slowly. First to my side, then to my back, then to my side, then to my stomach, extremely slowly.

It was impossible to crawl, because that would involve getting up from bed and getting on my hands and knees, and doing that would hurt. I couldn't really do any kind of movement except lie down, which is why I rolled to get around on the bed.

I did attempt to get up every now and then, and it was extremely painful. Getting up was so unbelievably hard. It took like 5 minutes to get up. I had to have something to hold on to at all times, and when I did get up, I could not stand up straight. I'd lean on the walls and slowly move around that way, literally putting most of my upper body weight on my hands touching the wall.

At some point I moved around by crawling. I couldn't go to sleep because of the back pain. So I just stayed up and bared the pain.

I looked up resources online for back injury caused by dead lifts, and it's apparently extremely common that it's often called a rite of passage. A lot of people go to the doctor or emergency room for it. Other people on Reddit explained to just do physical therapy at home, constantly keep moving, at least once every few hours or every hour, and doing back stretches and exercises, improving mobility, until it gets better. This is what I did and it has helped improve everything.

I'm now able to stand up from bed much more easily. I still feel back pain and I still have to grab onto the sides to help myself get up, but I can now get up from bed in under 10 seconds. It honestly took me a minute or two to get up before. I can now walk around without any pain, while last night I couldn't walk at all.

Anyway, it's hard to describe how much mobility issues I had. I still can't do a single leg raise right now. I actually don't know if I will be able to recover fully, but I think I will. I used to do 300 leg raises in a day, now I can't do a single one. I have to leave one foot on the ground, to lift the other leg, I can't do both at the same time. It's like a feat that I think is impossible, that's how much difficulty I have doing that right now.

But yeah, I do hope I recover fully from this. I miss all the mobility I had just a few days ago. I was able to stand up and do things in like a second. I could just stand up in a second. Now it takes we a few seconds.

Anyway I was bedridden for the most part today, except I'd get up and do some stretching and other exercises every hour or so just to improve my mobility a bit. It's been working. Anyway, that was my day today.