Episode #113- How Skiing Helped My Back Pain

In this episode I tell you a real life story of my back pain and a flare I had this weekend.

 

Since chronic pain has more to do with fear and nervous system dysregulation, I decided skiing sounded like a nice thing to do when my back pain was uncomfortable.

 

Listen for how this counterintuitive approach helped me through the pain with less resistance and more curiosity.

 

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Transcript- Automatically Generated:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, Episode 113, How Skiing Helped My Back Pain. In this podcast, we learn to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.
Become unstoppable body and mind.
Hello, my loves. Today, I want to talk about what happened over this weekend. So there was some back pain involved and the way I handled it.
The history of the back pain is that probably 15 years ago or so, I was snowboarding and went off a jump and landed weird and hurt my back. And ever since then, maybe one or two times a year, I have some back pain. And usually it lasts for a few days.
As a physical therapist, I always attributed it to like my SI joint and probably the lowest facet joints. And it feels like, you know, it gets kind of stuck and immobilized. And then the muscles around it get tight.
And anyway, so there's this logical answer that I had for what was going on, and I would always attribute it to something physical that I had been doing. So obviously, with this work over the last few years, I've really changed my perspective and I look at things completely differently. So I actually had some back pain that I recorded a podcast about, and I checked on that, and it was just about a year ago.
It was in May of 2022 that I recorded that episode about my acute back pain. It's just like once or twice a year, but not in any predictable way. And this time, I was just very curious, and here's what happened.
I started feeling uncomfortable in my back when I was dancing on Saturday night. So I had gone to this dance, and it was at a trampoline place, so I'd done some jumping on the trampoline, I'd done some dancing. But at this point, when my back started hurting, I could still dance.
I didn't really think anything was physically wrong. I didn't think there was damage, I didn't have fear. I was able to lean into this curiosity and identify several things that were less than perfect in my mind.
I look for the emotional things that could be going on, the stress level in my life, and especially this type of pain, where these neural pathways are very formed and developed. And the way I see it is probably it's like a trauma response in that area of the body or a survival response, telling that specific area to tighten up certain muscles, and then that creates the immobility and the asymmetry and the pain and the SI joint stuff. So anyway, that's kind of my physical therapist mind.
If you didn't get that, it doesn't matter. But instead of thinking of it as a physical thing causing the physical pain, thinking of it as the emotions and the nervous system being dysregulated and stress causing the body to actually, yes, tighten up in certain areas. And so when you feel the muscle, it is actually tight.
But instead of attributing the source of the pain to damage and then having a fearful response that amplifies the pain, I was able to look around at what was going on. And there was something, there was not to get into too many details, but just like some simple things about comparing myself with dancing and a guy that I was interested in, not giving me a lot of attention that I wanted. So and then some bigger things going on just in my life and with family and business.
And anyway, it was very easy for me to see that it made sense that my back started seizing up in this predictable pattern. I also want to mention, and I'm not an expert on this yet, and I do want to study more about it, but there's a lot coming out with fascia right now. That fascia, which surrounds all of the muscles and nerves and joints and connects everything in the body, we used to just think it was kind of a sheath and because they would study cadavers and it would just be like this dry outer covering.
But now they know that this actually transmits neural information. So messages from the brain can be transmitted into the body, not through actual nerve pathways, but through the fascia. And that could account for some of these predictable tightenings, like I said, in a certain pattern, like with my lower back or with someone else, it might be their hip or their neck or their shoulder when they have stress, right?
Sometimes people do really worry though that they've injured themselves and thinking of this pain as an actual injury and like wear and tear and maybe I've torn something or it's herniated. Here's what I have to say about that. What we know is that when they started studying pain-free people, that the majority of pain-free people, especially if you're over age 40, they do have damage and wear and tear in their body.
So they have herniated discs and they have stenosis and they have rotator cuff tears and meniscus tears. And the amount of arthritis that you can see on an X-ray or MRI will not predict the amount of pain that someone will have. So when there is wear and tear on our bodies, it's not necessarily painful if pain-free people also have that same amount of wear and tear.
There was one study that I found that they studied young athletes, so people who are young and athletic, so they're performing well, they're pain-free, and 89% of them had a hip labral tear. So we might not even know when things in our body are getting damaged. And when we find that hip labral tear, when they're in their 40s or 50s, they could think they just did it when it actually happened when they were a young athlete.
So I know it's kind of mind-bending, and it's different to think of things this way. But if I ever start to worry about the pain indicating that something just got damaged, I really just question that, because there is so much research showing that these structural changes are normal and do not cause pain in everyone. So we cannot blame chronic pain on structural changes that are normal, just like wrinkles and gray hairs as we get older, we have degenerative changes inside of our body that do not cause chronic pain.
But anyway, I was able to stay and dance as long as I wanted to, and then went home at night. I was having problems when I would roll over, and it would just tighten up and spasm and seize. I describe it as kind of like grabby.
So my back was kind of like, I would go to move, and the muscles would just grab and spasm. So I did notice that during the night. And in the morning, I usually go to...
This was the weekend, so it was Sunday morning, and I usually go to a dance class on Sunday mornings that I really like. And I also sometimes like to go skiing. It's near the end of the season.
And so what I chose to do is just listen to my body, and the dance class sounded like a little much. There's a lot of like, you know, moving and body rolls, and that sounded like a little scary for my back. And again, I'm trying not to lean into fear here, but at the same time, I was really just asking my body what sounded good.
And it did sound good to be more active than to lay around. And skiing actually sounded really good to me. So what I did, and this is just, you know, I was a physical therapist.
This is my bias. Maybe it's a placebo effect. I don't care.
I love it. It works for me. But I did some kinesio tape on my back.
So KT tape or kinesio tape, kinesiology tape. It basically is like a moving brace that is, uh, that supports your muscles wherever you're putting it on your back or other body parts. You can put it on specific ways.
The way I put it on was like for lower back SI joint. And I just think of that as like supporting my muscles. So although I know that this is my body, and I'm not worried about damage, and I'm not in that fearful state of like, you know, I've done something bad and how long is this going to last?
I have the belief that this is, you know, at most going to just last a few days, and I'm just going to do what sounds really good to help it right now. So I taped it, and that decreased my pain immediately by like 50%. And I have that expectation from tape, because that's how I always used to describe it, is when you have, you know, kind of those spasmi, graspy muscles, grabby muscles, or whatever these, I'm just making up words, I guess.
But when you have these, you know, you go to move and the muscle like clenches and gets really painful and sore, when I have the tape on, it feels like it supports the muscle. So I taped, I decided to go skiing. And again, I just want to point out that to someone else, skiing might sound very scary, even without sensations in their back.
That might sound super scary to someone, but I've been skiing for years, decades. So for me, it sounded relaxing to get up in the mountains and to enjoy the movement and exhilaration and the distraction really of going skiing. So I went ahead, went skiing, and throughout this process, I was really noticing detective for the opposite moments or times that my back did feel better.
If there were any times that I would get up to go walk and it wouldn't catch as much, I would try to notice like, oh, okay, this feels better. So I was cognizant of what was going on with my back, but I also wasn't urgent or fearful or monitoring it in a really judgmental way. So I started noticing with the very first run that it seemed to, like I was engaging the muscles in my body, and it was almost like that area wasn't as much of a presence.
I wasn't focusing on it. It was less painful as I started just moving my body and engaging in this, you know, flowy motion of skiing. And I ski at my favorite resorts that I grew up skiing at, and it's just like home for me.
You know, I just, I love that whole experience of being there. So I just was really trying to be in the present moment, and I noticed after the first run, it felt like my pain had decreased another 50%. So I went ahead and went up on the lift, did a second run.
And then I noticed, okay, I'm trying not to get too graphic here, but I think it is important to tell this part. So I think that because when my nervous system goes into these survival states, for me, especially digestion can be an issue. So if I'm going into freeze, it's more of the like gassy feeling and more like blocked up.
And if I'm more in fight or flight, it's more like loose and urgent and frequent. Okay, does that make sense? So again, not to get too gross, but I did have this sense when I was feeling my back in the morning that like my bowels had something to do with it.
And I even, you know, usually use the restroom in the morning and wasn't really able to, but had this kind of like bloated, gassy feeling. And again, instead of thinking of like, well, what have I been eating or like what caused this? I just, it was just so clear to me, like your nervous system is dysregulated.
This is classic, you know, nervous system dysregulation for you is shutting down that digestive system. Again, that's why I felt like the skiing would be so helpful and important for me is because that is just such a peaceful place for me.
I was able to use the restroom. And that felt really good. So anyway, that's all I'm going to say about that.
But just keeping in mind, your digestion is closely tied to your nervous system. And some of those uncomfortable feelings in the body, it's hard to tell exactly what is going on, especially people who've had chronic pain, their interoception, which is their ability to tell what is going on in their body, from the signals from their body to their brain, can become less accurate. So again, just something I noticed.
And after that release, I did feel better. And throughout the day, just kept feeling better and better. Now, the tape was still on.
It's tape that you can wear for several days. So I still, like, I bathed with it, and the next day was still wearing it. And throughout the next day, Monday, I probably noticed my back maybe 10 times.
And the rest of the time, it was feeling pretty good. I still had the tape on, but I wasn't in any rush to force my nervous system to, you know, not have that assistance. It felt good to still have it on.
It was like a little tender still. If I touched it, it was sore to the touch, for sure. But it wasn't like painful, other than a few times I noticed it.
And probably five of those ten times that I noticed my back were at yoga, because I did decide that it sounded good to do a hot yoga class. And I did notice my back with certain movements. And then I also noticed that I could relax and quickly either just keep going with the movement or modify it or take a little break or whatever, and the pain would go right away.
So the next day, so this is Tuesday now, I still have the tape on. I'm starting to feel like, you know, it's probably about time to take it off. But again, I'm just listening to my body.
I've gotten some coaching about the stressors in my life and ways that I was magnifying those stressors and making things harder on myself. And so that has really helped. And through this whole process, it was just interesting because each time it happens now, it's just clearer to me that this mind-body stuff is going on, and it makes this whole process of when there is a flare or an aggravation, just to be very compassionate with myself, to really take this as a chance to tune into my body and notice what I am gravitating towards or wanting to do from what's inspiring me.
And I will say that's taken some time to develop, so if you are starting out, you might feel a lot of pressure from what other people are saying. You've gotten a lot of your information from outside sources, and so you'll know the difference when it sounds like a should, and I'm doing air quotes, like should, like, you know, I should meditate for 20 minutes, or I should journal in this certain way for this amount of time, like versus if you ask yourself, your internal, your wise self, your higher self, your intuition, your body, however you like to think of it, what sounds good to you, sweetie? Like what, how can I help you love?
I like to talk to myself in this loving way like that. What do you need, hun? And then if there are any shoulds, have it come from that place, right?
From the wise self, from that calm self. And usually it's things like you should take a break or you should not be so worried, right? So those are the only kind of shoulds to listen to from your calm internal self.
But when you find that urgency or that desperate-ness or this, it's actually a nervous system state of flight of like trying to figure out and trying to fix, then you're still in a dysregulated state. And so it will not be effective if you're finding a problem and then trying all these things to fix it. Again, this is a process.
I teach all about it. I love teaching people how to tune into their intuition with their own bodies, how to think of their symptoms differently so that they're able to move through them more quickly, so that they're able to learn from these experiences. And as we keep regulating our nervous system with each of these times these things happen, our window of tolerance grows, our ability to stay regulated, no matter what's going on, expands each time we work on regulating our nervous system, coming back to that calm place, feeling more safe in our body.
And you can learn more about all of the techniques I teach through my podcast, through my membership program, my monthly membership, Alignment Academy. If you're ready to do this, we'll support. Have a loving group atmosphere, where you can bring your questions and share your celebrations.
And I also have a very special hybrid one-on-one slash group coaching program called Somatic Journey, where we're diving deep with individual sessions three times a month and one group mini retreat together, focusing on fun, different ways to connect the mind and body through hypnosis, dream interpretation, enhancing our intuition, and learning about our human design and how that affects the body. So that Somatic Journey information will be in the show notes as well. And if you've been liking this podcast and have not yet given it a rating and review, it's very easy to pop over to iTunes, give it a five-star rating, a sentence or two for a review, and I would really appreciate it.
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Thanks in advance. And have a great rest of your day, guys. Thank you so much for listening.
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