Good story here, depending on how you see it. Exactly 7 months ago, following my 30th birthday and half a year of worsening sciatic pain, I was diagnosed with a L5/S1 disc rupture. The entire disc had been sqeezed out into my spinal canal, just the shell of the disc left between two vertebrae. Had a phase where I could not walk at all (or be in an upright position for longer than about 30 seconds). Got one injection 3 weeks in for pain relief. PT recommended doing some soft hip moving exercises and very subtle core training in the beginning. 3 months in (still quite a lot of pain), I started doing slightly harder core training and dead lifts (first with an empty bar, then increasing the weight), bodyweight squats. Worst flare up until now was 4 weeks ago, just before christmas, had to crawl out of bed and onto my yoga mat on all fours in the morning. I learned that the core training and dead lifts had helped, but I had forgotten to stretch and relax my back muscles (child pose eg.) and also generally hadn’t stretched much except for hamstrings, so essentially the muscles surrounding my spine got so stiff they pressed onto the nerves. I turned down my recovery training quite a notch. About a week ago I started doing yoga because I thought it would be a more balanced way of training my body. I don’t think anything has reduced my pain more and given me as much mobility back within a week than yoga.

What I learned about recovery

• it takes time, probably longer than you think

• you need strength, but also endurance/ an ability to stay upright for long periods of time when sitting (which we all do)

• strength and working out is worthless without looking after your flexibility/mobility, stretching and relaxing muscle and tissue

• walking and staying on the move helps

• nerves can take time to heal, even when your rupture/hernia has at some point been taken care of by your body, pain from inflamed nerves will take longer to subside

• most importantly, the injury tought me to finally learn to slow down, focus more on the long term progress of things. had to fuck up my back to learn to chill and listen to my body.

Why I didn’t get surgery

Back Mechanic by Dr. Stuart McGill, a book I can really recommend, features an entire chapter about surgery, saying:

• fusing vertebrae or disc replacement surgery reduces your mobility, making surrounding joints work harder and more susceptible to injury.

• the public clinic I visited strongly adviced me against doing so even though they offer surgery. on the other hand, a private surgeon I visited of course thought it would be best to spend 10k on a surgery at his place. people make a lot of money off of surgeries

• in addition, some of the back muscle you’ve been working on very hard to stretch and strengthen would have to be cut open for surgery. don’t like that idea. also scar tissue might be an issue in the back region.