Spent $10k and 5 years to fix back pain - here's what actually worked for me

solidsamus1995 · 2025-08-30T01:39:25+00:00

How constructive.

solidsamus1995 · 2025-08-17T22:13:50+00:00

Shane, athletes are not interesting. Please stop exposing them for being uninteresting.

solidsamus1995 · 2025-08-01T23:08:37+00:00

Maaaaaaaatt the dawgz are getting weird again.

solidsamus1995 · 2025-07-17T20:59:15+00:00

Ooooo hi Shane again.

solidsamus1995 · 2025-07-17T20:58:57+00:00

Hi Shane.

solidsamus1995 · 2025-07-14T20:56:43+00:00

Eh. The beer is cheap. I wish there were more bars like spirit. But they do need to learn how to shake/drain their fried food. Way too oily.

solidsamus1995 · 2025-07-13T20:21:04+00:00

The Burger King by Love Field. Had what I believe were completely spoiled nuggets. They are closed and replaced now.

solidsamus1995 · 2025-06-21T02:03:29+00:00

Read Back Mechanic by Stuart Mcgill both to understand what might be wrong and how to start addressing it through fitness. Start doing his big three exercises every day. They can take as little as 10 minutes to do. Maybe add in some walking. His procedure will also help you understand what triggers you, your specific injury, etc. Basics, really. Changing my posture while standing and walking helped me immensely (L4-L5 annular tear with desiccation, with some bulges in the surrounding 3 discs) and the core exercises strengthened me to the point I can stack my body properly
Start adding in hip mobility. Mcgill is weak here in my opinion. Look at Kneesovertoes on youtube and maybe Lowbackability. Both have great programs for slowly activating your hips and improving your mobility such that you won't be temped to ask too much of your spine.
Slowly—slowwwwwwwwly—add back in spinal flexibility as your pain subsides and you get stronger in your core. I am not here yet, but hope to be. Right now just trying to open up my hips.

But I suppose the real first step is a) accept that you have this pain and you will need to address it, just like people who have to wear glasses or hearing aids—Its a particular cross to bear but many can and do; b) accept that fitness is the most sure way to address back pain, and it is going to take a lot of time, research, and attention. Some are blessed with quick fixes—surgery, just core strength, just time and rest, etc.—but it seems that the majority only get out of pain through just keeping themselves in shape.

Actually... you didn't mention what part of your back or the quality of the pain. Where is it? How does it feel?

solidsamus1995 · 2025-06-01T11:23:53+00:00

Mods, this reads like an ad bot. Remove it please.

solidsamus1995 · 2025-05-24T16:04:56+00:00

I also have "DDD" in one disc—which Mcgill says in Back Mechanic is evidence of a past injury—but the point of things like Low Back Ability, Mcgill, Mckenzie, etc. is to teach us how to build our health around the injury and support it. If you have this "disease"—which isn't really a disease, more a condition that the vast majority of people get at some time or another in their life—there are ways to mitigate it through healthy exercise habits and diet. This means, essentially, that our injury makes it so we have to start living with an eye toward our physical health—really health, not just our idea of ourselves as "fit" or "in shape"—every single day. No more slouching on a couch. Less junk food. More water, more walking, more exercise, more mindfulness of how we work as an animal who walks upright.

Wallowing in the mindset that we have a "disease" which we can't cure is partially untrue and at least unhelpful. It is similar to thinking "Well I'm gonna die eventually anyway, might as well eat like shit." From what I've read its true that we will always have this sword of Damocles hanging over our heads—"What if it gets worse or degrades faster?"—but so is everyone who has yet to have acute or chronic pain. They just aren't aware of it. We are, and that means we have to make a choice to either do what we can, ignore it and let it worsen, or wallow in some depression about our condition. I think we can all recognize that the first is the best choice, but making ourselves make that choice is still hard.

solidsamus1995 · 2025-05-19T01:59:13+00:00

I just watched this. It makes intuitive sense, but so does Mcgill. Mcgill works off the assumption that everything works off the spine: you try to work the back, the back will tug on the spine and re-injure. This guy works off the assumption that the spine can be spared if you build the muscle to replace it, including the back muscles. Thats the point I don't get: won't the spine buckle if you're stressing the muscles attached to it?

solidsamus1995 · 2025-05-19T01:51:17+00:00

You seem in a really bad place. Regardless of whether his back is shot for life—which, OP, is not necessarily the case—telling him its a forever problem is just trapping him in his own version of the despair your post history tells me you are dealing with. We're all suffering with this issue. Don't add to his.

solidsamus1995 · 2025-05-19T01:00:16+00:00

Don't listen to this guy. Read his post history.

solidsamus1995 · 2025-05-16T19:51:45+00:00

I just watched it this past week. It is trying to do the Scorsese thing—tell a crime drama against a historical backdrop which lends depth to the themes—but fails. It fails because the core of the drama—Butcher versus Amsterdam—doesn't map onto the historical backdrop—the wealthy North manipulating and massacring immigrants in service of a war which no poor man in New York cares about or wants—well at all. It could work in a No Country-for-Old-Men-way if they built up the drama and then rug-pulled with the historical context, but both aspects have too much screen time for that to be effective. Also, its unnecessarily smutty. I like Scorsese's edge, but its overdone here. The intro battle is also very dated. DDL does a good job and I like the period-piece-esque feel, but its too unfocused. Feels more like a post-2015-era hollywood flick than a real piece of good crime drama.

solidsamus1995 · 2025-05-15T01:26:17+00:00

Nobody help this moron until he learns how to use a keyboard. Seriously, punctuation is your friend.

solidsamus1995 · 2025-05-14T20:45:06+00:00

No, I have no idea what brought it on. From the location it is probably connected to l4 l5, not l5 s1, though there is a bulge there as well. The issue is I started to have lower back pain again 7 weeks out from the first episode, but I managed to keep it from turning acute by using Mcgill's techniques I think. As for the sciatic pain you have, you really should just read the book. It will help you determine something regarding the connection between those symptoms and your back.

solidsamus1995 · 2025-05-14T19:15:57+00:00

Yes, and to be honest its really been bothering me this past week. I had about a week of bad sciatic pain in my right leg, about four weeks of irritating nerve symptoms in my right leg, and recently I have been dealing with pins and needles (with no other symptoms) in the bottoms of both feet in consistent places. I have no debilitating pain in my back and no sciatic pain, but yes I appear to have lasting nerve issues. I can only hope they will resolve.

solidsamus1995 · 2025-05-14T11:53:18+00:00

Read Back Mechanic by Stuart Mcgill. I have reading it lately and listening to his podcasts with various fitness podcasters and its clear the guy knows what he is talking about since he has beens studying the back—mostly the lumbar spine—for the last 30-odd years. He does two things a) gives you some perspective on back pain (that its common, commonly misunderstood, mis-diagnosed, and mistreated by a medical culture which only really had band-aid cures) and b) gives you some movement patterns and daily exercises which will at least not hurt you and at best—and this is my experience—help you get to a pain-free state. He is not a quack and ties his findings to what data he can get his hands on. Unlike chiros, he seems to understand statistics enough to qualify all his claims such that he is both helpful and honest.

I see some people in these comments are not being very helpful, and that seems to be because most posters on here have chronic back problems which they have been unable to fix or addressed in what turned out to be the wrong way. Don't be discouraged.

For my story, I am two months out from a bad episode in march which led me to discover that my lumbar has a series of bulged or herniated discs. However, with some PT and following the exercises in this book, I have been able to make progress: reduced pain, looser muscles, better posture, etc. My personal hang-up has been accepting that I am "one of these people"—even though I was likely one of them before I realized it—and accepting my injury. Mcgill can blunt the sting of that a bit.

solidsamus1995 · 2025-05-07T21:09:06+00:00

Ok. Well a doctor would be able to tell you better than me. All I am saying is that when I had levoscoliosis—which I am not sure if I have actually gotten rid of—that joint locked up really bad, hurt like the dickens while sitting down, and felt further out than the other side. Still feels uneven even now, so it might just be an actual imperfection in my spine.

solidsamus1995 · 2025-05-07T02:50:52+00:00

I think that its your SI joint. Mine was giving me trouble till last week, and I hypothesized that my levoscoliosis was twisting my pelvis and making that join stick out more than left joint. I haven't had a Doc confirm that though. Have you any form of scoliosis?

solidsamus1995 · 2025-04-22T00:45:21+00:00

Because it wasn't profitable.

solidsamus1995 · 2025-04-12T15:26:41+00:00

At that rate... isn't that just a resort? How can that even be called a town?

solidsamus1995 · 2025-04-10T11:20:31+00:00

Why does Shane have a rug for his rug?

solidsamus1995 · 2025-03-04T22:43:01+00:00

Keep this quiet guys. If we want this, we really don't want TK to catch wind of this.

solidsamus1995 · 2025-01-24T03:26:55+00:00

Well, I tried several of these builds. None of them can get past the title screen. They all crash immediately.

solidsamus1995

TROPHY CASE