and when I hung from the rings outside my back crackled more too. I’m more crunchy than a breakfast cereal.
Unfortunately that won't fix your hurting back. May help with neck and shoulder tho. Its a reflex - because you have pain - that you go to the rings or horizontal pull-up bar and try to stretch your spine. It will just hurt further.
I was waiting for Chu to give you stretching tips and also to see what kind of answers you get. On
this music production forum one composer asked about a similar hip / spine pain.
Question:
Hi all. For the past year or so i have been dealing with chronic back pain. On bad days, its completely debilitating, on good days, i can still only sit and work for an hour or so at a time. I have barely worked at all in the last year, have had to turn down many sessions, and am basically at a breaking point.
I have seen all the doctors, doing physical therapy, eat extremely clean, take all the supplements, medication etc etc etc. Im still struggling most days. I bought a standing desk, and that helps, but not really. My next step is to try a new chair. I have a herman miller chair, which is supposed to be the best for this, but its not cutting it.
Does anyone have any experience with mitigating chronic pain while producing / mixing? Any chairs you can recommend that i may have missed in my searches?
Answers were similar - holistic, food, exercise, chiropractor, etc.. - , only members here are more knowledgeable.
Here is what lengthy post I wrote to him:
You allowed yourself go flaccid and limp like a dropped pancake from a pan.
You need light athletics. Jogging with sprints on empty stomach, coupled with frog jumps, some push ups. Pull-ups, where you need to learn to just hang really nicely stretching your spine, attempting to pull yourself up couple inches then let yourself fall again still hanging.
Stretching: turning your torso gently from side to side
Sit ups: don't sit up fully, only lift your ribcage, check it out on YT.
Good spine stretches - hanging from a bar by your hands - and try turning your hips from side to side
Do wonderful hip splits with going into squat position and with your elbows against your knees push your knees OUT combating some pain ==> gently raise your ass an inch then let it fall back multiple times, while pushing your knees OUT assertively with your elbows against pain. Then stand up and do "hulahoop" hip rolls in both directions with your hands your hips. Works wonders for me.
Try a chiropractor, but without exercise it'll be like a pill for a headache..
Also you badly need to buy another chair which has completely different padding for your ass and lower spine.. Then switch chairs daily.
Or just do as I do: place hard blankets below your ass and some hard pillows. Try to unbalance your comfy sitting position.
Roll a towel to the width of 3 inches and place it behind you at your tailbone, so it supports your spine.
Unbalance and change the surface geography of your chair(s) as much as possible.
There is a chair looking like a flat top mushroom -
leather cylinder - and you sit on it and its bottom is fixed, but the top rolls around with your ass as you change your angle - move the top of the chair - swiveling around your central position = your spine will be moving around, you can try that as well.
But for me the hip splits and chaotic surface padding helped most.
Exercise will give you more energy for the day as well.
Better look for a Jiu-jitsu or MMA club in your vicinity and ask them to show you basic exercise training and stretching. There is a wonderful two-man spine stretching, where (with your back) you lean on the other man's back and he takes your arms making soft "spring-motions" with his knees up and down he stretches your spine out wonderfully. Try that.
Don't forget to stand up from time to time and grab your hands and move them 180 degrees from side to side, while your legs, head remain in position. Then roll your head, chin touching your chest and raised shoulders.
You have pain because you cemented yourself into your chairs default surface padding, which fixed your spine disks into one position for eternity. BAD IDEA!!!!!
If you have a SOFT BED where-on you maintain Horrible sleeping positions:
Important to throw out your bed to the trash. Buy a thin and
hard coconut mattress -
3 and half inches max height - and put it on the floor. Put some thin plastic sheets, thin bed-covers, real floss silk sheets UNDERNEATH in a multi-layer configuration for the winter. In summer leave only a simple thin sheet under it. For your head you can use pillows to hold your head level with your spine. Healthiest is sleeping on your left side. Get a compass / app on your mobile phone and TURN the bed toward NORTH accurately. Leave it there permanently if possible.
Sleep on it. You'll get used to the hardness in a couple nights, just imagine you are a soldier on a battlefield. EXCELLENT FOR YOUR SPINE HEALTH!!
You'll never ever sleep in a soft bed after that.
Couple nights will make all your spine and hip pain go away if those pains are merely from bad sleeping positions. Cheap and supremely effective! Don't be afraid from getting a cold in winter: use multiple warm / plastic sheet layers underneath!
Try to sleep some hours without pillows during the night as well: flat on your back, flat on your belly, various "one leg raised" positions on either side, etc.. Your health and energy for the day will improve wonderfully with your hip / spine pains subsiding drastically.
First I was worried that because you were pregnant this may be an entirely different, gynecologically related problem. But your answers show just a typical aging joints and slipped disk problem. From sitting at your desk for a long time, from lifting weights / moving furniture / heavy implements, etc.. that you are not used to and you are not doing it the spine-sparing way they teach on YT how to safely lift weights, but we don't do that and get injured, result is slipped disks, etc...
I had debilitating
right upper-hip pain for a year - exactly where this blue figure puts its hands -
and I made it completely go away:
For example until ~the beginning of this year I had strong and debilitating spine-sprains[?]. Which were occasional. But got more frequent serious until last year. When this spine-pain hit, I could only whimper like a dog and the pain instantly propelled me into a forced position on my chair or I slid onto the floor, un-moving in a twisted position, where the pain was endurable. I couldn't move.
Pain got so bad during fasted-sprinting exercises, that when I frog-jumped in the cold weather this pain nearly immediately flared up and killed my hips and shot down on my whole leg, my knees, pinching the nerves it made my leg muscles refusing to obey me. Imagine a "sports athlete" suddenly starts limping during sprinting.. Even jogging I could barely perform. Went out to exercise in the countryside and ended up limping home! All kinds of pains followed. Couldn't spin, could turn 90 degrees, couldn't sit properly. Turning from the walkway to go into a store, pain, pain pain. All my life, basically, pain was popping up periodically.
1. Chu emphasized stretching and told us she frequently stretches with Ark. Ark is apparently a professional stretcher.
2. You posted you have an adult son, so you are no longer a spring-chicken. Aging / older people's joints - usually reaching 40 years old and past - just require more chiropractic stretching and rolling.
Here is the solution:
1. Fix your sleeping position
I slept on this soft bed
with
iron springs that Laura warned against - and I knew I had to throw it out, but I was putting it off forever. I was afraid that I'm completely crazy... (with debilitating immobilizing pain)?? .... People just don't throw out their beds, right? Everybody sleeps on soft beds with large pillows in the movies and TV, right? What will the people say??
Are you crazy??!
In 1997 my father-in-law got a bad slipped disk / his spine injured because he was boastfully and ignorantly
carrying too many big cement bags and bragging about being able to also lift metal
wheelbarrows chock-full with gravel. His doctor told him, to fetch a heavy wooden door and sleep on it, because that offered a completely flat surface required for his spine to completely avoid
the horrible sleeping positions on a soft bed and consequently the usual pains all over the body just after waking up.
So I delayed and delayed forever one of my best life decisions in life
to throw my bed out "to the trash". As you can see its no longer in use. Now I sleep on this in the Summer:
-- turned so it faces North --
and during the winter I put under it a half an inch thick multi layer floss (Chinese silkworm) sheets, plastic sheets, warm "bio-sheet" that you see on the top my "thrown out bed" on the photo.
Thickness of this hard coconut mattress is 3 inches max, as you can see here:
Pillows only during the winter and mostly to sleep on the
left or the right side. Then I turn to my belly or on back, push off the pillows and only wrap my head into thick folded (dry) bath towel - head inside the folds for warmth, so I have a thin "pillowing" I rest my head on. As I turn off the gas heater / radiator in my room for the night for pitch black darkness and zero noise.
Draft:
No draft is allowed in the room. So the chimney opening AND the window OR the door are never open at the same time, because it creates a through-draft at ground level, which is now "below the bed"-height essentially. Draft goes there on the floor, I found, and its cold and affects me now lying on the mattress on the floor. So I completely blocked out the draft in winter and now I sleep like a baby.
One of the really few best decisions in my life.
Above hard mattress prevents bad sleeping positions that the C's warned against as well. Someone might be able to find it in the sessions. Keeps my hips and spine
STRAIGHT. On a soft and fluffy bed your hips - the heaviest part of your body SINKS INTO THE BED creating resulting in a wide selection of horrible unhealthy sleeping positions, which makes you sick and painful all over in the morning! Fun? Nope.
2. Split your hips to stop slipped disk / spine pain
Second is the hip split exercise. This is for older people, not for sportsmen. Not for super stretchy young Selfie-Ready Babes, so everybody can do this. Exactly this type is working as tested. This is an old "karate-stretch" - is surprisingly unavailable on the net, no reference pictures, no YT videos I could find.
Method is only remotely similar to
a ballerina split, and I couldn't find it on image searches, its not yoga malasana, but exactly this karate hip stretching, which allegedly wrestlers use as well. Don't mind the quickly made spontaneous videos + inappropriate clothing, ugly fat belly under the shirt, etc..,
the stretching is that matters!
Hip Split demonstration: VIDEO 1
Hip Split demonstration: VIDEO 2
I'm 52. Above two videos work well for older people, no dangerous positions, no knee or leg breaking danger, like you see on Youtube done by Super Young Muscular Titans. This is no acrobatic fitness, nor dangerous yoga BS that you find YT in abundance...
3. Reduce your carbs intake to half
Extra collagen to repair your damaged knees, joints. Too many carbs
create acidic blood and uric acid crystals on the joints causing sharp pains even during normal, everyday movement.
Years ago I ate too many carbs to overload my brain so I can do lots of computer graphics content needed for our project. Now I halved that carbs amount with help of ground pig skin collagen. Finely ground type.
Link 1. Three tea-spoons
every other day[!], stirred into only warm = ready to eat soup or pushed into (only warm not hot!!) solid food - like mashing potato with a fork: so you no longer can see the white-ish powder.
Link 2.
Recent 6-part podcast also mentions peptides:
Podcast 5 and
Podcast 3.
This healed my sharp knee pain, which frequently I had on the front side of the kneecaps sharp pain, flashing down like lightning. Or weakened, all around knee-joint pain from spinning, turning, doing turning karate kicks, or if you dance frequently incorporating elements including turning on one leg on your heels, etc...
4. Make your sitting chair surface as uneven as possible and change your sitting-terrain frequently
Put blankets, pillows, towels, foam, etc.. under your buttocks while you sit on your comfy expensive chair. Put a rolled thick towel or two BEHIND YOUR LOWER SPINE, so you feel your lower spine - just above your hip, supported == pushed forward, while you sit. Remain there, reading or working in that position for a while. Main thing is you must make your previously unchanged sitting position at your desk that you cemented yourself into like an unmoving sculpture as chaotic and changing as possible. Buy physiotherapy chairs, looking like a rubber cylinder, which move with your bottom as you wiggle your lower spine, while you sit.
Do the PRIEST PRAYER POSITION:
Lay a thick triple folded
bio-winterbed sheet before your desk and KNEEL onto it, like a priest praying and continue working for a while until your hips and knees go completely asleep and you feel - after 50 - as if your hip joints got fixed with concrete.. This is just to make you not sit all the time in your chair. If you read on the computer, try to walk around a bit, while reading or watching a video interview. Keep walking up and down your room while watching the video.
Super Comfy Spine stretching
Just like this girl does. Stand up, facing front, legs slightly apart. Clasp your hands and bring them to the side, while your head remains in a forward facing position. Gently turn your clasped hands to the other side. Then turn your head as well, while turning your arms left and right. You can gently turn your spine a little too. Your bones should crackle in your spine.
That's it! Laura complained about pain for many years. I had pain for many years. Using this excellent research and awareness expanding forum our mind-capacity is expanding and we get smarter. We start to employ smart life decisions. We improve our everyday logistics.
So this is my story of completely stopping and erasing my debilitating hip and spine pain!
