When I was 11 years old I was involved in a major car accident... it’s funny how your whole life can change in an instant.
On that day, while we were standing next to the road waiting for the towing service to arrive I had no way of knowing that the trajectory of my life would experience a tectonic shift because of what had just happened.
From that moment on living with back pain and drinking pain killers became part of my life. While I was still in school I visited the physiotherapist numerous times for treatment, but as I got older these sessions became less effective over time.
In adulthood I became overweight and, in 2006, one of the reasons I wanted to lose weight was to alleviate the chronic back pain I had been living with for nearly a decade. I subsequently lost 30 kilos after completely changing my lifestyle and starting to exercise.
Making these changes and the resultant weight loss provided some relief, at least for a few years, but I was yet to realise the full extent and severity of my back problems. From 2007 to 2014 I lifted incrementally heavier weights and started doing highimpact exercises such as sprints and box jumps. I was, however, completely oblivious to the impact that these choices and behaviours had on my injury and it subsequently got much worse.
By the start of 2016, I had reached a point where nothing worked any more and my symptoms had become progressively more severe. I was experiencing numbness in my left leg, which was an indication of possible nerve impingement, so I went for physiotherapy, cortisone infiltrations and I decreased the amount of exercise I did, all in the hope of alleviating the pain, but nothing worked.
This story is from the July - August 2017 edition of Fitness Magazine.
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This story is from the July - August 2017 edition of Fitness Magazine.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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