A brief history of Tim

So I'm about 2 and a half years into my whole back ordeal, and people ask me the seemingly innocuous question of "What did you do?" which, to use the cliche, is a long story.  So lets start from the beginning and it may take a few days to get the whole story out there before I catch up to present day.

I worked and still do, as a Software Engineer working from home most of the time.  In about April of 2009 at age 29, I first weakened my disc while working out.  I had been doing a workout program call P90X for about 2 years and loved it.  It really worked for me and I was by far in the best shape of my life.  At the start of the program I could do 6 pullups, and at my best a few years later, I had improved to where I could do 22 in a single set.

I had never had much athletic talent at all growing up as a tall skinny kid, although I did go out for many sports, such as 6th grade wrestling, junior high basketball and track, one year of golf in high school, 4 years of running back of the pack JV cross country in high school, and one year of swim team in high school also.  I pretty much sucked at them all but enjoyed doing something to try to better myself and keep in shape.  I lifted weights and jogged on and off throughout college.

I had always wanted to be able to bulk up a bit, (being 6'2'' and 145lbs as a senior in college).  So when I started P90X at age 27, I was shocked at what a good fit it was for me.  Over the course of a couple years, I was finally able to put on about 15lbs of muscle (and a little fat) where I had never been able to when I was younger due to my super high metabolism, which as I entered my mid-twenties, finally started to slow just a bit.  I was able to get up to about 168lbs which was a great weight for my slim frame. It was a lot of time, dedication, and hard work to stick to the program and a good diet, even on days when I didn't feel like working out, but I loved it.

Where I eventually went wrong, was when I had become very accustomed to the workouts, and needed more of a challenge, I decided to throw a weight vest into the mix.  I had seen many other people using them with the program and for several months, it really worked well.  Pushups, pullups, plyometrics, and yoga with the weight vest pushed my fitness to new levels and I loved that every day I could go downstairs and do something that I had never been able to do before in my life.  Even if it was just a few more pullups or pushups, it really gave me a sense that I was finally able to do something physical that impressed myself (not that I was any sort of ironman level athlete, with my natural lack of god given talent and all) but after growing up as a kid with no physical talent, it was very fulfilling to finally not feel so self conscious about being so thin and gangly, and finally feel proud to have earned a fit and more normaly proportioned build through years of hard work.

Unfortunately, while helping my muscles, it was weakening my disc without me knowing it, even though I practiced good technique, lifting with my legs and not my back, and wearing support belts to take care of my back as well.  I do not blame the P90X program at all, it is a great program and they have plenty of warnings to be careful and listen to your body.  It is a challenging program, and they tell you that up front.  I was in great shape, had been training for a couple years, and was trying to push myself a little harder by upping the challenge.  Unfortunately with discs, they often don't let you know much is wrong until its too late.  There are often few warning signs as was the case with me.

So one day, when doing some yoga, I pushed a forward bend to far and felt a twinge in my back.  Nothing major, just felt like a muscle tweak.  I took a week off and felt fine.  The next week, while doing a two angle shoulder fly with a weight I had been using for months with that move, I felt what I thought was a muscle pull,  but from that point on, I noticed that I would have pain in my back at the disc level when I would get up from sitting from a long time.  After a few weeks of rest and not much improvement, I went to a chiropractor who listened to my symptoms and did the straight leg raise test to test for a disc herniation, which did not cause me pain at that point, and thought that I probably had a small internal tear of my disc and a pulled muscle in my back, which I think was accurate.  She said there was not a lot that could be done besides taking it easy and letting it heal on its own in a couple months.  For the vast majority of people, this is true.  I abandoned the weight vest, and took a couple months off from working out but it never really got much better.  It wasn't too bad and was really not much more than an annoyance from time to time.  A few months later, I started easing back into working out, by first starting with half workouts with none of the back moves, and slowly over several months added the other half of the workout but without the exercises that included bending over with weights, (like the lawnmowers, heavy pants, two angle shoulder flys for you P90Xers).  I never did add the weight vest back in for yoga or plyometrics after that, to be safe.

So fast forward to April of 2010, the annoying pain in my back never went away, and I figured it was part of turning 30, and things just start to hurt now as I'm getting older.  I had returned to P90X without the back lifting exercises for several months with no problems and was feeling otherwise great.  Then out of the blue, one day after doing some overhead tricep extensions with a 20 pound weight while sitting in a chair, I went to set the weight on the floor as I had done numerous times before and felt a massive pain in my back.  It must have just been the exact wrong angle with a weight in my hand combined with the internal disc tear that never healed.  I later learned I had just herniated my L5/S1 lumbar disc.  The pain was excruciating.  I immediately had muscle spasms, sharp pain in my back, hip, and calf and collapsed to the floor, crawled upstairs to get some ibuprofen and some ice.  I iced my back, and then crawled upstairs and went to bed.  I knew something was wrong.  After about a week of continued serious pain, I knew I had to go to a doctor.