391: 7 Easy Ways to Eliminate Back Pain For Good

And I woke up the next morning and my right leg was not working. And I mean, it was not working. I was dragging my leg, dragging my leg on the ground as I was walking. Hi, I want to welcome you to Midlife Conversations. I'm Natalie Jill, your host and I help midlife women redefine and rebrand aging. On this podcast, I do what I do best, taking complicated information and conversations around aging that are relevant to us now and breaking it all down simply with actionable steps that you can implement to level up your life, because your best years are yet to come. I also regularly interview some of the most inspiring people living in their best midlife years. On this show, I cover topics about our health, hormones, navigating weight, blood sugars, our mood, focus changes, even our relationships, career changes, beauty, and more.

We're going to be talking about easy ways to eliminate back pain for good, possibly even prevent it, alleviate how you're feeling it. If you do these things, you can fix your back pain or prevent it from even happening over 40, 50, 60s and beyond. I'm Natalie Jill and we're going to dive into this topic today. Now, if you're listening on my podcast, make sure to subscribe. So you always get notifications when there is a new episode dropping. And if you're watching this on YouTube, make sure to hit that subscribe. I'm going to be regularly releasing content for YouTube Plus. It helps sometimes as I show images and graphs when I'm talking about specific things, even even when I'm doing this with guests. So you want to make sure you subscribe there. So you always have notification about a new show and you can see what we're talking about some of the times. All right, so we're going to dive into back pain and I am quite experienced when it comes to this. I'm going to tell you my story, but I want to start with some statistics that you might not even be aware of. I don't want you to think you're alone if you deal with back pain first and foremost. Around 68% of individuals in their 40s show signs of disc degeneration. Did you know that the prevalence rises to about 80% in individuals in their 50s and approximately 88% of individuals in their 60s and beyond have disc degeneration. Now, disc degeneration affects 93% of individuals in their 70s and 96% of those over that. So it's inevitable in a lot of cases. Now, progression of this occurs 40 to 70% more frequently in women compared to men. So women it's not in your head if you've been feeling this. And pain with people can range from mild to severe. So you can't do life even to sometimes where you have degeneration, but you're not actually even feeling it. So why is that happening? What's this phenomenon that we can take a MRI of a bunch of people and see disc generation in a lot of them, but some actually feel it to the point of debilitation and some don't feel it at all. So what's that about? We're going to dive into that. Also, when you deal with chronic back pain and disc degeneration, it's usually a lot worse when sitting. So you notice that, and it sometimes can alleviate when standing and moving. The problem is if you're in pain, you don't necessarily always want to go move. So I want to dive in a little bit to my back pain story and why this became an important topic to me and how I can help you with this. So we cannot fix this degeneration. That's not something we could fix, but we can eliminate pain and take it out of the equation. So let me explain what I mean by that. So I had disc pain for years. In my 40s, I would feel my lower back a lot if I was sitting too long, sometimes for no reason. Sometimes I'd be doing even a light workout, and all of a sudden I would feel my back pain. And I didn't understand what that was about. Now an MRI had revealed that I had disc degeneration. And I didn't know the stuff that I'm about to share with you today. And I wish I had known this then. So I had Learned in my 40s dealing with it that I would just kind of work through it. I would take no anti inflammatories, I would take Advil that really acted up, and I would sort of deal with it. That's just what I was doing, how I was navigating it. It wasn't until I had a massive disc rupture. And what happened was I was actually working out on set. I was doing a long stretch, long stand of filming, and I was doing some moves that I probably shouldn't have been doing. So I want to be transparent there, but I had this horrible shooting pain come out of the side of my back. And I'll never forget it because it was so intense. And I was on set filming, and I remember I went to my bag and I was like, I've got to do something. I'm getting paid to Film this stuff. I'm here with a group. This is excruciating pain. What do I do? And all I had in my bag was my et al. Remember my. At all for cramps. So I remember taking so much Myadol, which was a ton of caffeine and aspirin, trying to get this pain to subside, and it wouldn't subside. I got through the day somehow. And I woke up the next morning and my right leg. Leg was not working. And I mean, it was not working. I was dragging my leg, dragging my leg, dragging it on the ground as I was walking. So I was like, what the heck is going on with my leg? What is happening here? I had something called foot drop. And if you look that up, foot drop is like your. Your whole leg is not actually working. So I thought, well, maybe it was. I didn't even put it together that it had to do with my back. I thought, gosh, maybe I did something to my pariformis or something else happened. But I got back, I went to the doctor, obviously, because that was critical. And they did an X ray and I had an mri and they said, you have a massive disc rupture and it's impinging on your nerve and that's creating your foot drop. And if you don't do something to remove this disc that just ruptured, you could end up not using. You could lose use of your right leg, which was just not an option for me. So I jumped in and did something called laser endoscopic surgery, where they go in and they. It's very minimally invasive. They remove the rupture, which freed up my leg and would help alleviate the foot drop. And I did not, did not do a disc replacement or a fusion. And I decided not to do that because I was worried that if I fused a disc together that all of a sudden I would put pressure on other disc and I'd have problems there. And I also knew that if I put a disc replacement, I could have other symptoms from that. So I opted not to do that, which then was pretty much putting me into chronic pain because I had full bone on bone. Like, there was literally no disc now it had ruptured out. They removed it from the laser endoscopic, and now I was bone on bone. So this was painful. Like, painful to sit, painful to move, painful to work out, painful all the time. So I thought, this isn't going to work in my life. What do I do? And I started going down, exploring. Do I want a fusion? Do I want a disc replacement. And I did not want any of that. So here's what I did. I had a very strong core. And you always hear if you have a tight core and a strong core, you won't have back pain. Well, your core is not just your abdominals. Your core is that whole midsection area. And I had really done a good job changing training my abs. I mean, I had a full six or eight pack, even very lean, very strong abs, but I still had this problem. And you know what it was? I'll tell you what it was. I was walking with my daughter, and she's, you know, 17 at the time of me recording this. But at the time, she was, she was little, she was younger. Not a lot younger, but younger pre teen or teen. And she said to me, we were walking, she said, mom, your butt looks flat. And I remember remember going, what? What do you mean my butt looks flat? And I knew I just kind of wrote it off to her being a pre teen and just saying what's on her mind. But I started like looking at it. I'm like, my butt is flat. What's going on with that? And it started to connect a dot with me that if you don't have strong glutes, if you're weakening that area, and that happens as we age, we lose muscle. And if you're not actively training something hard, you're going to lose muscle faster. And you then gravity kicks in, so you kind of have that drop and I call it the grandpa butt. You get that, that flatness. Well, I had that flatness. It was starting. I had that flatness. Even though I looked very fit, it was not something I was training. Seriously. I didn't really lift weights on my butt. I would do kind of leg workouts. But, you know, I grew up in the 70s and in the 80s and even in the 90s, it was in. That was like the body type to be thin. We used to cover. We used to cover our butts, for goodness sake. When we go to the gym, we would tie a sweatshirt around our leggings. Remember those days, women? Do you remember those now, people? The booty. It's all about the booty. Booties are in. It was not in. So we just got in the habit of you didn't want a big butt. So that meant not gaving a strong butt and that. I lived that. I'm just, I'm admitting it. So gravity kicks in, it starts getting flat and I started digging into, you know, what creates that pressure on those disc. Now my disc rupture was L5S1. And what I really learned and figured out is that if you can strongly develop your glutes and your core, your glutes and your core, you can basically take your lower back out of the equation. The reason some of us feel massive pain in our lower disc, some of us not saying this for everybody, some of us is because we all have the degeneration, but the reason some feel it and some don't. My theory, my theory just based on natalisms, is that if we have weak glutes, that disc is taking more pressure and we're going to feel that more. I was mind blown piecing this together, like mind blown piecing this together because I thought if I could train my glutes and get them stronger and do that couple with my core, I can take my lower disc out of the equation. Therefore, I'm not going to feel that pain. This was mind blowing to me. And here's what I want you to do. If you're not driving, if you're watching this on video or you know you're in a place you can do this. If you deal with lower back pain, what I want you to do right now is stand up, put your shoulders back, squeeze your core, and I want you to squeeze your glutes to almost flatten them out. Squeeze it and you tell me if your lower back pain goes away. That's kind of what turned me on to realizing, okay, when I do that and I activate my glute muscles, I don't feel my lower back. So I went on hyper focus mission to develop my glutes and I, as I'm getting older, I'm almost 53, really hyper focusing on growing them and I don't have back pain because of it. So here's what I want you to know. Here's all the things that I figured out and this will hopefully help you. Number one, when we have lower back pain or pain in our back, a body in motion stays in motion. And you might think, well, I'm in pain, I can't move. Well, this is why we have to move. There's something called the pain cycle. And the pain cycle means you're in pain, so you don't want to move, so you're now stiffer, you're being sedentary, and now you're necessarily not eating the way that you should. You're not in a great mood. Energy stays stagnant. You're going to start feeling that pain even more when you can break through that and actually move your body with what you can move and get out of that. That will help you break the pain cycle. So doing whatever you can to be active and move your body is critical. If you're like, I can't even walk, what can you do? Can you raise your arms? Can you do arm lifts? Can you do something with your legs? What can you do? We've got to get out of that. That mindset and be in motion. When my back would hurt, I used to say, I don't want to walk. It's going to hurt. But if I would do that and squeeze my glutes and kind of get it going and then go for a walk, I would always feel better. So, number one, a body emotion stays emotion. Do what you can to break that pain cycle. The second thing, whenever you can, throughout the day, you're doing dishes, you're doing, talking on the phone, you're standing, Whatever you can do that move I just described to you, squeeze your glutes, put your shoulders back, Tighten your cord out. So almost like tighten your core, push your ribs almost down, shoulders back, squeeze those glutes, do that stance. That helps you work that lower back area to take that. I'm sorry, it helps you work those glute muscles to take that lower back out of the equation. That will help it help you feel better. The third thing to do is sitting makes it worse. So stop sitting. Stop sitting all day. How can you add in more steps? How could you pace more? How could you park further? How can you commit to going for walks? How do you move more? I'm sitting as I'm recording this. This is rare for me. I only sit when I'm recording. Other times, I'm moving around. When I do meetings, I stand. When I'm on a phone call, I pace. When I'm scrolling social media, I pace. When I make sure I'm walking, I always take the furthest place to park. I take stairs whenever possible. Sitting will make it worse. When you're sitting, your hip flexors are tight. Sitting is going to make it worse. Okay, the next thing I do, we tend to have very tight hip flexors, which is not helping anything. It's pulling on things. So we need to stretch out our hip flexors. Stretch out your hip flexors regularly. If you are watching this on video, I'm showing how to actually stretch your hip flexor. So I want you to look at this video of how I'm stretching it. I'm not doing it where I lean all the way forward to the ground. I'm doing it where I'm right up. And it's a small, small move to just really get in there and stretch out that hip flexor. It's the opposite motion of sitting. So we want to do daily next foam, foam rolling. Why foam rolling? Well, most of us, especially women, end up being quad dominant, especially in midlife. We are quad dominant, front of our leg dominant. We need to activate our glutes and our hamstrings more. When you foam roll, you're rolling out your your quads. You're almost, in a way, shutting off that quad from firing initially. So it forces you to activate your hamstring and your glutes. Hope I'm explaining that way. It makes sense. But if you foam roll before your workouts or before going for walks, that helps you not be so quad dominant. The next thing that I do, there's an exercise called a bird dog. And I'm going to show you, if you're watching video, what that looks like. But a bird dog really helps strengthen that lower back area, and it feels so good on it. The next thing I do, I do targeted core and glute work to stay committed to developing muscles there to take my lower back out of the equation. So how do I do that? Well, I really do targeted exercises. So I'm going to walk you through some core exercises first. So there's lots of core exercises we could do. My absolute favorite one is a plank. There's nothing that beats a plank. Planks are challenging. It does create progressive overload. It helps us progress naturally. GL are amazing. So anything plank based, I'm a fan of. You could do them on your forearms, you could do them on your wrist. I'm going to show you the proper form on video. If you're watching this on YouTube so you can see how to do this. Now I'm exaggerating it a little bit so you can see what this looks like. But when you're doing a plank, you don't want it to be where your lower back is caved in. That's going to make your lower back problem worse. You almost want to over exaggerate almost to a V and really squeeze. Ribs to knees, ribs to knees. Squeeze to really activate that core. Okay, moving on to the glutes. There are three exercises that I think are critical for developing those glutes, and they will feel so good if you've got lower back. The first one is a glute bridge. A glute bridge. And I'm gonna show you how I do this from the floor. If you're watching on video, but you're basically laying, laying down on your back. Your knees are up and you're going to drive through your heels and push up your booty. So you're using your hamstrings, you're using your glutes and you are pushing up in that move and you can just hold it there. Or you could do reps up and down. This should feel so good on your lower back and it's so good for your glutes. Most people, when they have that flat backside, when they look like grandpa butt, they are actually they can't even do this yet. So this is so important to work towards this. You should be able to do a glute bridge. The next two exercises I recommend, they're a little bit more advanced, but once you can master that, glute bridge is a deadlift. And I'm going to show you the proper form. You could do this with your own body weight, by the way, your own body weight. You just want to make sure you are using that mind body connection and activating your glutes as you pop up. So you're coming up slowly, you activate those glutes and the next one is just a squat. Even if you start with your own body weight. I'm going to show you how I do a squat on the video. If you're watching on video, just want to show you how you do a body weight squat driving through your heels. Look at how my back is and I'm really using those glutes and I'm pushing up those three exercises even before you're adding weights to that. Because I don't want to freak you out about adding weights if you've got lower back pain. But these three things should help alleviate that lower back pain. Okay, what else do I do? What else I recommend? One, eat anti inflammatory. We do not want our body inflamed. We don't want inflammation. There's a lot of things we can do to help with inflammation, but this is just really simple, basic things I'm going to tell you. Number one, eat real, natural, unprocessed food. Eat real, natural, unprocessed food. That's simple to say. You can define the ingredients. It's simple. Think fruit, vegetables, protein, nuts, seeds, olive oil, avocado, natural, unprocessed, real foods. No, I don't mind if those things are combined together. So you pick up, you know, something that has four ingredients in the bag, but you know what those are, that's still pretty much unprocessed. Eat unprocessed natural foods. There are three things that really contribute inflammation. If you want out of pain, I highly suggest avoiding these. This is grains. Grains? Yes, grains. They will activate inflammation. Don't. I don't want to argue with you. If you love grains and you're doing amazing, you're not in pain, more power to you. Keep eating them. If you're dealing with pain, you have autoimmune or you've got inflammation. Eliminate the grains, you will feel better. Dairy is another one. Our dairy, especially in the US is highly processed. We basically kill the enzyme that would help break it down. If you're eating regular dairy, you're going to create inflammation. You are going to create inflammation. Again, I don't want to argue. If you love your dairy and you want to tell me why it's amazing for you. More power to you if you're not in pain. If you don't have autoimmune, keep doing it. I don't care. You could do it. I don't do dairy for that reason. Unless it's raw dairy or unless it's. If I'm in Europe, I seem to not have a dairy issue. We don't have. They don't do all the things to it that we do here. So dairy can also create inflammation and feel that. And then sugar. Goes without saying. Sugar's so damaging in so many ways. Take added sugar out of your diet. I don't mean fruit and fructose. I mean sugar, high fructose, corn syrup, added sugar. We're eating way too much added sugar. I'll have another episode on that soon. But we want to take out sugar that's also creating inflammation in our body. Okay. And then supplements that help with inflammation. There's so many. But the, the two that I use is curcumin, which is the active compound in turmeric. I don't care what brand you pick, but that is amazing. Or have real turmeric. Cumarin, you want that? That's going to stand out. Is a potent anti inflammatory agent and this benefits so many things like arthritis, heart disease, inflam, inflammatory bowel disease. But also it's going to help with your pain and. And then omega 3 fatty acids, which is primarily found in fish oil, is another.

Thing that I highly recommend for pain. Anyways, I hope this was helpful. If you liked this, please let me know below if you've got questions or if you want more like this. Also, if you're watching this on YouTube, please make sure you hit subscribe so you get notified of new releases. And if you're on my podcast, hit that follow on the show notes so you get notified of new shows. It also helps me grow the reach with the show. And if you found Midlife Conversations my podcast helpful, I want to be able to keep bringing on amazing guests and bringing on great features for you. And the more subscribers that we have aware of the show and liking it, the more that I can access these amazing guests for you. So please do that and I will see you next time. Bye.

I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in as my guest. If you found this episode valuable, please share it with friends and on social media. Be sure to tag me and our guests so that we can find you and share the love. I'm Natalie Jill fit on all social media platforms and the biggest thank you that you can give me is leaving a review and hopefully a nice one at that. This will help others find these episodes so we can help and reach more people. If you do leave me a review, please Message us@supportataliejill fitness.com with a screenshot of your view and we would to love love to send you a free digital download of my DSR Journal as a thank you.