So what do you do when you’re in my shoes, crumpled on the gym floor and terrified at the prospect of standing up? Lampe’s targeted massage helped loosen my spasming QL (I had a couple more massages over the next two weeks) and shortened my recovery time. ![]() Which it’s not designed to do, and you feel it in the form of a spasm or low back pain. You go to stand up or deadlift, and the QL, now tense from being on duty by itself, is stuck with even more work. Thanks to poor posture and prolonged sitting, these helper muscles do practically nothing all day, so your QL potentially works harder and harder to pick up the slack. Unless you’re a typical desk worker, that is. It’s not designed to do the job alone your glutes, along with all of the other trunk muscles, help out. It’s like a tension cable that keeps your spine upright and your entire trunk steady. (Technically, that’s QLs, since there’s one on each side of your spine.) It fans out from the vertebrae just below your rib cage down to your iliac crest, at the top of your hip bone. The QL is one of the deepest muscles of the trunk. ![]() Varacallo adds, “Nobody comes in and says, ‘I have a strained QL.’ ” But they probably should. Google searches might make you think you have a herniated disk, Lampe says, “but I’d say the QL is the most overlooked muscle when it comes to low back pain.” Dr. “Only a small percentage of patients have a herniated disk, and an even smaller percent will have something that requires surgery,” says Matthew Varacallo, M.D., an orthopedic surgeon specializing in sports medicine and joint reconstruction at Penn Highlands Healthcare in DuBois, Pennsylvania. The truth is that muscles, ligaments, and arthritis are responsible for about 85 percent of back-pain episodes. Like kale and the Kardashians, herniated disks get way more attention than they deserve. Why a "slipped" disk probably isn't causing your back pain What I learned from that was a revelation that would change my relationship with my spine-and could reduce the pain that millions of Americans live with each year. I swore as she manipulated the part of my back in which a boxer would lay a kidney shot, experiencing a whole-body rainbow of agony and release. Lampe had found my quadratus lumborum (QL), a little-known muscle that plays a big role in back pain. Then she rolled me over, jammed a knuckle beneath my bottommost rib, and set my brain on fire. Lampe, a beacon of grace, nodded sympathetically. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play Herniated disks sound serious, and each time my back left me immobilized, I was convinced they were the culprit and never gave my back muscles any thought. ![]() They’re responsible for the kind of anguish that compels almost half a million Americans to get intensive spinal-fusion surgeries each year, even though studies show that these surgical interventions help barely a third of sufferers. Herniated disks-when the jellylike cushions between your vertebrae bulge out of place and squish against your nerves-affect men twice as often as women. Like plenty of other folks with back pain, I was sure I had a disk problem. Coaxing me onto a nearby table, Lampe asked if I’d ever had a massage to treat my back pain. A familiar future unspooled before me: a week or two on the couch in cranky agony, a month of tenuous recovery, and, as with the approximately 80 percent of Americans who will suffer from back pain, a lifetime of knowing that it’ll all probably happen again.īut before I could straighten up and try to drag my body out of the gym, a trainer called over to Dara Lampe, one of the gym’s massage therapists. ![]() Last time it was moving a couch before that it was reaching under a car seat before that it was getting out of bed the wrong way. There I was on the gym floor, half bent and looking like some sort of sick animal, afraid to stand up.
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