well we are back with dr corenman and he joins us now he is with the steadman clinic
to talk about back pain and improper and proper ways to lift and with a lot of
people getting back to work maybe after a couple
months off during the off-season or doing different types of work it's really time
to think about how you are lifting things or even if you just moving the
christmas decorations around the garage getting ready for the holidays
its so true we see a lot of
professional athletes
and most of them don't injure themselves on the field
they are at home lifting up an envelope or pushing the car or something like that
the injuries from lower backs are so significant
for little activities and so i thought we would talk today about why lifting is so
important and how the mechanism of lifting is relatively simple but
injurious if you do it wrong yeah you always hear about lift with your knees
and pull the item close to your core right that's true
but most people don't do that because when we're little kids
we don't think about lifting our backs are great you can lift and push and pull without
having any problems but unfortunately
when we get older our backs get a little more fragile and we have to learn how to
lift differently and a lot of times i feel like we are just in a hurry
and we're not stopping to think
am i in the right position i'll grab something out of my back
seat of the car or ill go to the dishwasher to lift something up and i
might not be in the right position to do so that's exactly true most
people injure themselves
with simple non thinking activities when we're in a rush if we don't prepare
ourselves to lift that's when we injure ourselves
and you are kind of amazed at how that little slight movement
can injure you so
badly i can get a professional baseball player in
and he says i was just bending over to lift up the pan and my back went out
you know and here he is making plays and sliding into second base things like
that
so it it's a little crazy to think that little activities can do it but that's
mainly how these things occur
and you have some diagrams that will show what your discs are doing and what is
happening during lifting lets take a look at these well this first diagram is
a simple diagram showing the side view of the spine call the motion segment
and if you think about it there are two vertebra
and they're separated by the shock absorber the disc in front
you can see on the right side that's a normal disc and the pressure inside is
normal but as we get older the pressure in the disc drops and those fibers on
the side walls like the side walls of a car tire letting the air out
those fibers get a little less tense
and have a little more play which is
one of the big problems okay
so decreased space between the vertebra
let's go to the next slide
so this shows you what the disc looks like everybody calls the disc a jelly
filled donut and it really is the
interior jellies like the air in a car tire
and the outer plies
there are thirty plies just like plies on a radial tire
and if you look at the picture
i'm sorry go back
so if you look at the picture you'll see the plies run in different directions
and this is important for lifting because you'll see in the bottom right
when you twist
half of the fibers in the disc tighten up and the other half loosen up
so just by the simple act of twisting you lose fifty percent of the strength
of the disc and this is the biggest deal of anything in lifting is that the twist is
what's detrimental
people that twist and load their spine are going to injure it
now if we don't mind going to the next slide
this is a picture of on the left the normal disc in the resting position and
as you lift this is what happens to the back of the disc
the back of the disc is under significant tension so you start to add these
factors uo you twist
so you lose fifty percent of the strength in your disc and then you bend forward and
you're putting all the stress on the back fibers
and you're developing a situation where you can start to tear the disc
if we can go to the next picture please
so this is a complex picture but it's a side view
of a person who's bending forward and lifting
and you have to go back to physics and high school to remember all these terms
but in reality if you look at the load if you remember said if i had a
lever long enough
i could move the world well what he was saying there is that you can develop
enough stress
by a long enough lever that you can create
a lot of force and that's what happens to the back
is that you look over here
you'll see the back is under significant stress as you lift something
ok doctor corenman we are going to keep you around because we are going to find out
if we're lifting properly and that if things do go awry how you can help us
out so you can find more out at http://neckandback.com and he is
available at the steadman clinic at 479-5895
stay tuned we will have more on the back