Yesterday one of my pain heroes, Bronnie Lennox Thompson over at Health Skills, posted an article that really resonated with me called ‘Deciding When to Say When: Pain Cure? Or Pain Managed? I left a pretty lengthy reply on her blog post, two of them, actually, and felt like they contained some thoughts I should share with you all as well about →
In my last post I talked about movement variability and how important it is for folks trying to change their pain, or just live more healthfully and resiliently in general, and in this post, I want to dive into that topic a bit deeper and talk about ways I’ve added more movement variability into my own life. This is part of →
This post is both stand-alone as well as a part 3 from my ‘Expanding Our World, Expanding Our Movement’ series (Interested? Here’s part 1 and part 2). It revisits and reinforces some of what has been written about in previous movement posts but this one is specific to why I think movement variability and moving through postures, and not specific →
Wow, weeks can fly by! I had started the first two parts of my movement repertoire series with the intention of getting parts 3 and 4 out the following week. That obviously didn’t happen. And this isn’t yet part 3 because I want to share something with you all. It’s related to everything I’ll talk about in those posts but →
In part 1 of this series, I talked about how when we have chronic musculoskeletal pain, our world’s can become pretty small and how in those smaller worlds, we don’t move in the ways we used to or move as much as we used to. It hurts, after all. When we’ve been hurting for a long time, it’s easy to associate →
When we have chronic pain our world can become very, very small and when our world becomes very, very small, it becomes less populated, less interesting, less motivating, less engaging, less enjoyable…just less. And when our world becomes so very small, our movement becomes small too. Our movement becomes stifled, guarded, restricted, limited…less. We may not move much or as much as we used →
I ran today. Well, I went for a jog today. Well, a joggish walk may describe it more aptly. Like a 2-minute joggish walk. Two 2-minute joggish walks to be precise. But I’ll stick with ‘I went for a run today’ because that’s what it felt like. This may not seem like a big deal, people run every day. I →
At some point along the way in writing this blog and trying to figure out this whole chronic pain thing, I went from learning about and understanding more about the science of pain to actually living what I know (well, mostly living what I know, I have my moments). I didn’t really notice it myself, at least not until it was →
I recently wrote about how my thoughts on movement have changed over the past couple of years (part 1 and 2), and I thought I’d delve a bit more into the evolution of those thoughts and why I posted them. Why I think our emphasis needs to shift a bit from the overly formulaic and prescribed movement to exploring enjoyable →
In the first part of this post on movement and pain I talked a bit about how I didn’t think about movement and posture much outside of the gym and lifting heavy things during training; how after I got injured, had surgery, and had persistent pain, I obsessed about movement and posture ALL THE TIME, to my detriment; and how →
My brother was out for the past week with his girlfriend, it was a wonderful trip, as it always is when I get to see my bro (that’s him in the pic with me), but he said something to me that really got me thinking, something that kind of brought together a number of ideas for me, a culmination of →
The San Diego Pain Summit is still swirling around in my head, an unreal amount of thoughts and ideas associated with all I learned, was exposed to, and talked about there, that it’s hard to even know where to start. I have roughly 4 draft posts in the wings right now because there’s too many directions I want to go →
This past weekend I attended the first annual San Diego Pain Summit and I can’t even begin to put into a cohesive string of words all that I am thinking, nor can I come close to formulating into a single blog post all that I learned during the course of three days of thought-provoking presentations from a stellar line-up of speakers. On top →
After my flare at the end of last year (which I talk about a bit here), and the months of getting through it, I started reading a book on pain called Pain: The Science of Suffering, by Patrick Wall, the guy who literally co-wrote the textbook on pain. I took my time, just recently finishing it, and figured I’d share some of →
These past two months have been a bit of a whirlwind for me, with some pretty awesome successes but also some pretty spirit-crushing setbacks. It can sometimes be hard for me to figure out where the balance is between successes and setbacks and what direction is the best way forward when I feel like I’m taking two steps back for →