Preventing Stress Fractures

 

Posture exercise series to strengthen your back and prevent stress fractures

What is a stress fracture?

·         In women and men, the combination of aging and reduction of physical activity can affect your musculoskeletal health and contribute to the development of bone fragility. 

·         While more common in women, stress fractures occur in men, particularly in those with low testosterone.

·         Stress fractures are tiny cracks that can occur in any bone.

·         They can be caused by overuse, increased intensity of an activity at a rate that is too high for the body, overuse and osteoporosis in people over 50.  

·         Skeletal health can be assisted by improving the strength of supportive muscles.  Ideally the objective should be to prevent fractures rather than treat associated complications. 

How can I prevent stress fractures?

Doing exercises on a regular basis can help strengthen your abdomen and lower back in order to keep your muscles strong and prevent injury.

When you start a new exercise, start slowly and progress gradually, making sure you are practicing correct form with each movement.  

Also, make sure you are getting the proper nutrition as this is also a critical component to bone health.

Here are some posture exercises to help prevent stress fractures in the lower back:

 



Superman

*Benefit is to strengthen  back muscles

-Lay face down on the floor with your arms stretched out in front of you and neck in neutral position

- Keeping your arms and legs straight lift simultaneously up towards the ceiling

-Hold for 5 seconds and lower down to complete one set 

Superman with arms at your side

*Benefit is for back muscle strengthening

-Lay face down and place pillow under your abdomen with your arms at your side

-Looking down at the floor raise your head and chest off the floor

Donkey Kick Exercise

*Exercise for improving strength in lumbar extensors and gluteus maximus muscles

-Put both hands and knees on the floor with your head facing the floor

-Slowly lift one leg at a time towards the ceiling making a 90 degree angle with that leg

-Bring leg down to starting position and repeat with opposite leg

Lying down with head lift

*Exercise to strengthen abdominal muscles

-Lay on your back on the floor with your knees bent and arms at your side

-Lift your head towards your chest and raise a few inches off the floor

-Hold for 5 seconds and bring head back down to resting position

-Repeat

 Supine with one arm raised by your head  

-Lay down on your back with your knees bent and one arm raised at your head and stretch and hold

-Release this arm and bring down to your side

-Repeat on opposite side

Great article about ActivAided in the news

The ActivAided postural retraining device that I helped develop with Kelly Collier is in the news again!

Some highlights from the story:
"Ms. Collier, a 25-year old Carnegie Mellon University graduate, embarked on the idea to upgrade the standard back brace into a flexible and supportive posture-correcting shirt after sustaining a back injury as a collegiate swimmer. She teamed up with physician Gary Chimes and several classmates to create the company’s first prototype as part of her senior project.

We here are excited to see the success that Kelly is having, and are excited about ActivAided is improving the lives our patients!

Operationalizing Fun

The main operating principle for Lake Washington Sports & Spine is prioritizing happiness

The origin of our practice happened incidentally at the American College of Sports Medicine meeting about 4-5 years ago.  Garrett and I have been friends since 2001, and whenever we happened to be at the same meeting, we would try to get to dinner and chat.

Both of us were part of large practices- Garrett in private practice, and I was in a large University practice- and we were noticing that the conversations we were having at work were rarely about the things that we thought were the most important.  In particular, we thought that medical practices were not spending enough time prioritizing happiness.

Around this time, there was a trend in the world of psychology to focus on the psychology of happiness.  One key insight was recognizing that happiness is not the absence of sadness, but is an independent concept.  Instead of focusing on depression and misery, there was an emerging science of studying happy people, and figuring out how to develop deliberate tactics to become happier.  Some excellent resources on this topic can be found here  and here.

Several years later, Garrett and I both made a decision (by fate, we made the decision within 2 hours of one another, even though we were living on opposite sides of the country) to make a change to our practices, and I left academia to join Garrett.  It's been a great decision.

One of the things that I think other clinicians find striking when they visit our office is how strongly we prioritize happiness.  While we pride ourselves on technical excellence, particularly our skill with musculoskeletal ultrasound, our #1 operational principle is prioritizing happiness.  Traditionally, clinicans often define themselves by body part, saying things like "I'm a spine guy" or "I'm the knee guy."

We like to define ourselves by how we do things, rather than what we do.  We're "fun and happy guys," and our hope is that for patients, that makes all the difference.