Hi, I'm Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy. Today's video should be titled ‘How the outlet won! or rather “How to plug won”. But anyway, um, I got this really interesting phone call the other day from somebody who obviously had a bit of a sense of humor. They called and they told me that they had just bent down to plug the light back into their wall and they threw their back out.
So they're calling me because they're scrolling on their phone, laying on the floor, hoping to find somebody who can help them resolve their back pain. It was very interesting phone call to say the least; it went a little bit like this. This poor woman, literally apparently, had just bent down to plug a cord for a light, just a regular sits on your table light, into the wall.
And when she did that, something grabbed in her back so strongly that she fell to the floor and she's laying on her back in one position, afraid to do much more than breathe heavily because the pain was just so severe. She thankfully had her phone on her because, you know, we all it's like an attachment, right? So she's scrolling through and she, she decided she was going to try just calling, physical therapy places. And I was like, the second or the third person that she called trying to get an appointment.
​

Hi I'm Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy. I was asked the same question multiple times this week. So I figured why not talk about it? I was asked, "Why is it that my knee makes this grinding noise? It almost sounds like two pieces of wood rubbing on each other when I go to stand up and sit down." The interesting thing was these people were asking me this question only as a point of curiosity, because their knee didn't actually hurt. It just sounds horrible. And so they couldn't figure out why your joint would make a noise that just sounds like two pieces of broken wood rubbing into each other, and not even hurting.

My answer started with first talking about the anatomy of your knee.

​

Hi, I’m Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy. I want to give a little tip on how to tell early on if you have a back issue.

And my example of this is, if you can't lay flat in your bed, like 100% flat on your back with your legs straight and your heads flat on your bed, then that is a very early sign that something in your lower back has a problem. Because most people ignore that pain since you can bend your knee or you can roll on your side, and that back pain goes away.  So why would you pay any attention to this type of pain, you just adjust your position and the discomfort is gone.  

The reason I know this is the start of a problem is because I see what happens five or 10 years down the line when that same problem has progressed.

​

I'm Dr. Molly, with Your Goals Physical Therapy, let's talk about that burning pain between your shoulder blades or maybe it's right underneath your shoulder blade. You can feel a knot there and you just want to dig the sucker out, but it just keeps coming back every month like clock work. 

When you go to your massage therapist, it gets better for a little bit, but the knot and pain comes back after 3- 4 weeks just like clockwork. Then you're grabbing your shoulder blade like the pain never left. It feels like if somebody could just take their elbow and dig into just the right spot it would finally just disappear. But meanwhile, it hurts when you move your arm a certain way, or if you have a stand in the same position at your desk. It's just constantly talking to you every day without fail. And it's progressively getting worse. How frustrating! If you ever wonder, “Is this really just from how I'm holding my stress?”, or “Is this something that I'm gonna be dealing with forever.” 

That's what I wanna talk about. Your stress can definitely cause things in your body to hurt, but many times when talking about the burning pain in your upper back or shoulder blade, it's actually caused by your posture.

​

One thing that shocks people about me is when I say that I love training my abs. I just love abs day. I’m constantly looking for new abs exercises because I like new challenges, and you can’t get bored if you know 100 different ways to exercise something. But for many women, it hurts to do abdominal exercise. It hurts to lay flat on their back or while completing planks which are notorious for hurting backs. This causes women to just skip training their abs. And this is what Martha told me when I first met her. 

Martha said “How can you like to train your abs? It hurts when I lay flat on my back with or without my knees bent. I can't even do modified planks without pain.” She went on to tell me that her physician told her not to train abs because she has a herniated disc. So her thought was that if it hurts and the doctor says it's not good then I'm just not gonna do it. 

I asked a little bit more about what she could or couldn't do.... Well, I make it through my aerobic classes, I do boot camps. And I don't have any problems. I just avoid doing the ad stuff, but I do squats and lunges and all the upper body exercise without any issues. My back doesn't really hurt when I get done. ​