Stop Back Pain While Laying Flat

Hi, I'm Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy. This week, I had a mom come in and she was telling me about her back problems. One of her back problems was that she couldn't lay flat on the floor. She had been trying to do some yoga and just laying on the floor made her back feel completely unstable. Well, during that session, I shared a very funny moment when I, myself also had back pain when I laid flat. I’d completely forgotten about this story.

And so I figured I will share my funny anecdote for this particular video while talking about how you can get over having back pain when you're laying flat. It doesn't have to be with you forever, or certainly not as long as it was with me. So a little history about me, I was about the age of 13, when I bent over to tie my shoe and the amount of back pain I had I can't even describe. It was so bad that I think I crawled to my mom to tell her that my back was hurting. It was so dramatic that she rushed me over to the chiropractor.  The chiropractor assessed everything and told me that I had a leg length discrepancy. And it was like three inches, which sounds dramatic when you're 13, everything's even worse. Right. So anyway, after a while, she was able to help me calm down the pain and I didn't have pain walking around anymore. I was able to bend over and tie my shoes.  When I was done with the chiropractor I didn’t have any problems, but going forward, 

this was something that was just sort of a reoccurring thing. And of course, since this doctor told me that one leg was longer than the other, I sort of assumed that this was going to be just how life is.

One of the things that I knew was going to cause dramatic back pain if I did this, was laying on something that was a harder surface with my legs straight. So if my knees were bent, I would be okay. Mostly. Sometimes if I rolled to get up, it would be a problem if I was laying on the floor with my knees bent. BUT ​

I knew without a doubt, every time I laid on something that was mostly firm, with my legs straight and then tried to get up, I was going to be in a massive amount of pain. 

It was going to hurt to put weight on my left leg. And that pain would last a good two or three hours before it resolved itself. It was pretty traumatic. But again, when you think that this is just how life is going to be and you don't know that there's anything else that you can do. Then you just sort of accommodate. And how often do you really have to lay flat on something? Hmm. When you want to do yoga, if you want to go get a massage. It would make me so paranoid to get a massage the idea that I would lay on a flat massage table and be on my back. And heaven forbid they didn't give you that bolster to go underneath your knees fast enough. The pain would be so shocking then at some point I would have to try to roll over and that could easily cause immense pain. And I knew it was going to hurt. I knew it was going to cause everything to  seize up and it was going to hurt when I walked. It was very tiring. So I avoided all things related to laying flat. Eventually there did come a time when things were a little bit better. And this is when one of the more embarrassing moments happened.

In the late ‘90, early ‘00, it was still okay to tan. We actually thought that was kind of good. Okay. Obviously we know that indoor tanning is not necessarily good for you, but that was the thing at the time.

And so one of my most embarrassing moments was, when you're in attaining beds, you're laying flat, right? That's the, you don't want to have creases. You don't have the little lines, so you're laying as flat as you can. And when I went to switch sides to lay on my stomach when my back seized up on me. And I was just sort of stuck even after the tanning bed was done. My time was up for an excessively long time as I tried to let my back calm down enough that I could get all the way out of the tanning bed. I was in there for so long that the owner came and knocked to make sure I was okay. It was so embarrassing.  I never went back to that particular place again. It was just very embarrassing because 

I was literally stuck in there and I couldn't move because it felt like I was gonna move, like my bones in my back were going to break. ​

It was very traumatic. And so that was one of the more embarrassing things that happened to me. 

That's the way that my story started. Obviously I ended up in a physical therapy school. Which is where I figured out how to fix all of these things. It took a little trial and error to figure out what exercises and what activities and what things  help to make sure that that pain doesn't come back. Now I get to share all of that wonderful knowledge from my embarrassing moments on massage tables, random tanning beds and just trying to lay on the floor.

I am now in my forties, I have two children. I am able to run, I'm able to lift weights, I'm able to jump. I can even jump onto and off boxes. There was a time when I was boxing, at a gym, as in hitting heavy bags. All these things would have at least annoyed my lower back at one point, none of that bothers me at all.  I'm able to do all of those a hundred percent with no back pain. I don't feel a smidge, so I no longer have to worry about laying on the floor and then getting back up. All of that's completely resolved. I'm able to do yoga on the floor. I'm able to jump up and down.  I get to play with my kids on the floor without thinking about it. Right. My kids like to play airplane, you know where my feet hold them up in the air and they get to pretend they're an airplane.

I don't have to worry about any of that because my back does not bother me. I don't deal with any of the things that I was dealing with in my teens and my twenties.  I'm actually stronger and healthier now in my forties than I was in my twenties. And I just want every mom and every person to know that it is completely possible to live without back pain. And if you're dealing with back pain when you're laying flat, and then when you stand up, you're having pain going down one leg or at like one specific spot on one side of your leg, which makes it hard to put weight down on a leg. There is a way to get through that. There is another side. There is a way for you to stop dealing with this every day; having to wonder about what position you're in and if this is going to get set off.

And so if this is the type of care that you're looking for, feel free to message me, and I will get back to you and talk to you a little bit more about how we can make this, your reality also, where you have no back pain ever. I hope you're having a great day. Bye.

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