Should I Get an MRI?
At about a rate of once per year, I am subject to a bout of central low back pain that forces me into excessive stiffness, pain, and an old man posture. Usually, it’s by doing something stupid where in retrospect I probably shouldn’t have been doing what I was doing. Heavy deadlifts for time? Yeah, that’s happened.
I had my yearly occurrence about three weeks ago while standing up from sloppily crawling around on the ground with my toddler after having sat in front of a computer for two hours. A quick bout of activity (bear crawling is much more demanding than you may think) after prolonged sitting conjured my retrospective thought of, “dumbass — you know better.”
I was diligent with great sitting posture utilizing my McKenzie lumbar roll and performed my sustained cobra press-up (Fig 4 below, typing in this position as we speak) before I could do full and free press-ups (Fig 5 below) with repetition. By following some basic rules for acute back pain, as my stiffness decreased, my range of motion increased and subsequent pain alleviated. It took about three days to get back to normal.
