Working Through Back Pain At Body Specs

Working Through Back Pain At Body Specs

With apologies to Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson, I woke up Monday morning with no way to hold my back that didn’t hurt.

Such an incident usually is an omen of several weeks of layoff from golf, and often results in me spending days on end flat on my back.

This time, however, things were different. Before heading to work, I spent some time (slowly and painfully) working through stretches I had learned from Skip Bunton at Body Specs. That got me to the point where I could go to work.

Over the course of the day — during passing time between the high school classes I teach — I repeated the stretches in my back office.

Those got me through the day.

That afternoon, during my regularly scheduled appointment at Body Specs, I told Skip about the pain, and he quickly shifted me from the planned workout to one focused on getting my lower back in order.

For the most part, it worked. What was a sharp, debilitating pain now is a low grade ache of the sort I usually feel as I’m recovering from the worst of the back pain.

I am obviously quite pleased to have avoided a debilitating round of back pain. I am even more pleased to have a few new tools to help manage that pain.

If there is a larger lesson in the experience, it is that a good physical trainer like Skip Bunton can help golfers work through a variety of game wrecking ills. What I’ve got to focus on now is ever more work on the core and lower back to prevent these back incidents in the first place.