Hello from me and my spine! Ankylosing spondylitis
Do you remember my last video when i said this this injury is not permanent uh it has a very clear path to recovery it’s um doesn’t get in the way of everyday life it’s not chronic pain it’s not um something i have to live with forever it’s a little bit out of date now it turns out my injury isn’t actually an injury it’s an autoimmune disease called ankylosing
Spondylitis quite the mouthful there it’s an inflammatory disease and it usually affects the spine and the pelvis and the hips and kind of where your spine connects to your pelvis apparently no one knows what causes it just what happens is when i’m still too long when i’m sitting down or lying down all the joints in my back and spine and hips get inflamed and
Tighten and get really really kind of tense like this and i lose a lot of mobility um and all the muscles around the joints get uh really really tight to kind of try and compensate for the joints themselves not working so everything tightens everything it’s really stiff and you kind of end up all hunched and in pain and unable to to move normally and properly if
It’s left untreated and this is actually a little bit dramatic uh all the bones in your spine can start to fuse so the joints are no longer movable mobile joints you end up with this kind of like block of bone and you’re hunched over and you can’t really move that’s in extreme cases though and i’m really lucky that we caught it and started treating it as quickly
As we did because we can start to manage that and make sure that doesn’t happen now so all these symptoms worsen after rest so sitting down lying down being still not moving not exercising which means sleep is remarkably tricky obviously you’re lying down all night you’re not moving which is prime uh circumstances for this whole ankylonics bottle artisting
To just really sink its teeth in so i usually wake up around three or four a.m now um due to my back just completely ceasing up uh and i need to get out of bed well kind of fall out of bed at that point and do some yoga or stretches or pilates to get it to calm down somewhat so i can go back to sleep and that’s not every night you know that goes up and down um
But it is it is interesting now uh having having sleep something i used to associate with relaxation be more of a a trigger for flare-ups now so this means my morning routine is now very centered around this i get out of bed you know i can’t really sleep in with this so i wake up quite early now and i do a bunch of pilates and yoga and movement exercises each
Morning uh it normally means i can’t do things early in the morning activity wise and meeting up with people because i have like a full 45 minutes of exercises to get my body moving and and being mobile again after after being in bed certain things also make the inflammation and therefore the pain a lot worse and you can kind of dial it down and control that a
Bit by controlling these triggers so the big ones for me are diet diet and stress so i’m i’ve been figuring out exactly what foods set this off and what foods don’t and how i can control it and um i i’m eating very healthily these days i know exactly what i can and can’t eat and what causes all the pain and the inflammation uh i’m i’m now that guy at the cafe is
Saying like oh i can’t eat that i can’t eat that but it’s it’s so worth it if i can get through a night without pain i can sleep or i can move or i can train that day or i can you know just kind of feel um as mobile as i want to um the next day there are flare-ups as well which are just kind of a week or so of time where it just gets worse for no reason nothing
You can do no amount of kind of yoga or stretching will fix it so it just kind of um i just kind of limp around like an old man for a couple of days until it goes away just to kind of ride those out and then it happened that often i seem to get it maybe once a month once every couple of weeks but you can start to know when that’s coming and you plan accordingly and
You um you know i don’t really do anything that requires heavy physical activity when i know that’s that’s starting however this all sounds very doom and gloom there is good news uh the way to manage this and treat this is through exercise it’s through mobility it’s keeping active it’s making sure that this kind of information doesn’t result in you tightening up
Lots and lots of movement lots of exercise which is what i love to do anyway so i’m i’m feeling very thankful for that i’m doing more training these days than i have ever really so the aim is to counteract that stiffness and that inflexibility and that inflammation and i feel so lucky that that is the um the treatment if it was the opposite and i was you know
I had to stop exercising and stop moving like the thought of that definitely definitely scares me a lot so i do feel very lucky that i can um i should be doing more exercise to help manage this so my doctors have told me just to kind of turn the exercise knob up to 11. these days i’m training tricking twice a week or three times a week depending on the week i’m
Running every second day i’m doing strength training every second day i’ve got yoga and pilates every single day i’ve got a group pilates class once a week and now that summer’s starting i’m going to be starting swimming as well to keep that kind of thoracic movement in motion without too much joint impact i’m actually really enjoying all of that it has meant some
Changes to how i train tricking though as you can imagine impacts and hard landings aren’t really the best for this especially because all of this is kind of centered around my pelvis and spine where you know kind of the sensory body that takes all this impact so i need to keep these impacts to a minimum so this means every trick i train everything i learn i need
To do in the foam pit first and then once it’s good in the foam fit i need to move it to a crash mat and then once it’s got a crash mat then i can start to think about it on the floor basically i need to have every trick to the point that i can land it as easy as running before i put it on the floor so that there’s minimal um you know impact as i land so no no
Chucking tricks at the moment and some days with these flare-ups i was telling you about any sort of impact is too much even the foam pit so and that includes the take-off not even the landing uh so those days you know i just kind of adjust training schedules i train standing kicks or i train things like gumbys cartwheel switches all these kind of things that
Don’t rely on um jumping and landing there’s there’s ways around it and i’m managing it um i think pretty well to keep training so i’ve been training back at the gym for a couple of months now which i’m really excited about oh man my first session back was just who had such an appreciation for just simple movements simple cartwheels just jumps and moving and
Yeah it felt incredible i feel so lucky that i can keep training so that’s where we’re at i have ankylospondelitis i’m going to keep training uh progression might be a bit slower than i’d want it to be but we’ll get there i’ll still have videos coming out on this channel um i’ve got lots of plans for them actually i’m pretty excited to show you so thanks for
Watching this little little update video and the next video will definitely have tricky unit i promise
Transcribed from video
I have a joint disease – Ankylosing Spondylitis By James Daly