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So, for some odd reason, one of the family member's staying with me started screaming in the middle of the night. Hearing an adult male yelling in my house, where I typically am the only adult male sleeping there, I shot upright...and threw out my upper back somehow or other. I'm not sure if I fell asleep in a bad position, or had a pre-existing injury, or what the hell, but right between my shoulder blades is screaming at my every time i turn my head left or right or look down.
Other than the embarrassment of realizing that in a fight-or-flight my body seems to have chosen, not even freeze, but "die." I'm treating it, and hopefully it will get better soon, but I'm kinda not sure what direction to go with working out. Anyone have good recommendations of exercises that won't strain that area of my spine? The stuff I was doing last week is all out of bounds, I'm not going to be doing KBs or Olympic lifts for a while. So I need a new plan, but I'm not sure what it is yet, and I can't think of exercises that won't implicate my upper back in any way. Like in the past, I dealt with a bad lower back strain by doing a Smolov Jr for Bench month, but I'm not sure what to do without my upper back.
I don't know exactly what's wrong with your back, but two-handed kettlebell swings have actually really helped when I've tweaked my back, as I do every five years or so.
What I do is start with a conservative range of motion, and then after several reps the pain-free range of motion increases a bit. I continue until I can do the full range of motion pain-free. Usually the pain comes back after a while, but it gives me short-term pain relief and probably accelerates healing.
Not sure if this works as well for the upper back, but it's worth a try. Generally you want to use the injured muscles ASAP to increase blood flow to the injured tissue, rather than just resting it completely.
It actually wound up resolving itself with two days rest, some yoga, and a day standing in the freezing rain at a football game.
Re kb: I was thinking more in terms of kettlebell sport, where it's all overhead lifts.
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This isn’t that uncommon; I regularly wake up screaming in the middle of the night.
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I'm not a sports physician or physio, but I would say once you've recovered to mix in more stretching and pilates. There's clearly small muscle groups that have not been toned by your regime that can be thrown out in this way. I don't know how old you are, but this kind of thing is recommended as you age. From what I've heard it will also help prevent weight training related injuries.
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I don't have any exercise advice for you but I really want to know: why was he yelling?
I have yet to get a satisfying explanation. He says he was watching a movie on his phone, half fell asleep, and scared himself when something happened on screen + being in a different place than he expected. This seems unlikely. His father thinks he got into my liquor after everyone went to bed and had some kind of alcoholic fugue, and strongly implied no more drinking this week. This would fit but nothing is missing, and he's not the kind of guy who hides the evidence. His sister, my wife, just thought it was some kind of nightmare/terror thing. Which makes sense but, dude, it was a LOT, if that happened regularly you'd know about it. From what I remember hearing I kind of felt like what he was screaming seemed like a coherent sentence moreso than hallucination, "I DON'T EVEN WANT TO FUCKING BE HERE" etc, so it seemed immediately like he was talking to a person and snapped, maybe late night facetime with a girlfriend who really pissed him off? But he has no current gf he's talking about openly.
None of these possibilities are really very explanatory.
Without additional events I would just right this off as night terrors. I've done similar things in my life (shouting while asleep) for no reason at all. It wasn't a chronic condition, just happened to be a one off weird half-sleep where your mind plays tricks. Very embarrassing, but not uncommon.
Yeah it was just super freaky. Doesn't seem to be a big deal or anything.
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It might not be advisable to work out depending on what this is. It's pretty common to get pain from misaligned costovertebral joints and in that case you need to do stretching exercises.
If you don't want to go to a physio I recommend looking it up on YouTube, there is a plethora of good instructional videos going through every possible injury and demonstrations of what you can do yourself.
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