I just experimented last night with the treadmill/iPad/noise-cancelling headphones combination, and it's terrific. Normally, it's hard to watch tv while treadmilling because the treadmill noise overwhelms the soundtrack of whatever I'm watching. But I put the iPad on the console, plugged in the NCHs, turned on an episode of Angel, and walked and watched for 43 minutes -- not bad. when you consider I haven't been on the treadmill in at least a year.
Yoga is helping my hip a lot. I'm still having some pain, but it's definitely less, and sometimes for a day or two after yoga it's down to where I can't feel it at all under the ambient sore muscles ::g::
FWIW, here's the way my physical therapist explained what's going on with my hip, more or less: "Imagine a joint, in your case your spine, as a sliding screen door. Different things can go wrong with the joint: the "door" can jam altogether; it can fall completely out of the sliding mechanism; the mechanism can get dirty and move reluctantly; the stoppers at the end can give out, so that the door slides way past where it's supposed to; or the stoppers can soften, as though they were made out of felt instead of hard rubber, so that the door is just a little bit loose in its frame. In your case, normal degeneration of your spine is like the last one -- the bones in your spine have degenerated just a little bit, so that the normal functioning of the spine doesn't stop where it should and the sacroiliac and muscles are having to do the work that those bones would normally do. They were never meant to do that work and it pisses them off. You can't fix the bones, so the best thing you can do is strengthen the muscles so the extra work doesn't annoy them so much." (Obviously, YMMV and all that.) The exercise she currently has me doing involves tying an exercise band around my ankles, then sidestepping back and forth across the room, stretching the band with each step so that the hip adductors are being worked hard -- it's surprisingly tiring. She's also encouraging yoga, Pilates and low-key aerobics like treadmilling or rowing.
Now that I know what's wrong and know I can't fuck it up with normal exercise, it's getting better. She tells me I should not expect to become permanently pain-free, but that it's realistic to expect to get my pain levels down to where I don't need too much medication -- which would be plenty for me.
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Yoga is helping my hip a lot. I'm still having some pain, but it's definitely less, and sometimes for a day or two after yoga it's down to where I can't feel it at all under the ambient sore muscles ::g::
FWIW, here's the way my physical therapist explained what's going on with my hip, more or less: "Imagine a joint, in your case your spine, as a sliding screen door. Different things can go wrong with the joint: the "door" can jam altogether; it can fall completely out of the sliding mechanism; the mechanism can get dirty and move reluctantly; the stoppers at the end can give out, so that the door slides way past where it's supposed to; or the stoppers can soften, as though they were made out of felt instead of hard rubber, so that the door is just a little bit loose in its frame. In your case, normal degeneration of your spine is like the last one -- the bones in your spine have degenerated just a little bit, so that the normal functioning of the spine doesn't stop where it should and the sacroiliac and muscles are having to do the work that those bones would normally do. They were never meant to do that work and it pisses them off. You can't fix the bones, so the best thing you can do is strengthen the muscles so the extra work doesn't annoy them so much." (Obviously, YMMV and all that.) The exercise she currently has me doing involves tying an exercise band around my ankles, then sidestepping back and forth across the room, stretching the band with each step so that the hip adductors are being worked hard -- it's surprisingly tiring. She's also encouraging yoga, Pilates and low-key aerobics like treadmilling or rowing.
Now that I know what's wrong and know I can't fuck it up with normal exercise, it's getting better. She tells me I should not expect to become permanently pain-free, but that it's realistic to expect to get my pain levels down to where I don't need too much medication -- which would be plenty for me.