RANGE: No, I’m just curious what your injury was and what your kind of story is in regards to that injury, recovery, how it went, and…
ASHLEIGH: Yeah, just give you sort of the cliff notes, so it wasn't like a one-time injury.
I was an athlete growing up.
I was a gymnast for the first nine, ten years of my life and then kind of just took on everything including weightlifting, and was very kind of aggressive with all of it.
I know on my own and by the time I reached 21, my back hurt all the time and I went and got the MRIs done because that's really all anyone knew how to do, “let's get this kid in MRI” and at 21, I had severe degenerative changes at l4-l5 l5-s1, multiple fairly significant disc bulges and then on the right side l5 and s1 never separated so that's called a fusion on the one side which may or may not have had much to do with why those segments were degenerating that significantly at such a young age.
I’ll never know that, no one will ever know that.
I was like “okay fine, big deal”.
I was a collegiate athlete so when I had to put my shoes on, I'd go through phases where the pain was tolerable and then it would be not tolerable so I would just lie on the ground and put my shoes on and go train rather than have to bend over to put my shoes on.
I just didn't care. I was that stubborn about it and just went through from age 21 when it first knew what was going on in there, through to my early 30s, I just did it all anyway and I'd spend a bit more time stretching, rolling out on lacrosse ball.
No one really knew what to do from a manual standpoint, sometimes I'd get an elbow in the piriformis if I was lucky, hands through to psoas, and early 30s I started to experience phases of numbness down the s1 dermatome, a little bit of drop foot here and there and I was like “oh you know I would text a colleague and be like oh my foot and they're like I’ll be like you know it would always be fine in a week or so if I just did things a bit differently in training or spent more time rolling around on a lacrosse ball.
I was always able to like maneuver my way out of the next level of… I don't know…
Sorry, we're putting up a Christmas tree, it's not my specialty, Derek's like “do I put the star up?”
I’m like “I don't know, do we have to?… fine…
RANGE: Christmas in Florida…
ASHLEIGH: Yeah and so the degenerative changes had just gotten to the point where it was just a bit of a shitstorm and I think I was 33 or so, maybe 34 and I was just working with clients one day, I had been competing and all the stuff and I went home one afternoon I was getting out of my car and I was like… and that was it.
I just felt like I was gonna puke.
I'd crawl up to my condo and I was done and I had had a bunch of those episodes over the years where the disc would just shift a little bit more and compress upon a nerve and I'd go down but two or three days in a lacrosse ball and lots of bodyweight lunges just to keep my glutes active, I would always come out of it. Not this time.
I called the D.O. friend of mine, it was like an afternoon, I finally made it up to my condo, and I’m like “I’m in trouble.”, he came running over with an injection of lidocaine and a bunch of other stuff and just got the injection right into like l5-s1 and he was with me sitting on the floor.
I was crying. I was hurting and a couple of hours that injection kicks in and I’m like “okay, I was walking around, I think I’m going to be okay” and that night it was just… the dermatome of s1 feeds like the lateral glute hamstring, lateral calf, Achilles reflex, and the foot.
So that night as that injection wore off, it was like a neurological shutdown.
It was the weirdest thing I’ve ever experienced.
It was a mix of cramping and the nervous system on that side, down my left leg, just going… and midway through that morning my foot was numb and I was like “this isn't good”, it was really numb.
But I went and what did I do? I trained.
I did pull-ups and chest presses because I really wasn't in pain anymore but as the day went on, my foot was numb, my calf numb, by the end of the day, my whole s1 dermatome was like “I think I have dropped leg.”
So a couple of days went by, and I kept training.
I would have to watch my foot doing lunges so that I didn't fall because I couldn't feel it, it was numb.
And I was talking to my colleagues and they're like “yeah this doesn't sound good, get on some prednisone.” so I got on prednisone and a prednisone pack, that wrecked my GI system so I was only on that thing for a day because the first step was trying to calm down the inflammatory process that was obviously going on and I just lost the ability to walk properly it was like I had a broken ankle.
People were asking me what was wrong with my foot and ankle because when that dermatome goes and it's numb, you can look at your hand in your arm and you know that it's there but you can't use it.
No calf raises, no.
I would support myself and force myself to do calf raises but it wasn’t working.
It's like a fake paralysis almost.
So that went on for a couple of weeks before I started to really take it seriously because I had always bounced out of it.
Finally went to get an MRI and my colleague was like… it was a seven-millimeter disc protrusion that had fragmented in the…so the pieces of the disc had actually broken and wrapped down around the s1 nerve root which is why I lost the s1 dermatome because there were pieces of a disc wrapped around it.
So the neural surgery wasn't to get me out of pain, it was like “if we don't get those pieces off the s1 nerve, not only are you going to lose that nerve root but you're going to lose the neurological function of your left leg probably forever. We're not even sure that you're going to get it back but you need a neurosurgeon consult, like tomorrow.
So that's the short story and then I had neurosurgery, got the disc fragments pulled off and I had surgery on a Friday afternoon, it was an outpatient thing.
Surgery was very easy, that wasn't complicated in any way and the neurosurgeons, the gap, went in, and cleaned it up, no one knew what was going to happen from there and I was training by Monday morning.
I couldn't feel my legs still, it took me a good six months to get that feeling back because with the nervous system it takes the nerves about a millimeter a day of growth from l5-s1 down to the Achilles reflex, that's a long journey so you know I'd lost…
RANGE: That's the sciatic nerve?
ASHLEIGH: No, the sciatic nerve wasn't involved at all, it was the s1 dermatome.
So the s1 nerve root comes out of the s1, out of the sacrum.
So it's the whole lateral line, the sciatic nerve really wasn't involved much at all.
So what happened is the tissues in my leg, I lost a good three inches off of most of my calf, and I still don't have an Achilles reflex on the left side but it doesn't actually inhibit my ability to run.
So it was just a step-by-step rebuild. I never stopped walking. I would strap my foot into a bike and make myself go bike riding.
I made myself use my leg and forced calf raises even when I couldn't do them because I knew that one day I was going to get my leg back and sure enough, it was probably about four months after neurosurgery where I woke up in the middle of the night and my left calf was cramping and I was like “yes!” because it's a cramp means it's coming back and so there was like a reboot of the whole left side and then I discovered gymnastics strength training via podcast and I just went after rebuilding my spine from a mobility standpoint because I'd never trained flexion, that was always contraindicated and I bought into that because it hurt so I bought into it.
That's the short story so that was neural surgery was probably seven years ago and so my back's amazing.
My back is probably better than anyone's back that we work with here.
The stuff that I still struggle with but I’m really getting to the bottom of now are the fascial lines that just… when I lost the reflex and then I lost the tibial reflux and I had all these nerve conduction tests done so they could actually conclude what reflexes I had lost and it was the majority of the ones on the left side.
I had to rebuild that but then the tissues are weird because of the fascial lines… like everything just sticks together like glue.
That's been the journey, the most eye-opening for me is actually finding the right combination of training and manual work and just getting into those tissues with anything like edges of benches, edges of barbells, just to open the lines up so that when I do things like running, the response isn't just my leg turns to cement the next day, which was exactly how that went for a bunch of months, drove me nuts and now I’m actually at the point where that's resolving itself and I’m really really getting back to full sprint capacity without paying for it in fascial tension and the whole lines freezing up.
So that's the story that, the best journey of my life.
I wish it hadn't happened but if it hadn't happened I just would have been pig-headedly doing my own thing.
RANGE: Yeah every injury is an opportunity to learn, right?
ASHLEIGH: Yeah. So yeah I was one of those people growing up that made fun of people with back pain.
I was like “why is that person crawling into the clinic, they must be a wimp.”
RANGE: I had two herniated discs l4-l5 s1-s2, pretty common but so it's a similar kind of story just way less severe than yours but I was a regular in chiro's and acupunctures, physios spent thousands of dollars on stuff and it would be a temporary, band-aid heal and then I'd go train and it would be two weeks back where sleeping was hard, everything was difficult and I was pretty young, that happened to me in 2014.
So 23 years old, similar to you.
At that time, training was difficult. I didn't really know much about anatomy or how a spine operated.
I was very much afraid to bend my spine.
I was told not to round my spine and it's funny how that's so.
Yeah, it's funny how it's becoming mainstream now.
A Jefferson curl, you see it on every mobility page, it worked for me and in terms of training, all my physios and chiro's, they were kind of telling me “you can't fix it, it's going to be with you for life, you're never going to be able to restore your athletic potential” and I was like I never really believed it.
I never really liked anyone telling me anything… I was like “I gotta figure something out”.
So yeah then I just started doing my own studies and through ATG, that's what kind of helped me.
I won't give it all the credit although it is wonderful but it helped me maintain or sorry, regain lumbo pelvic control like my back injury was…
I’m sure you could agree that it's just like a breeding ground for inflammation in your glutes, your thighs, and your hip flexors.
Blood was not going to that area and I didn't really know how or where to start… definitely helped me a lot and…
ASHLEIGH: Love it guys, I would love to… I’ve got a call I need to jump on, to be continued… yeah, Keegan?
KEEGAN: Yeah, great to connect, and next time we'll dive a little bit deeper again then.
Yeah, I’ll put up the recording for the other time as well with the back one so people can dive into that but yeah looking forward to it.
Hopefully, see you in April but we'll chat for sure before then.
ASHLEIGH: Yeah, thanks for your time guys and I’ll confirm when as soon as I book my flights to get to LA.
I’ll let you know.
KEEGAN: Perfect.
Yeah, good to see you…
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