Page 20 - Family Wellness - Spring/Summer 2016

W18 Back Pain
When your career is all about helping other people achieve their fitness goals, you need your body to
be firing on all cylinders. When you’re a mom of
two active little ones, a lingering injury that keeps you from doing everything you want and need to do with them can really slow you down. And when you can’t sit more than 15 minutes in a car without pain screeching from your back all the way down your leg, something’s got to give.
That’s the situation 33-year-old Kristen Yonkman,
a certified personal trainer and corrective exercise specialist at the YMCA in Hamilton, NJ, found herself in about 18 months ago. “I started experiencing low- back pain, and in my life, when I have pain, I figure I must have just overdone it. So I just wait a little while, and it usually heals itself,” she says.
As an NCAA All-American sprinter at Calvin College and a four-year starter on the varsity soccer team, Yonkman was used to aches and pains, but as a corrective therapist, she figured it was something she could handle on her own. “But I rested, and nothing happened. So I rested a little longer. And I did weight workouts, and I tried everything in the book that I knew from corrective exercise that normally helps fix this kind of pain. And it was just not budging.”
When the pain didn’t improve, Yonkman knew she should see a doctor, but she was afraid to learn that something was wrong that might derail her career as a trainer, which she loved. “It was scary because I could not sit in the car for more than 10 minutes without being ready to cry. My husband is a pastor, and the church pews and the car—even my own couch—were the worst places for me. It was changing my lifestyle in a way that wasn’t acceptable to me anymore,” Yonkman says. “But I was scared that I was going to go to the doctor and get a diagnosis where they said, ‘You’ve just blown up your back, you can’t do anything now. You can’t do what you were born to do.”
Road to Recovery
While she was still able to perform at her job and she even went on a rigorous backpacking trip in California, car rides and sitting became incredibly painful. Yonkman avoided seeing anyone about
her back for 9 months, until finally, last September, the pain and the disruption to her life became too great, and she found the courage to follow a friend’s
recommendation to Performance Spine & Sports Medicine in Bordentown, NJ.
She chose Performance because she liked that they offered non-surgical approaches to treatment, because she wanted
to avoid surgery if it wasn’t totally necessary. Kristen saw
Dr. Michael Rizkalla, and after
his initial assessment and a careful examination of her X-rays, he helped her develop a game plan that she felt comfortable following. “Dr. Rizkalla outlined three possible approaches from the least aggressive treatment (physical therapy, chiropractic care, and acupuncture), to the most aggressive treatment (injections and more invasive measures),” she recalls.
“He suggested we start with
one approach and move on to the others if we needed to. He took a lot of time with me and made sure I totally understood what and why he wanted to do what he wanted to do. That in and of itself was really comforting for me.”
As a college athlete and a
professional trainer, Yonkman
says she dreaded a doctor telling
her that she couldn’t run or
continue doing what she loved,
and she was pleasantly surprised
that all the doctors and therapists
she saw at Performance helped her heal within her comfort zone, instead of pushing her toward a more invasive solution. “The outlook from the beginning was how to get me back
to doing the things I need to do as a athlete, a trainer, and a mom,” Yonkman says.
Dr. Rizkalla determined that Yonkman’s posture had most likely been impacted by her two pregnancies, which had a negative impact on her walk and her stance. “I was sort of walking around like I was ready to fly from danger at any point, so my spine was so taut that it had become like a bowstring.
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