She was already strong, and still in pain

Luci came to me in her mid forties, in constant hip and lower back pain.

She had tried everyone. Pilates, yoga, gym classes, chiropractors, osteopaths, physiotherapists, GPs, surgeons. The full list, over years, in the order you go through it when nothing is working.

She is a designer. She sits for most of the day, and the stiffness had been quietly taking things off her list. She could not go for a walk. She could not take her dog out. The things her life was actually built around had been shrinking one at a time, and she had adjusted around each one as it went.

The part she could not get over

Luci was already strong.

She had been training. She was, in any way you would ordinarily measure it, functionally strong. That is exactly why nothing anybody told her made sense to her, and it is why she had started to assume the pain was just going to be part of her life now.

What the assessment found was weakness through her glutes, her quadratus lumborum and her lower back muscles, and hips that needed realigning and the right muscles switched back on.

Small ones. The ones you cannot see and nobody points at.

She could not believe it was the small, minute muscles that were the problem.

That is my assessment of what I found and corrected, not a diagnosis. I am not a doctor and I do not pretend to be one. What I am is somebody who looks first.

What changed

She noticed something shift within the first couple of weeks.

Within six months the pain was gone. Not managed, not down to a level she could live with. Gone. And she had the tools to correct it herself when it started creeping back, which matters more than the six months does.

She trained here for over three and a half years after that. With the pain out of the way she could actually push, so she did, and she got considerably stronger and dropped multiple dress sizes along the way.

She now does big hikes every week that were completely out of the picture before. She carries her art supplies into the middle of the bush and stands there painting for an entire day.

Why she stopped

She moved to Sydney.

Her own words are that the biggest thing she regrets about the move is that she cannot come to Steps to Greatness any more.

If you have already tried everything

The reason I tell this story is that there is a particular woman who reads all of this and decides it does not apply to her, because she is not unfit and she is not lazy and she is already doing the work.

She has been to the professionals. She has been told, more than once, that everything looks fine.

Luci was that woman for years. Everything did look fine. Nobody had looked at the right thing.

You cannot assess your own body from the inside of it. That is not a personal failing. It is just not a thing anybody can do.