Pulled abdominal=a new kind of hurt

Tshirt weather at the hill today. I was skiing down the side of a trail when all of a sudden I see a trough that has been carved out from water under the snow. I crouched and popped at the last second trying to jump over it, came up a bit short and got bucked. Did a quick somersault and skied away but damn did my abs hurt. Skied to the bottom in pain and decided to call it a day.

laying down in bed to rest was a bad idea because trying to do a sit-up to get back out is real painful. You dont realize how much you use your core muscles til you do something like this. it hurts to think about moving.

[/sweet blog]

I tore a hole in an abdominal muscle about 10 years ago (it was like a hernia, but not). The surgery to repair it would have been really invasive (the tear was in the transversus abdominus, behind the rectus abdominus). The surgeon said that there was a risk of creating bigger problems, since they'd have to cut through the top layer to get to the bottom layer, and advised me to just let it heal on its own. That meant ~6 months of no real activity - I was told to always opt for the elevator over stairs, etc, running was out, most anything that involved using core muscles (virtually everything) was ruled out.

It flat-out sucked. Sneezing was the worst. If I had to sneeze or cough, it literally felt like someone had stabbed me with a knife, and then it all went numb for a few minutes. Not cool.

Maybe pulled or torn intercostal muscles ... you can even hurt those by coughing too hard