Why a herniated disc meant I couldn't exercise the normal way
For two years I didn't walk. A herniated disc put me in a wheelchair, and it wasn't a twisted-ankle kind of injury. It was the kind where the surgeons looking at my scans didn't sound optimistic about any of it. Most exercise advice assumes you can move without pain first. Mine didn't work that way, and there was no plan on paper built for someone starting from a wheelchair.
Getting the right diagnosis took three different doctors before I trusted a plan
Before I could do anything physical, I needed the diagnosis to be right, and that took three different doctors with three different opinions. Not two, not four. Three, and each of them read my back slightly differently. I kept going back and asking questions until I found an explanation that matched what I felt day to day, because acting on the wrong diagnosis would have set me back further than doing nothing at all.
The timer method: walking until the pain started, then timing how long it took to fade
Once I trusted the plan, I started walking. Not far, and not without pain. I'd walk until the pain began, then stop and use the timer on my watch to see exactly how long it took to fade. That was the entire method in the early weeks. Walk, time the pain, wait it out, then try again the next day. No programme told me to add five more minutes on schedule. I was working off what my own body told me that day, not off what a plan on paper said I should be able to manage by now.
Building the ladder from short painful walks to swimming, then a gym, then running and lifting
That timed walking is what let me move to the next stage, which for me was swimming, and I stayed there for about a year. The water took the weight off the joint in a way pavement never could, and it let me build back some fitness without the same punishment afterwards. I only moved into a gym in the last six months, and it's from there that I've got to hiking, running, weightlifting and pull-ups, all of which would have sounded absurd to me a few years ago when a walk with a timer was the whole of my exercise for the day.
The one mental check that kept me moving on the bad days
The thing that got me through the worst of it wasn't a training rule. It was a question. Is this true, or is it a story I'm telling myself? Some days the fear said I'd never walk again, and that wasn't a fact; it was a story built out of one bad hour. The fact was whatever the timer on my watch showed that day, however small the number was, and I learned to act on that instead.
What I'd tell someone starting from zero with an injury, not a training plan
Start with whatever small test you can time, not the plan you think you should already be following. Let the number tell you what your body will do next, not what you're afraid it won't. Somewhere in this same stretch I was also offered Ozempic, for the diabetes that came with the weight. I know how valuable it is for other people, but I'd already done so many diets that I didn't want another thing added on top; I wanted to understand why the weight kept coming back in the first place. The timeline is the only part of this I fully trust looking back. Two years in the chair, about a year in the water, six months in a gym, and only after all of that did running, lifting and pull-ups show up. I lost 55 kilos across the whole of it, and that number came years after the timer on my watch, not instead of it.