Concerning Posture and Sleeping

I have a uniMX with no reconstruction for now and I also have upper back kyphosis. I got a hard foam roll on amazon.com - it is 3 feet long and about 6-8 inches wide. It is flat on one side. I put it on the floor, put a pillow under my head and lay with the curved part of the roll parallel with my spine every night for about 15 minutes. It helps "undo" some of the shoulders curving in that I get working on a keyboard for hours and hours a day. It also helps stretch my scar (my MX was in July.)

It may be that your top leg is pulling you over into a crumpled position. Here's a suggestion for sleeping: Lie on your preferred side with your bottom leg straight and in line with your straight spine and your pillowed head. Bend your top leg 90 degrees or less, and prop your shin on a pillow or bolster. This will prevent it from falling forward and taking you with it. It's really good for your spine to sleep in an aligned position. If you wake up and find that your position has disintegrated, rearrange yourself. Also, when you're ready to get up in the morning, take a moment or two to lie flat on your back, so that everything can realign symmetrically. Then when you get up, swing your legs over the side of the bed and allow that motion to pull your upper body upright. When your feet are on the ground and you're in an upright seated position, THEN stand up.

Another suggestion: In addition to lying parallel on the foam roller, you can lie across it so that the roller is under your upper back. With your knees bent, your hands supporting your head and your butt dropped, push into your feet to roll your spine up and down over the roller. Keep your butt hanging low. It feels really great, like a very gentle chiropractic manipulation.

Hope these help!

I am a year out from my bmx, and I still have problems with that! I,too, have tried sleeping with a pillowl.Because of severe chronic vertigo, I can only sleep on my left side and that shoulder is getting sore. I had 6 months of occupational therapy for scar tissue adhesions and pmps, and at some points, they would ultrasound my shoulder and that seemed to help.

Nagem, I have tried your suggestions and found they don't work. If I don't wake up at night, I can't realign, so who knows what the heck I am doing. I naturally have a slow time waking up in the morning, so I lay there for quite awhile, relaxing and waking up. I can't lie flat on my back because my  head will spin from the vertigo..what a mess.... 

I should have asked my occupational therapists about it before I was discharged. Those ladies had a solution for everything.

So glad to hear that you are starting to feel better!

I have found that even working with a PT, I feel like I am on my way to fighting those curled in chest muscle issues and then some days it seems to all go back to where I started. So my PT told me to just keep working through it gently to win that battle.