The Texarkana Gazette is the premier source for local news and sports in Texarkana and the surrounding Arklatex areas.Fox News declared President Trump victorious last week, insisting that his unhinged threats against North Korea had deterred the country from planning a missile. Harvey's Rent-All • 1409 South George Street • York, PA 17403 • Phone: 717-845-2789 • FAX: 717-852-0014. Copywrite 2017 Harvey's Rent-All, Inc. Airsoft is a team sport, which participants eliminate opponents by hitting each other with spherical plastic pellets launched via replica weapons called airsoft guns. Inside David Wright's Grueling Rehab Routine. Far down the right- field line at Tradition Field, the New York Mets’ Port St. Lucie, FL, spring- training ballpark, a yellow, buff- colored cement blockhouse sits tucked beneath the grandstand. This is the Barwis Methods Training Center, run by Mike Barwis, the team’s strength and conditioning adviser. It’s a utilitarian, warehouselike space: The ceiling is black, the walls unadorned, the constant beat of the hip- hop loud and forceful. It’s a serious place, meant for work. Only a handful of clients are here at 9 a. February morning, a week before the Mets pitchers and catchers are due to report to camp, and one of them is the team’s captain and third baseman, David Wright. Decked out in Nike, he seems to be in prime physical condition—pecs hard, lats firm, calves taut. Ready for baseball? He’s not. There’s a reason that Wright, a 1. January. The 3. 3- year- old missed four months of play last season after being diagnosed with lumbar spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spinal canal that compresses and inflames the nerves running through the spine, causing sharp, immobilizing pain in the lower back that in some cases extends to the legs. He hasn’t had a pain- free day since—and won’t, for however long his career lasts. To play at all, during the season he must put himself through intensive two- to three- hour workouts every day. The fact is, Wright, who in person is open- faced, generous, and disarmingly down- to- earth, will deal with back pain for the rest of his life. Spinal stenosis generally affects men and women over 5. And though unusual in younger people, it has cut short several prominent sports careers. Former New York Yankee Don Mattingly retired because of it. Former Phillies and Mets star Lenny Dykstra tried to correct his condition with surgery, but he never played again. Cooper Manning, the eldest of the football Manning brothers and an all- state high school wide receiver, never made it onto the Ole Miss gridiron because of his stenosis. Last year, Oregon State sophomore defensive back Dashon Hunt retired after being diagnosed with it after an on- field injury.“The doctors told me I could play and have a very long, successful career and never have a neck injury or I could go out on the first day of contact at practice and risk paralyzing myself or dying,” says Hunt, in a phone interview from campus. He quit the team, he says, because “no sport is worth dying over or getting paralyzed from the neck down over.”Wright, though, is determined to continue playing. His neurosurgeon, Robert Watkins, M. D., a preeminent Los Angeles spinal physician whose patients have included former major leaguers Dave Winfield, Reggie Jackson, and Mattingly, is confident that, through a targeted and intensive physical therapy and rehab regimen, Wright will continue to return to the field safely and with full mobility. But he cautioned Wright last year it would require enormous amounts of work—resulting in a comprehensive, three- part routine involving untold hours of stretching, core work, and resistance training—more than in any program he’d ever attempted. When Wright wakes up this February morning, his back feels, he says, “a little cranky.”Simply standing up straight can trigger pain. It’s how his back feels most mornings—somewhat stiff, with limited rotation and flexibility through his core. He arrives at the Barwis facility around 8: 3. It’s the first step in a 3. When he breaks a sweat, he dismounts and further loosens his back and limbs in a stretch cage. A series of general arm, leg, and core stretches follow. At this point, Lucas Duda, who, at 6'4" and 2. Mets’ current mountain of a first baseman, ambles by, flush with good health. You are so pale!” he jokes. Wright merely shrugs and keeps working, and Duda heads out the door. There’s nothing Wright can point to—no collision, no awkward slide, no violent swing—that triggered his condition. When he reported to Port St. Lucie in early January 2. Within weeks, though, his back began to bother him. He attributed it to normal spring- training soreness and played through it, not missing any time. But by the beginning of the season,” he recalls now, “it just hadn’t gone away and I didn’t really know what it was.” He didn’t tell the team trainers or physicians, he says, because he was desperate to stay on the field. He’d missed parts of three of the previous four seasons with a stress fracture to a spinal vertebra, a strained right hamstring, and a jammed right shoulder and was determined not to lose playing time again—particularly now, with a Mets team that seemed poised to win. The 2. 01. 5 season began, the Mets were off to a good start, and Wright, the face of the franchise—a seven- time All- Star in the middle of an eight- year, $1. Then, on April 1. Philadelphia, Wright led off with a single. A few pitches later, he stole second base. He had trouble getting there. A couple of feet before the bag, I just felt my hamstring grab,” he told reporters afterward. He pulled himself from the game. The next day the Mets placed Wright on the 1. Wright was despondent but saw in it a potential silver lining: “I thought the two- week rest would help my back,” he said. It didn’t. Once the hamstring had healed, the club sent him to Port St. Lucie to resume baseball activities, the final element of his rehab. His first day on the field, the trainer asked him to run at 5. Immediately he felt stabs of pain in his lower back and legs. He couldn’t continue. An MRI revealed the spinal stenosis. The team doctors told him he had a storm track of symptoms, including a smaller- than- normal spinal canal he’d had since birth that had been further compressed by a series of calcium deposits accumulated from his fractured vertebrae. Until that moment, Wright had never heard of the condition. Don’t Google it; it’s going to scare you,” advised David Altchek, M. D., the Mets’ medical director. Wright did anyway and instantly regretted it. He asked when he could return to the field. Not anytime soon,” Altchek told him.“I moped around for a few days,” says Wright. And then I decided if I wanted to play again, I had to get to work.”Watkins, the spine expert, believes in an aggressive treatment approach to spinal stenosis. He also believes that Wright’s condition is ultimately less about his smaller- than- normal spinal canal than the two decades he’s spent constantly twisting and torquing on the baseball field. He injured the L4, L5 discs,” Watkins says. You injure a joint in your back—it doesn’t need to be a massive herniation—and that affects everything you do. As soon as you bend forward, the weight of your body times the distance back to that joint is huge leverage forces.” In the days following his April 2. Wright a series of six bilateral steroid epidural injections to quiet the compression on the nerves that ran through his spinal column into his legs. Less than a week later, Watkins had him working with Michael Schlink, P. T., O. C. S., an L. A.- based physical therapist whose expertise is spine- related core stabilization and strengthening. Schlink treated Wright daily for a month, then two to three times a week the following two months, teaching him a series of four minutely choreographed lower- back- strengthening exercises that proved critical to his main 2. Called core- stabilization exercises, they address the six planes of lumbar spine motion—forward and back, side bend left and right, and rotation left and right—to create a better balance between the muscles in front of and behind the pelvis, which relieves spinal pressure. What I did,” Schlink says, “was neurologically wake up abdominal, multifidus, and gluteus medius muscles that weren’t properly firing.”The exercises didn’t solve Wright’s stenosis, but they did reduce his back pain. Without them, he would have been unable to complete his rehab workout. Eric Young Jr.'s Speed and Agility Workout > > > In the Barwis facility, Wright is ready to begin a version of that workout. On Mondays and Thursdays, he concentrates on his upper body; Tuesdays and Fridays, his lower body. Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays are rest days, with light stretching and massages.) Today is a lower- body day, and what Wright conspicuously doesn’t do is lift heavy weights. In fact, except for one stretch he does several times with 1. I can’t get under a squat rack with 3. During the workout, Wright maintains a tight, workmanlike focus, taking brief pauses between exercises—but only one break.
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