At 49, Jillian Michaels Breaks Silence on Spinal Injury: ‘Rock Bottom’
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Jillian Michaels broke her silence on the “freak accident” spinal injury she sustained in 2021.
The fitness guru slipped and fell in her bathroom, fracturing her spine, which left her in debilitating pain.
She kept the accident a secret during recovery and posted old content to social media.
After enduring nearly two years of recovery behind closed doors, Jillian Michaels is sharing the story of a back injury that changed her life—first for worse, and then for the better. The fitness guru spent much of 2021 at a physical and emotional “rock bottom,” she said on Instagram, after a slip and fall left her debilitated with a fractured spine. The catch is, she didn’t actually know it was fractured until months after the incident.
“I wish it was some gangster motorcycle story where I told you I was racing motorcycles or Lindsey Vonn-ing downhill at 60 miles an hour, but it wasn’t,” Michaels recently told People. “It makes it that much more disturbing because, in a way, it wasn’t preventable.”
She likened the event to a cartoon character slipping on a banana peel—she ran into the bathroom to get the attention of her wife, DeShana Marie Minuto, and fell. “I went running in and I smacked onto the edge of the bathtub with my back,” she explained.
Acute lower back pain and tightness quickly followed the accident, but Michaels was convinced it wasn’t serious. So she turned to deep tissue massages and intense stretching in an attempt to loosen up. Later, she would learn from doctors that those efforts intensely exacerbated the damage done.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she recalled to People. “The pain at night was so bad. I truly thought to myself, ‘The only thing I think would be worse than this would be burns.’ It was so crazy. I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t stand. I was having to crawl on the ground. I’m like, ‘My life is over.’” On Instagram, she added that she would “literally just sit in a ball and sob” anticipating the worst.
Eventually, the pain grew intense enough, (“It felt like I got shot in the base of my spine,” she said on Instagram.) that she went to the emergency room where she was diagnosed with a pinched nerve and prescribed muscle relaxers and intense pain killers, but nothing worked.
So she took matters into her own hands and pulled some strings to schedule time with spine specialist and orthopedic surgeon Stuart McGill in New York, who found that she had not only fractured her L3 vertebrae, but herniated three disks in her attempts to recover.
McGill recommended little to no movement, and Michaels obliged for a whole month. That’s when she started posting old content to social media to avoid news of her injury getting out.
“I’m posting old videos from 20 years ago on social media,” she recalled. “I’m not doing any press. I’ve disappeared off the grid. No one knows. Nobody has any idea as all of this is going on except my immediate circle. I’m like, ‘I’m not telling this story until I know how this story ends.’”
With the help of pain-relieving epidurals and physical therapy with the DB Method, an assisted squat machine, Michaels’ recovery began looking up. And now, as a DB method spokesperson, she’s passionate about helping others with acute and chronic back pain recover the right way and avoid further injury.
In an Instagram video, she begged viewers not to follow in her footsteps and Google at-home remedies for back pain, and instead seek professional help. “You can make it a thousand times worse,” she said.
Although the healing journey was a major challenge, Michaels can look back now and call it a learning experience that helped her evolve emotionally. “It dramatically changed my life for the better in ways I had been unable to change previously...I let all that old sh*t go,” she said.
And now, she’s back to doing the things she loves. “I’m riding horses,” she told People. “I’m riding jet skis, I’m snowboarding. I’m just super, super careful.”
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