Jillian Michaels knows all there is to know about helping others with fitness, but it wasn’t until she faced her own serious injury that she had to retrain herself.
The celebrity fitness trainer said her workouts have changed forever in a new interview with PEOPLEwhere she opened up about a freak accident in the spring of 2021 that left her feeling like her life was over.
“I wish it was a gangster motorcycle story where I told you I was racing motorcycles or Lindsey Vonning downhill at 60 miles per hour, but it wasn’t,” the 49-year-old told the publication in a new story published Wednesday, March 1. unavoidable.”
According to her retelling of what happened, Michaels walked into the bathroom to get her wife’s attention, The Shana Marie Minutowhen she slipped and fell, hitting her back against the bathtub.
“I ran in and smacked my back against the edge of the bathtub,” she explained. She noted that she spent weeks trying to convince everyone — and herself — that she was fine, until things seemed to take a dark turn.
Six weeks after the incident, Michaels was unable to get out of the car when she arrived one night to have dinner with her family, and she also felt “a bolt of lightning strike”. [her] leg,” prompting Minuto to take her to the emergency room. Still in the hospital in crippling pain, her doctors told her there was some kind of “nerve entrapment” and sent her home with pain meds.
“I couldn’t sleep,” the Biggest loser alum recalled. “The pain at night was so bad. I really thought to myself, ‘The only thing I think would be worse than this is burns.’ It was so crazy. I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t stand. I had to crawl on the floor. I thought, ‘My life is over.'”
After going through multiple doctors who brushed off her injury, Michaels finally got in touch with a spine expert Dr. Stuart McGillwho diagnosed her with a broken vertebra and advised her to move very little for a month.
Dr. McGill also noted that the home rehab Michaels had tried actually made her condition “so much worse” and even destabilized her spine.
Michaels said at the time that she wasn’t sure she would get better, which is why she kept her condition a secret from the public and posted old content on social media to prevent her fans from noticing her absence.
“Nobody has any idea since all this is going on, except my immediate circle. I’m like, ‘I’m not telling this story until I know how this story ends,'” she said.
Fortunately, Michaels, about five to six months after seeking help from Dr. McGill, finally on the road to recovery, and now she has a whole new wisdom to bring into her workouts.
“The most important thing is the biofeedback, listening to your body,” she said. “Even now, when I jump rope, if I jump rope for more than 10 minutes, it hurts the next day.”
Nevertheless, the mother of two children tries to live as normally as possible. “I ride horses. I ride jet skis. I’m snowboarding. I’m just super, super careful.”