Photo: Allison Michael Orenstein
Jillian Michaelswent completely off the grid after getting into a slip-and-fall accident in the spring of 2021.
“I’m posting old videos from 20 years ago on social media,” she tells PEOPLE exclusively. “I’m not doing any press. I’ve disappeared off the grid.”
“No one knows,” she continues. “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.'”
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Allison Michael Orenstein
Michaels recalls the moment the injury happened, sharing that it wasn’t a preventable accident. She was walking into the bathroom to get her wifeDeShana Marie Minuto’s attention when she slipped and fell, comparing the moment to slipping on a banana peel.
“I went running in and I smacked onto the edge of the bathtub with my back,” the formerBiggest Losertrainer explains.
“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,” she says. “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.'”
After turning to spine expert Dr. Stuart McGill, Michaels learned that she had fractured her L3 vertebrae and would spend the next year working on restabilizing her spine.
With the help of McGill and theDB Method,an assisted squat machine that takes the pressure out of the back, five to six months later, Michaels’ life finally took a turn for the better.
“I look at it as a tool that is so essential to help people build enough functional strength to maintain their fine hygiene and to move through their daily life and their daily activities safely,” Michaels, who is now a spokesperson for the DB Method, says. “Getting people to function safely when they don’t have the fundamental strength to do it in the first place is kind of a massive problem. This is an excellent tool.”
“Everybody’s going to be different,” Michaels says. Most important is the biofeedback, listening to your body. Even now when I jump rope, if I jump rope for longer than 10 minutes, it bothers me the next day."
After her year-long road to recovery, Michaels says she’s feeling good and living her life close to how it was before her injury.
“I’m riding horses,” she boasts. “I’m riding jet skis, I’m snowboarding. I’m just super, super careful.”
source: people.com
