Do you find yourself chasing pain? Is there a body part that feels really tight, and all you want to do is reach for that tennis ball and dig around? What about foam rolling? Or asking your kids to walk on you? Is that actually fixing your problem, or are you just managing the symptoms?
I took an interesting course this weekend, and it's made me think about the body in ways that I never really thought about before. It was all about faulty, dysfunctional, or compensatory movement patterns that get stored in our brains after an injury or trauma. Remember that ankle sprain that happened when you were 8? Or that tweak in your shoulder when you were 19? Or that plantar wart on the bottom of your foot when you were 30? They may not hurt anymore, but they certainly molded you into what you are today. Whether we do it to avoid pain, to increase stability and safety, or to find the path of least resistance, we still do it without even realizing it.
I always thought that tight muscles needed to be stretched or released. I was THAT person who would stick a lacrosse ball in my shoulder blade and roll around on it until the "knot" disappeared. Little did I know, releasing a tight muscle could be more harmful than good. You might ask... "wait, WHAT?" Yes! Don't you ever feel that when you stretch a tight muscle, it gets even tighter? It's like a Chinese finger trap.
What happens in faulty movement patterns is that certain muscles get inhibited, and other muscles start to compensate for them and get facilitated. This is a muscle dysfunction, and dysfunctions cause pain. The only thing that tight muscles tell us is that they're dysfunctional and not working properly. We don't know whether they're overworking or even active at all. When you stretch or release a tight muscle that's facilitated and overactive, if you don't activate the inhibited muscle that the tight muscle is compensating for, the brain feels threatened. Your brain is very smart, and it realizes that there's no more protection and nothing else to take the suddenly freed up load. What happens? The tight muscle works even harder to do the job, and it ends up even tighter. What about a tight muscle that's inhibited? After you release it, it will still be inhibited and angry unless something gets changed.
These passive techniques will not change or correct your dysfunctional movement patterns. In order to make changes, your brain must learn, reprogram, and store new functional movement patterns. Via specific testing, facilitated and inhibited muscles can be identified. When your muscle fails a test, your brain lights up (because really, who likes failure?), and this makes new learning possible.
In less than a week, I've noticed some crazy results from my testing. It's been described as "voodoo" or "magic" because you can literally see yourself get strong within minutes. If you're interested to learn more, don't hesitate to get an assessment done! Stop chasing pain, and fix the cause!
