A lot of musculoskeletal pain in the body occurs because of inefficiency within the muscular system. There is a balancing act going on in your body every minute of the day. If you move too little you'll likely feel pain, if you move too much, you'll likely feel pain and most importantly If you move inefficiently, you are likely to feel pain. It is a fine line between pain and no pain and there are simply a plethora of reasons as to why this may be happening.
In this upcoming series of blogs on muscle rules we will cover some of the main points related to how your muscles work, why they may be working less/more than ideal and how we address that in clinic.
When you understand how things should work in a perfectly normal environment, it becomes simpler (don’t read “easy because it’s never easy) to diagnose and treat the parts of the whole that aren’t doing their job in an efficient manner.
Our muscular system and it’s ability to perform it’s job well and efficient is governed by our brain and nervous system. Changes to muscular function for both good or bad, have to be done via changes to the nervous system.
In the next blog we will cover the first couple of rules.
As for now, lets introduce you to them…..
Rule no 1. The normal function of any muscle in the body is the ability to fully shorten and contract and fully lengthen and relax in all ranges of motion.
Rule no 2. The ability for muscles to do this is governed by the brain and its response to conscious demand and subconscious responses to sensory/chemical/hormonal/nutritional/emotional feedback.
Rule no 3. Information received by the brain that is processed as dangerous or harmful can drastically effect the nervous systems ability to create normal function of muscles (whether there is an tissue damage/injury or not).
Rule no 4. Not all tight muscles are inherently weak but neither are they functionally fully strong.
Rule no 5. 'Strong' (hypertonic/up-regulated) and 'weak' (hypotonic, down-regulated or inhibited) reactions within muscle movements are both equally dysfunctional and likely to result in pain via inefficient balance of movement.
Rule no 6. Muscles are not always the cause of pain. They are generally more likely to be collateral to a larger, hypersensitive response from your brain to sensory/chemical/hormonal/emotional information.
Rule no 7. One of the key ingredients to treating pain in relation to movement is accurately assessing whether a 'tight' muscle is either;
(a) Efficiently doing its job and functioning normally
(b) Inefficient, hypertonic and favouring a slightly shortened or lengthened state
(c) Inefficient, hypotonic and slightly neurologically inhibited
Rule no 8. Don't carpet bomb your muscles with release work, get it assessed and treated at a neurological level.
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