If you exercise regularly but still deal with recurring aches, stiffness or movements that never feel as as stable and fluid as they should, more stretching may not be the answer.
That is according to Dana Santas, known as the “Mobility Maker,” a certified strength and conditioning specialist and mind-body coaching professional sports, and is the author of the book, “Practical Solutions for Back Pain Relief.”
The issue is often a muscular compensation pattern or to put it another way, some of your muscles may be overworking to compensate for weakness of movement dysfunction in other areas of your body.
In everyday life, prolonged sitting as is usually the case with most of us today, poor posture and repetitive movements can all create weak links in your muscular system that trigger compensations. With M.A.T., it can trigger a fascial dysfunction and neuromyofascial derangement. To keep you moving and functioning, certain muscles take over jobs they weren’t designed to do and your body starts to rely on them to handle more than their share of work.
Over time, as is usually the case with the human body, compensation patterns designed to help you keep moving and functioning end up having the opposite effect which leads to chronic pain, tension, increased injury risk, and other symptomatology.
The only way to stop chasing your symptoms is to recognize your compensation patterns, your patterns of stability and mobility and restore as close as possible to the ideal patterns. In M.A.T., that is referred to as ideal skeletal/fascial/neuromyofascial alignment.
Most of my clients I see for chronic musculoskeletal pain and other symptomatology are searching for the “why” when it comes to their pain. They usually state, “I didn’t have an injury,” and ask, “so why am I having pain?”
I have to explain to them that their body is designed as a coordinated system with muscles firing in a series of kinetic chains to make their movements against gravity and ground reaction force possible. Muscles, joints, and connective tissues all share responsibility for producing and controlling your mobility and stability. When one part of that system isn’t doing its job, other areas step in to pick up the slack.
For most, those weak links develop gradually during everyday activities and go unnoticed until chronic pain and tension gets the attention of their nervous system. An individual’s dominance patterns, particularly handedness and eye dominance have shown to influence pain perception, sensitivity, and the development of certain chronic pain conditions. Evidence suggests that functional lateralization or how the brain processes sensory information from different sides of the body impacts pain tolerance, with non-dominant sides often showing higher sensitivity to pain.
As an example, if you sit for prolonged periods of time, your glutes and deep core weaken while your hip flexors become dysfunctionally tight. The resulting weakness and positional dysfunction cause your lower back and hamstrings to take over during basic exercises and movements such as with squatting, lunging, and even your gait.
Hunching over your phone or computer screen all day at work tightens your chest and middle of your back. Limited mid-back mobility and a stiff rib cage push your neck and upper back muscles to work overtime during reaching and overhead movements, with the lower back compensating during any type of rotating.
In my role at my facility, I work with athletes as well as non-athletes to recognize and correct their compensation patterns, their stability and mobility patterns that arise from their repetitive movements before they turn into injuries, pain, and other symptomatology.
Take for instance a high school baseball pitcher whose throwing shoulder becomes restricted from repetitive overuse. When the shoulder is unable to move through its full range of motion, the mid and lower back extend to compensate for the loss of mobility so what eventually shows up as back pain actually started at the shoulder.
An old injury that never fully healed can also set off a compensation chain well beyond the original site of injury. A sprain that left your ankle joint unstable can shift the load to the opposite leg and hip. Using the example of a high school pitcher again, a sprain of a left ankle could throw off his pitching mechanics from the optimal possibly causing a shoulder problem.
At first, compensation is a useful adaptation by your nervous system that keeps you going and functioning when something is not working optimally. However, problems usually arise when the compensation pattern goes unaddressed over time.
Muscles taking on extra work fatigue faster and become chronically overloaded, while muscles meant to do their job weaken even further. The result is tension and instability which is a recipe for chronic pain and increased risk of injury.
Muscle compensation is not a sign that your body is broken, but rather evidence your body is adapting to keep you moving and functioning for your survivability. The key is to recognize when those adaptations are no longer woking for you.
Rather than repeatedly chasing tight hamstrings, a nagging lower back, or sore shoulders, look at how your body is distributing the workload during your movements. What are your stability and mobility patterns? When muscular coordination, breathing mechanics, and mobility improve together, the compensations driving your symptoms can begin to resolve. The paradigm shift from chasing pain to correcting your compensation patterns or patterns of stability and mobility is what leads to real, lasting relief.