 Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash Do you want to know the truth about pain? Then read on, my friend.
Simply put it is just a signal perceived by the brain that something is wrong. The brain senses the pain signal and tells you that something is off balance, out of the neutral, out of the order. Next the mind starts producing rather unpleasant thoughts accompanied by rather unpleasant emotions. The usual response to pain in the body goes like this. The muscles tense up, the breath becomes shallow, shoulders ride up to the ears, the ribcage lowers down to the pelvis, the hips and calves tense up. Sound familiar? Feeling all of this nonsense happening in your body brings on more unpleasant emotions and thoughts. You tense up more, clench your jaw, tighten your fists and the buttocks. Now you are creating compression on your joints and organs. The brain screams louder and you get caught up in the cycle of negative signals going between the body and the brain. Now imagine if you were going on vacation tomorrow. You are boarding the plane and arriving at a beach paradise. Palm trees, sunshine, the waves crashing, the breeze in your hair… Or maybe you head up to the mountains. Snowy peaks, sunshine, snow covered trees, the quiet… For a moment the mind gets taken away by the beauty of nature and you get a flood of pleasant emotions, thoughts of happiness and relaxation. The body responds by relaxing the shoulders and the hips, now you want to take a deep breath, and slowly a smile appears on your face. And what happens to the pain? You forgot about it! For a split second, you forgot about it! Yes you did! Or maybe it was longer than a second or maybe it just went away? On its own? How could this happen? Well, my friends this is the beauty of mind body connection. You take your mind off of something and it no longer exists in the awareness. Out of sight, out of mind. I have two little kids, you know what is the best way to get them to quiet down after a scraped knee? Switch their attention to something else. All of a sudden the tears dry, the smile is back and they are chasing after Josie (the dog) again. The knee is still scraped though, the problem is still there… but it gets better after about a day or two. It heals on its own because of our wonderful built in healing potential. You are wired to be resilient and to get better. Now I know, some of you had knee pain or back pain for years and it is not going away on its own. However, every day when I ask my patients what took them so long to get help, they respond with “oh it would just come and go, get better and then get worse.” Yes! It gets better when you are happier and it gets worse when times are hard. This is the mind body connection at work. Unfortunately it doesn’t go away completely, right? That’s because the muscles have become habitually shortened, so they are creating compression on the joints and joints hurt or deteriorate with time. When you are in pain, you start moving differently. Your body does a magnificent job compensating for lack of mobility. The problematic area becomes extra sensitive because of lack of movement and old swelling. The area of the brain that senses the signal from the original injury becomes bigger. This is called the sensitization. Now add an emotional component to this mess and you got yourself a big problem. Luckily, there is a way out of this. There are many different bodywork techniques that can be done to release the tight muscles. Here at Healing In Motion we do a variety of different techniques. It may be massage, dry needling, work with nervous system (Neurovascular Integration), etc. We place a lot of emphasis on work done by hand, because honestly, you need it. Humans need to be touched. The studies on babies show that babies who are not touched don’t gain as much weight. Touch is healing, it’s love, it’s comforting and it feels awesome! Next there is the integration piece. This is when we teach you to move. All the tension which was binding your muscles is going to come back if we just do the manual work. The wires of the brain to muscles need to be reconnected. We do this through really cool Pilates and Somatics exercises. The goal is to get you to experience the joy of simple movement. The joy of breathing, the joy of walking, the joy of feeling alive in your body. When the tension is released, and you are moving correctly you feel like a kid again – FREE! You can do a quick jog instead of walking because it’s fun, or you can choose to jump up and down in place because you are excited. My kids do it all the time. When and why did we lose this ability to be joyful? Yes, it can be done! And you got absolutely nothing to lose just by learning more about it. Do you want to explore this further? Click HERE to talk on the phone. Or maybe you want to take it a step further and talk in person, click HERE to register for a Sample Session. Anyhow, life is too short to spend it grumpy and in pain. So let’s talk if you are ready to make a change. Now go out and enjoy that Colorado sunshine. We are so lucky to have 60 degree day today! Talk soon, Elena
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 Photo by Holly Mandarich on Unsplash The weather is finally getting better and I have been doing more hiking with my new puppy Josie. As I was hiking I was thinking about some recent complaints from my patients about their knees hurting on the way down. For those of you with knee pain, have you ever wondered why does the knee hurt more on the way down than the way up? Well, I’m going to tell you some of the common reasons why this may be happening to you.
I want you to think of the knee as a very simple joint which is stuck between two complicated ones, specifically your hip and your ankle. The mechanics of the knee are quite simple, it bends and it extends. It also rotates very so slightly during those movements. This rotation if not properly controlled can cause pain in the knee joint. Let me explain. The ankle and the hip have a lot of mobility and can move in a lot of different directions. Whenever there is something wacky going on in the hip or the ankle joint, your knee will suffer. Whenever I work with patients who have achy knees, I look at the root cause of what brought it on. A lot of times knee pain is due to weakness of the hip, in particular, the weakness of the gluteus medius (the top muscle of your buttock). This muscle controls the angle of your femur (the leg bone). So whenever there is weakness of the gluteus medius the femur will go slightly in and cause more stress on the inside of the knee. This stress will manifest itself as pain on the inside or the outside of your knee. Another common offender is the quadriceps muscle group located on the front of your thigh. When this group of muscles shortens (when you are straightening your knee) it is called concentric contraction. When this group of muscles lengthens (when you are bending the knee) it is called eccentric contraction. Now think of walking downhill and making a step down. The muscle on the front of your thigh has to lengthen in order to lower the weight of your body down. This movement has to be done with what we call eccentric control. A lot of time, when the eccentric control of the quadriceps is weak, the angle of patella (the little tiny bone on the front of your knee) will be pulled to the side at a wrong angle and cause you knee pain. Now let’s look at your ankle. It is pretty common for ankles to be stiff, especially when you never stretch and have a sit down job, run, hike, bike, or wear heels. Sounds familiar? Most of my patients with knee problems have tight calves. Tight calves will make your ankle stiff. When you are walking downhill, there needs to be a certain mobility of the ankle. If the ankle is stiff, the knee will compensate by bending at a wrong angle and cause pain. If you want to get really nerdy, as I always do, I always look at the pelvis. All too often, pelvis is misaligned which may make one leg longer than the other. Guess what? We have an instinct to have our eyes on the horizon. So to compensate for the difference in the legs, you are going to increase the angle of the femur, thus causing yourself knee pain. The bottom line is this. Knee pain is a result of some kind of dysfunction that is happening in the hip, ankle, pelvis and the surrounding muscles. Recently I treated a lady who came to me because her knee was hurting during hiking. “I’ve been hiking for years, I don’t know what’s wrong. It must be my age.” – she said. After an exam we determined that there were several factors causing her knee pain. It turned out that 10 years ago she had a bad ankle sprain. She never got physical therapy for it, or knew what to do about it. After several sessions of manual work on her ankle and hip and teaching her how to move correctly with Pilates exercises, she is now back to hiking and wants to climb a fourteener this summer. Knee pain is very easily treated but you always should look at other factors that may be causing it. We take care of a lot of knee injuries at Healing in Motion Physical Therapy. I put together a simple guide for my patients to give the some information on what they can do about their knee pain. You can download it HERE. If you want to talk to us about your particular situation and discuss this further, simply fill out the form HERE or call us at (303)669-0941. Best wishes and happy hiking. Elena |
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