Movement Compensation

This blog is all about life long, pain free activity. I'd have to say that the number one enemy to that is compensation. For the purposes of this post, the definition of compensation is:  A movement in which you change where the stress of the body is because of an inadequacy in another area.  It's literally the "silent killer" to your body. Why? Compensating adds overall stress to the body which leads to injury and early degeneration. 

Now here's the bad news....we all do it and we don't even know it!   Whether it's while sitting at your desk at work or during deep overhead squats, you compensate in some fashion. However, the secret to life long health and well-being is addressing your mobility and stability shortcomings to minimize the stress on your body.

Example.

A crossfitter comes down with lower back pain after a few months of training; he doesn't know one specific moment that lead to his injury but he feels the pain days after he deadlifts.  He also wonders why he can't squat below parallel like the other people at his gym and can't seem to have very good deadlifting technique.  He enters my office and we clean up his lower back with muscle and joint techniques like active release technique (ART), graston technique and chiropractic joint manipulations. He's feeling better after 5 treatments but "it's still in there", aka it still hurts a bit. So we perform a full body functional compensation assessment (we call this the selective functional movement assessment or SFMA).

We find that his hips and upper back are pretty inflexible. This would be an example of a compensation. Any time he tries to squat low, he doesn't have the hip flexibility to do so.  And anytime he tries dead lifting, he doesn't have the hip flexibility to keep his back upright.  Therefore the stress of the movement goes to the low back and the darn thing won't feel better until we get the hips and upper back moving better. Every time this guy works out, his low/mid back receives twice the load that a similar person with flexible hips and upper back.

If he had better hip flexibility, he could keep his back more straight!

 So we addressed the hips and upper back with corrective exercises and manual therapy, and after 4 more visits the low back is pain free, and suddenly the man is able to sit lower in his squats and have a personal record in his Squat snatches and isn't worn down after dead lifting anymore!

notice the angle of spine is a nice 45 degrees!

 The way to break your own compensation patterns is to have your own compensation assessment, then address them through manual therapy and corrective exercises like we outlined above.

 To have your own personal 'compensation assessment' to identify any possible future injuries visit us at www.Mobility-4Life.com

The Formula

I was at dinner the other night with some friends and someone asked me what I could possibly do about his bad shoulder? knee? back?  He asked me these questions with a tone that suggested he didn't think there was anything to do.  He said he'd been to other doctors and they said there wasn't anything to do.....just stay off of it.

Well I invite you to consider there's another way.  There are more options out there than people are aware of.  For us, we have a general formula to how we treat all of our patient's at Health-Fit.  It works wonders for everything from TMJ pain to toe pain and everything in between.  The formula?

1) Decrease Pain
               -there are lots of ways we do this; adjustments, manual therapies, electric muscle stimulation, kinesiotape, rest, nutrition, etc......   Really anything that gets you feeling better.

2) Increase Global Range of Motion (Flexibility)
               -Active Release Technique (an advanced muscle therapy), Adjustments, Corrective Rehab exercises, etc.
 What we see is that people compensate from other areas of their bodies where they are very stiff, so they end up putting too much stress on their 'painful' area.  We address this so we can interrupt the cycle.  I.e. When your lower back hurts because your hips are too tight and whenever you move it ends up putting too much stress on the low back.

3) Increase Motor Control (Stability)
               -Corrective Rehab exercises are the main component of this category.
 Now that we have you moving better, let's hold on to it.  Ever wonder what's the point when you stretch really hard, get a little bit more flexible, then the next day you're back to the same flexibility level you were at previously?  Well when you have more stability of the areas of your body that aren't suppose to move much (check out Blog Post #1 - The Joint by Joint Theory), you can hold onto the flexibility that you've gained.


Numbers 2 and 3 are what end up making the long term difference...i.e. keeping the pain away long term.  It leaves your body an efficient mechanical machine that can take a licking and keep on ticking.



Consider that when the woman on the left walks up the stairs, exercises, or anything, that she's putting more stress on her low back and on her knees because she lacks the flexibility in her hips/hamstrings/ etc when compared to the woman on the right.  Of the two.....who do you think is going to need a hip replacement first?

When I played baseball in college, I always wondered why I couldn't seem to go more than a few weeks without arm pain when guys like Derek Jeter can go decades without creating the same overuse injuries that I seemed to create.  If you want to be able to be active for a lifetime, pay attention to the formula and follow it.  When inflexibilities and pain show up, address it before you start compensating and wearing out other parts of your body.

For your own Mobility assessment please visit us at  www.Mobility-4Life.com

Ankle Flexibility

(exercises at the bottom)

If there's one spot on the body I could pick to have great flexibility, it'd probably be the ankles.  Why? The ankles are the number one shock absorber in your body. You will without a doubt drastically increase your risk of injury by having decreased ankle flexibility during activities like running,  jumping, squats or truly anything.

But it's a specific kind of flexibility called dorsiflexion that really matters.  Dorsiflexion is a fancy way of describing how your foot moves forward and backward at your ankle. If you can really picture it, compare how far your foot can moves forward while running to how much a spring on a shock absorber compresses.  The higher the range of motion, the more shock absorption there is = the less stress on your lower body.

Now my fear is that people will read this and think, well I've sprained my ankles a million times so I'm sure the range of motion is fine.  Unfortunately that's probably not true.  Someone like me, who has sprained my ankles a bunch of time, ends up having more flexibility (laxity we'd really call it) of the side to side motion of my ankles, which isn't helpful, and tighter from front to back.  So because of that my ankle range of motion (in dorsiflexion) is decreased.  Bottom line = I have decreased shock absorption so when I run a Turkey Trot (5k) which I alluded to in my last post, I'm left with sore calves.  And if I ran 30-40 miles/per week like some of my patients, I would very quickly develop a lower body overuse injury.

So what to do?

Come see me!  Lol.  Or at least get evaluated by a sports medicine professional to see if there are any joint fixations or scar tissue that might be leaving your ankles tighter than they need to be.  

There are also corrective exercises that can be done by yourself to increase your ankle dorsiflexion range of motion.  Such as:

1) Half-Kneeling (front foot) Ankle Mobilizations

2) Standing Split Stance Ankle Mobilizations

   

I'd recommend doing a 30 second warm up of one of these before everything your active.

To check out more visit www.Mobility-4Life.com