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