Before we begin with our today's topic of benefits of movements, let's revisit our last week's subject of pain as a protection mechanism.

If you have read through the last week's post, you will now be able to understand that, (acute trauma aside) "when I am in pain, it doesn't necessarily mean I am damaging myself."

And if this concept still rings new and unfamiliar - don't worry - we will be delving into in much more detail over the next weeks and months.

When pain persists, the entire nervous system changes in order to protect the organism, and these changes compound overtime. So, if your pain has persisted for longer than tissues take to heal, then increases in pain are far less likely to relate to changes in the state of your tissues and are far more likely to be to changes in the nervous system.

Recurrent pains are also often over-protective. If you have had a recurring pain for many years, each recurrence does not mean you have re-injured that muscle, joint, ligament or nerve. What it means is that something in your environment or behavior - such as a movement that caused the initial injury for example - was enough to activate the protective response.

Unfortunately, living with persistent or recurrent pain means fear of movement. We shrink our range of motion, avoid "scary" or "new" movements, and, sometimes, stop moving at all. All of the above signal to the nervous system that movement is, indeed, unsafe, and need to be guarded against.

Our nervous system armors itself with a mindset of mistrust and fear before moving (imagine what kind of muscle tension this brings on board), and soreness and fatigue afterwards.

So is there a way for us to benefit from movement without triggering the overprotective response of the nervous system?

You bet!

The answer lies in graduated exposure - a fancy, sciency term for moving forward slowly, yet consistently.

Graduated exposure and novel ways to engage and challenge the nervous system are already built into our on- the - mat practice.

A great way to pace yourself are to ask yourself these two questions as you move through your practice:

I have included a great image from one of my pain management colleagues; it shows all the different areas of the body and nervous system that benefit from movement.

Several recent well structured studies confirmed that movement is THE BEST treatment modality for musculoskeletal pain.