Your probably are already aware {or at least heard} that pain is one of the body's protective mechanisms - pain's job is to alarm you whenever there's damage to the body or when something potentially dangerous is happening.
The purpose of pain is to make you change your behavior: stop walking on that sprained ankle, nurse that sore shoulder, or stay in bed (usually with a cold - yuck, I know) - when you are run down and exhausted.
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 {usually longer than 6 - 8 weeks}, 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.
So now you will be able to understand that, (acute trauma aside) "when I am in pain, it doesn't necessarily mean I am damaging myself."
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.
It also splinters the body by tightening certain postural muscles and creating a grand variety of compensation patterns - something that we are addressing now both on and off the mat.
Is there a way for us to benefit from movement without
triggering the overprotective response of the nervous system?
A great way to pace yourself are to ask yourself these two questions as you move through your practice:
Does this feel safe?
Will I have to pay for this tomorrow?
More information on how to pace yourself to keep the nervous system freak - outs {a.k.a. flare ups} at bay while still moving forward
lives here.
Unfortunately, persistent pain and tension - and hey, our busy modern life in general - mean stress, and stress, of course, means tension.
Here is how our musculature responds to stress.
This rabbit hole goes way beyond tension - read on to understand how chronic tension patterns contribute to the cycle of
repetitive injury.
Stress And Muscle Recruitment:
Whenever there's stress (and, of course, fight or flight response), brain "primes" certain muscles to help you escape.
This is great in the short term - you get ready to run away or fight by "priming" big long muscles such as hamstrings or trapezius. These big muscles are best suited to do this
job because they can produce a great deal of torque, partly because they cross more than one joint and partly because they can shorten a great deal.
In the long term, continued over activation of big long muscles – whether it is in the back, or anywhere else in the body – is not smart.
As a general rule, when
big long muscles (think big muscles along the spine, around the shoulder or the hip – such as trapezius, hamstrings, gluts or IT band) stay active for a long time they tend to contract, there’s a build up of acid, and they start to feel stiff.
Our body is quite economical in the way it works.
If the big long muscles are consistently turned on, the shorter muscles – like the little ones that stabilize the vertebrae or the pelvis, for example – go to sleep, because there’s no need for them to work.
These changes prime you for developing compensation
patterns.
In the long run, these erroneous changes can make you move differently, hold yourself differently, and even behave and talk differently – all of which have long-term consequences on both physical and mental state. This is why old injuries are more likely to revisit and also are easier to identify at times of stress.
Stretching feels awesome!
It is a great idea to stretch the tight muscles and strengthen the weaker ones ( like we have been doing for this past couple of weeks).
More importantly, though, is to identify + upgrade your stress management
strategies so that you can downregulate your nervous system efficiently and help those big long {and very tired} muscles to find ease and peace.
