Your body is the smartest machine ever built. It’s built on task efficiency. It will get a job done in the easiest way possible. I believe this is where we coined the term, “path of least resistance”. If you drop a napkin on the floor, as you bend over to pick it up, your spine will flex. There is nothing wrong with that. We should be able to change levels, stop and change direction, walk, and rotate without pain. The problem is that as we have evolved in western culture, we have developed and adopted these life hacks that have made life easier, but it has come at an expense.
Let us start from the floor and work our way up. When we started wearing shoes for fashion and not function, it created a problem. When we walk, after the mid stance phase, we should push off the big toe. This “toeing off” causes a response for our ankle to do its job as a mobile joint. If we are wearing a stiff soled shoe, that action becomes compromised. When the ankle begins to lose mobility from lack of usage within its full range
of motion, the joint above it, the knee, attempts to help (remember your body does not know exercise, it wants to get the task done) by not doing what it was meant to do, act as a joint of stability. This has a way of showing up as pain in the knee, because the knee is attempting to act as a mobile joint.
Next up are the hips. When man was created, there were no chairs. Thank goodness. If we wanted to rest, we lowered ourselves into a deep squat position, flexed our spine, and took a break. This constant grooving of the hips kept that ball and joint moving efficient. We did not fall apart once chairs were
created, but as we began to sit for entertainment (radios, TVs and now computers), we slowly started to become compromised in the hip. If you couple this with the creation of the automobile, and minimizing our need to walk, you can track how we have become stiffer in the hips, and have complained more about back pain.
Moving up the path, we arrive at our lumbar spine. As we sit, the muscles of our trunk, or for the purpose of this post I’ll refer to them as, the core muscles, tend to turn down because they have minimal need. That is a simplified definition of the core. You could argue that the core muscles encapsulate the muscles from the shoulder girdle to the hips. What you need to know is that the area approximately beneath your chest to your hips needs to be a point of stability. Injury can occur when this area has the diminished ability to maintain stability and becomes mobile. It’s a common goal to work towards six pack abs (which is more a sign of low body-fat), but we can’t sacrifice function for aesthetics.
Then we have the twelve vertebrae of the upper back, or thoracic spine. Tennis players and golfers are familiar with this area. Just try swinging a club or racquet without rotating through the upper back. The thoracic spine is meant to be mobile, but if we are stiff in that area, either the lower back or the shoulder joint help us out by compensating. This explains why lower back pain from golfing is prevalent in the senior community.
Our body was meant to move as one with its muscles and joints in perfect harmony. It was Aristotle that said, “The whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts”. We were not wired to isolate muscles. As we evolved and then partnered it with training with a bodybuilding (isolated training) approach we created muscle and movement imbalances. Next time you feel pain in either your knee, back, or shoulder just remember the root of the problem may be coming from somewhere else. I’ll see you at the studio.
