From Design to Dysfunction and Back Again

In my last blog, Designed to Move, I shared with you the important role motion plays in maintaining the health of all of our body’s systems.  Today I want to talk about how failing to move creates a downward spiral that makes it increasingly more and more difficult to adequately move our bodies and stave off dysfunction, pain and illness.  Let’s start with a little perspective.

Our musculoskeletal system is a success story of creatures who for hundreds of thousands of years, could not keep still, or they would perish.  The body’s arrangement of muscles, bones, joints, and nerves enables a hungry man or woman to reach over his/her head to pick apples, or to bend down to dig through snow to unearth edible roots.  He or she can run from danger, climb a tree, and throw a spear made by his/her own hands.  Our ancestors “worked out” constantly in order to stay alive.  Motion is required to sustain muscle.  It is muscles that move our bones.

 

The increasing occurrences today of bodily breakdowns that result in such things as plantar fascitis, knee injuries, carpal tunnel syndrome, rotator cuff issues, and hip replacements are not a result of faulty design of the human body but of a flawed environment.  With each labor saving device we incorporate into our daily lives, our motion is restricted more and more.  Without adequate motion, the muscles, designed to walk, run, reach, climb, jump, swing a golf club, and even sit properly, atrophy.  Inactive muscles lose their ability to contract.  An efficient organism (which our human body is) doesn’t waste resources on unused functions.  The more inactivity, the more incapacity.

Standing upright on two feet isn’t easy.  It is a major feat of engineering.  Balance is everything.  To achieve it, the body’s major posture joints or load joints—the ankles, knees, hips and shoulders—are stacked one atop the other, 8 in all, 4 pairs on each side of the body.  Gravity presses down, and there is vertical load-bearing.  To balance the load between two feet, the load joints are in horizontal parallel alignment from left to right.  A functional body has ninety-degree angles between the 2 vertical lines and the four horizontal lines. It is active postural muscles that keep the joints in proper alignment.  When those ninety-degree angles are lost all hell breaks lose.   Gravity is a powerful force that puts tremendous stress and strain on the body when it loses its proper alignment.

Most of us spend our days sedentary and as a result, our posture muscles disengage because they are not being used.  So, when we decide to stand up, the body has to figure our how it will accomplish this.  Being a master at adaptation, it recruits other lesser muscles, usually on the outer periphery of the body, to help out.  The problem is that these muscles are not strong enough or in the right locations to maintain the right angles and parallel lines.  In the interest of moving, the body compensates for the lost or dysfunction and sacrifices alignment.  The problem is that lost alignment, or dysfunction, interferes with proper range of motion, which in turn leads to more lost alignment, compensation and dysfunction.  Eventually there is pain to signal that something isn’t right, and ultimately, if not corrected, the body can no longer stand upright and can’t move.

Look in the mirror, to see if you have one or more of the following conditions: one shoulder higher than the other, one hip higher than the other, one hand appearing closer than the other, your feet and or your knees pointing in any direction other than straight ahead, or, from the side view, your head forward, your shoulders rounded, your back flat or excessively arched, your knees flexed (bent)or hyper-extended.  If any of these are present, your body is violating the 90 degree rule of proper alignment.  What you are witnessing is dysfunction and the compensations your body has created to keep you moving.  Now that you have acknowledged the bad news, here is the good news.  You can return your body to design function by re-introducing proper motion that re-trains the posture muscles!

The Egoscue Method® provides proper motion through a series of e-cises chosen specifically to address your unique alignment issues.  With 20 minutes to an hour daily, you can regain your design function.  For more information on The Egoscue Method® please visit my website at http://loveinmotion.me/, or contact me by email @ suzannelamarche@gmail.com or call me at 951 704-5965.

YOUR HEALTH IS IN YOUR HANDS!

Material based on Pete Egoscue’s book, Pain Free at Your PC