I'm a mess! My lower back is stiff when I wake up in the morning, the inside of my right knee hurts when I walk, I have a constant ache on the left side of my neck, and I simply feel tight all over.
In trying to help this individual feel better, both immediately and long-term, would the best approach be to address each pain as its own isolated issue OR to understand if there's a mechanism connecting them all?
To quote my teacher, Dr. Andrew Buser, "Dysfunction cannot be understood until optimal postural function has been defined and understood".
This refers to how many in the medical field will look to what’s wrong and treat simply the symptom without necessarily comparing it to a framework of how the body (posture in this regard) should optimally work.
Beyond the Postural Therapy model of how the body is designed to function: put the bones in the right place and keep them there with the 'right' muscles (Anti-Gravity Kinetic Chain), there's a more simplistic model of optimal postural function:
A Toddler!
Watch a child stand, sit, breathe, squat, and crawl. They typically do so with perfect, unrestricted form. What are kids doing at this age? They're playing: swinging from bars (or rings, picture below), squatting down to pick up a toy, and bouncing around. These full range of motion activities help keep the kids healthy and functional.
What happens as we age? Most of us limit how fully we move our limbs and stop doing motions we did when we were young.
The body is designed to move in full range of motion!
Here are two tests you can do to measure how functional you are at the moment:
See how far you can safely squat down with ZERO pain. Can you do so like the toddler in the picture above?? Be careful if you have any knee, hip, or lower back issues.
Raise your arms as high as you can from the front. Don't do this with a side in which you have shoulder or neck pain.
Something fun you can do is to be your own therapist. Take one of these measurements and do stretches which address muscles limiting your range of motion. Do a stretch, then retest. Keep doing this with various movements and reinforce in your body the ones the help.
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