Corrective Exercise and Somatics
Tired of feeling stuck, like you’re fighting daily life because each movement causes pain and discomfort? Tired of trying to fight your body to get through the day?
We’ve all been through the struggle of pushing through another day in pain. It always seems like the only answers out there are take a pain pill or let’s cut you open and “fix” whatever is wrong with you.
I can tell you from personal experience and working with hundreds of clients, that surgery and pain pills don’t really ever take care of the underlying problems causing the pain. I’ll explain why surgery and pain pills don’t always work and sometimes even make the problem worse than it was before.
For thousands of years early people used mindfulness and meditation to address pain, even in severely injured areas of the body. But somewhere along the way, western practices lost that insight and we began trying to use “heroic medicine” (aka surgery and medication) to fix the problems and dull pain. Now of course, this has saved thousands and thousands of lives. We are very good at helping save peoples’ lives when traumatic injuries have occurred. But all too often, people who were supposed to be helped by a surgery or pain medication only develop worse symptoms.
As our modern science is catching up to what’s actually happening in our bodies and minds, we have learned that those techniques of mindfulness and meditation can actually be a golden ticket to reducing pain. that’s because pain is actually created entirely by the brain from memories of past experience, current situations, our stress response, and how inflammatory our bodies are.
Pain is kinda like the physical manifestation of fear. Our brains register the damage and decide (based on our past experience with injuries and healing) how much of a pain signal to create. Our muscles tense into a splint around the injury as a protective mechanism (and these can also be emotional injuries), and cause pain to occur so that we are more gentle with the area while it heals.
Unfortunately, if we get locked into this holding pattern the pain increases over time as we lose conscious control over our muscles ability to contract and relax. Like muscle memory we stop having to think about contracting around the injury and our body just does it for us.
The same thing happens with our posture. Have you ever felt like you just can’t sit up straight? If we continually do the same motion or sit in the same posture, we develop imbalances in our body and our muscles tense to protect us, with out us even knowing it. We create a new way of being in our bodies and our muscles and skeletons adapt to this new shape.
Prolonged muscle contraction can feel like numbness, tingling, burning, achiness, fatigue, sharp stabbing pain. Worse, it can and almost always throws pain to other areas. This is called pain referral. Pain referral makes diagnosing the underlying cause of pain difficult. Our physicians are almost all uneducated in things like trigger points, muscle groups, fascial lines, and somatic connections, including orthopedic surgeons and PTs, who you’re being sent to help deal with your pain!
Because practitioners often don’t have this training, they make you exercise the areas that are in pain, cut into the area to “repair” the damage, but miss the root cause the problem entirely. This destabilizes the system even further and causes more pain! I’ve seen and addressed problems like shoulder pain, back pain, knee pain, and more using the view point that the body is a functional unit and that pain is a symptom of a problem , not something to get rid of.
Then, there’s the problem with numbing the pain. Your body’s signals are it’s way of communicating with you. Pain is a signal that something is injured or not right. It will send signals through the nerves, often quietly at first, enough to ignore. Then as time goes by and you continue to silence the body with pain pills or just pushing through, the body gets louder and louder, sending more and more signals. By taking pain medication, you actually force the body to create more pain pathways. This causes an increase in the amount of pain over time because our body is trying to send us a message, and we can’t hear it. That’s why pain meds are so addictive, because by taking them for a prolonged time, you are actually creating more pain, and in doing so, the need for more meds.
This occurs when we get surgeries, as well. Cutting into tissues that is already in pain, causes more injury and therefore more pain. Now not every surgery is going to cause this and sometimes that surgery is Absolutely necessary, especially after serious injury. But, exploratory surgeries and repairing of even moderate tears to ligaments has been shown (through several studies) to have no affect on pain levels, because it is ultimately the relationship of the muscle to the injury, created through the brain.
SO, in order the deal with chronic pain, we must bring our conscious awareness back to the muscles, turn on under functioning muscles, turn down overly tense muscles, create length in the muscle and connective tissues, and then reintegrate through mindful movement.
We must focus on the muscles that are causing the pain (which usually hide), Retrain the brain to trust and not fear injury, and then create a healthy relationship between muscles, joints, and the mind again.
This is where corrective exercise and Somatics comes in. these systems work together beautifully to rebalance, retrain, and reintegrate each functional unit as a coherent system.
Check out NASM’s page about corrective exercise, which gives a great explanation of how corrective exercise works.
Somatics is a series of mindful movements informed by intrinsic movement patterns and functional connection in the body. The movements are meant to be slow and intentional. Helping retrain the mind to know what contraction and relaxation is. Check out this page about Somatics for more information.
Throughout my years of Massage Therapy, Yoga, and Personal Training my clients and I have experienced the healing power of mindful movement and understanding functional units of the body. Over the years, I have often heard my clients say that I’ve made more difference in the few sessions with me, than they have in years working with their PTs or with other therapists. I owe that success to the great teachings of people like my yoga practice, My wonderful teachers during my schooling at Healing Hands, Thomas Hannah (creator of Somatics), and the experience I’ve gained working with hundreds of clients. I’m eternally grateful to all those who have given me feedback and helped me grow to where I’m at now!
