“It’s all connected”. I’ve heard and said those words many times. And while cliche they are true, which I feel most people understand on a intuitive level. At the current count (which is far from settled) there are 37.2 trillions cells in the human body, all of which has their own microscopic socal life. And while 1000 Shakespeares writing for 1000 years could not accurately catalog all the cellular drama in one human ape, I would like to zoom in to a couple of recurring compensation patterns that are to often neglected.
The first of which is the shoulder hip connection. The only real joint of the scapula (shoulder blade) is where the clavicle (collar bone) meets the acromion, its lateral tip. Aside from this one gliding joint the scapula is fastened to the ribs by various muscles, one of which is the serratus Anterior, which sits between the ribs and scapula. It extends to the side ribs and is known as the boxers muscles as when it’s contracted it pulls the shoulder forward in a punching motion. If you continue where your serratus muscle leaves off you will find your extenal obliques which will go to the center of your sternum . If you cross your sternum and go a bit deeper you will find your internal obliques which will connect to your hip. These muscles work together to perform any torso twist, connecting one shoulder with its opposite hip. If one muscle is injured all these muscle will be affected.
To think about this functionally, think how you walk. As you put one foot forward you will instinctively put the opposite hand out as its the easiest way to stay balanced, How you move your shoulders will affects how you move your hips and vice versa. I encourage you to move your shoulders in a different pattern when you walk and see how your hips move in response. So if you have a hip or shoulder injury its best to be mindful of the opposite hip or shoulder, as it will form its naturally form its own compensation pattern, that can cause future problems if ignored.
For my next pattern, i am going to use a personal example that I see many people having a variation on. I while back I was experiencing low back pain, which I eventually traced back to a decade old skiing mishap which I unfortunately ignored. My body however acknowledge my compromised knee and shifted my weight to my right side as to not further injure my left knee. This is exactly what my body should have done. I however did not do any exercise to strengthening my knee so my lean to the right became more and more pronounced. Fast forward several years and the imbalance in my legs caused enough of a torque in my hips that I started to have severe back pain. Luckily by this time I gained enough bodily awareness to realize I had to strengthening my knee, which gave it the strength to carry my weight in a balance way. My back pain for the most part disappeared, but it would still flare up from time to time. Then it dawned on me that my knee was strong enough to carry my weight, but over the years my ankle atrophied since it was receiving less weight for all those years as well. So a bit of ankle exercises to my knee exercises and my back feels healthy.
As obvious as this seems to me now, it took me a while to figure out. Pain can be blinding. There are many ways this ankle knee low back triad can manifest itself. Often someone who is experiencing knee pain has an old ankle injury. If the ankle becomes less supple all the microbends it is designed to perform gets translated to the knee joint which will stress it. Its is important that we are able to zoom into the individual components of the body when we are injured, but it is also crucial we are able to view the body holistic. A right shoulder injuries can cause problems in the right knee, or a broken toe can cause lumbar pain to name just a few ways in which it's all connected. Few of us will go through life uninjured and those injuries will will cause readjustments to the whole body. It is my belief so much of pain is the body’s way of trying to make these patterns knowable so we can properly heal ourselves
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