Mobility, self-care, and physical therapy techniques are growing in popularity. These methods include foam rolling, corrective stretching, lacrosse ball mobilization, barbell mobilization, and physical therapy-based mobilization exercises and drills. These trends promote a proactive approach that allow athletes to heal themselves after injuries, instead of running to the doctor to get a prescription or surgical fix.
Mobility, self-care, and physical therapy techniques are growing in popularity. These methods include foam rolling, corrective stretching, lacrosse ball mobilization, barbell mobilization, and physical therapy-based mobilization exercises and drills. These trends promote a proactive approach that allow athletes to heal themselves after injuries, instead of running to the doctor to get a prescription or surgical fix.
While some people see results from these techniques, the majority of people – including practitioners – are still mystified by the true underlying cause of their pain and how to fix it for good.
Unfortunately, this has led to a low standard for the results people see from pain relief techniques. Most people have settled for living with a certain level of dysfunction, pain, and limitation without knowing it’s possible to get better.
3 Empowering Self-Assessment Drills
In the video, I’ll show you three simple self-assessment techniques. Whether you have pain or not, perform these assessments to determine if your alignment is off. It most likely is, but you are unlikely to do anything about it unless you can feel it yourself.
You can use this video to get the bigger picture of the methodology behind my video tutorials on posture and alignment on Breaking Muscle. Going through the motions or doing any exercises doesn’t work well. You must understand the role you play as your own practitioner.
The 2 Missing Pieces of Pain Relief
Most people are able to get temporary relief, but continue to have the same problem later on down the road. Or their pain improves, but then they experience pain in another part of their body. This is because the following two points are missing from the mobility movement that is sweeping the fitness industry today.
#1: Look Past the Pain Point
Most mobility techniques focus on working the area where the pain is located, or nearby areas. This approach misses the bigger picture of overall joint relationships. In other words, a person with elbow pain is most likely going to focus on mobilization techniques for the surrounding structures, and maybe even go as far as addressing the mobility and function of the shoulder.
This person will likely continue to have elbow pain because the real source of the problem is a hip or shoulder dysfunction. In many cases, the entire unit of the pelvic girdle and shoulder girdle needs to be addressed for the elbow pain to subside completely.
The human body works as a unit. Taking a segmented approach will only yield limited results. Unless you have fallen off your bike and broken your arm or incurred some other acute injury, it does not make sense to treat the site of the pain.
#2: Move More
Lack of movement is the underlying source of chronic pain. Most people know this, but don’t put theory into practice by combating the lack of movement that is the crux of chronic pain.
I see fitness and health practitioners who blame pain issues on shoes, bad form at the gym, or high-impact workout programs such as CrossFit. These factors all need to be taken into account when assessing the cause of pain. But none of these things would be a problem if people moved more and still had the full joint range of motion that results from a lifestyle based on moving in order to survive. The degree to which physical functionality is devolving and leading to injuries is widely overlooked.
Many active individuals would say they get plenty of movement, but even active people who work out frequently grew up sitting at school, driving cars and riding in subways to get from point A to point B, and working at a computer. In modern society, we do not move in order to survive. Instead, we click a mouse.
Don’t Settle for Less
My next three videos provide simple perspectives on how to incorporate these ideas into your own pain-relief programs. You will learn how to cope with your own chronic pain issues more effectively and stop settling with limitation and dysfunction.
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