Many patients continue to have pain simply because they continue to engage in the mechanical cause.
Stuart McGill 2007
“Primum non nocere” (First do no harm)
Perhaps the most important part of any type of healing is to first stop doing those things that are making us worse. Research done by top experts in the field such as Dr. Stuart McGill and Shirley Sahrmann PT, PhD has demonstrated conclusively that mechanical overload to the soft tissues of our body (such as muscles, joints, and nerves) causes damage and goes on to provide strong evidence that damage to these tissues causes pain. In laymans terms: Excessive and inefficient movement causes wear and tear; wear and tear causes pain.
Consider lightly hitting the thumb with a hammer repeatedly, eventually even the slightest touch causes pain (McGill). Tissues throughout the body are continually hit with the hammer because of faulty, inefficient, or destructive movement patterns. For example if every time you rise from a chair you lean forward in your lower back rather than your hips then you may be repeatedly irritating the tissues in your lower back each time to stand up.
Oftentimes the more you stress any system in your body the more intolerant and inefficient it becomes. Think of how little it might take to “set you off” at home after a really bad day at work, or how the more coffee you drink the less it seems to work and the more it bothers your stomach.
When you overstress your muscles, joints, and nerves they become more sensitive, react stronger, and refer pain to a larger area. At this point the brain is no longer responding efficiently to the stimulus but instead over-responding to a perceived threat. This reaction could be manifest with a sudden loss of range of motion and a headache in response to a windy day; dull achy pain throughout the whole body in response to a small bite of sugar; or excruciating low back pain from getting out of a chair or rolling over in bed.
Take Away The Hammer:
In today’s’ blog post you will learn more about exaggerated pain in response to movement; what specific movements are common with low back pain and how to move more efficiently so you can take the hammer away and allow the tissues to become less sensitive while also training your body to separate motion in different areas to set the stage for future corrective movements.
In future blogs we will break these big movement faults into smaller more specific movements to further decrease the amount of irritation to sensitive areas and allow your body to continue to heal and start thriving again in your physical activity.
Our goal for this section is to teach you how to start separating motion of your hip from motion of your spine which is a theme you will see repeated throughout this entire course.