Injury

Last week I wrote about injuries that occur over time. This week I am going to talk about sudden unexpected injuries.

Many things can happen to our bodies when they are unexpectedly pushed beyond their limits. Muscles can tear, bones can fracture and ligament can be stretched. All of which requires the body to rest for healing to happen. Any massage in the immediate time after an injury is more likely to harm than help. The time one needs before they can receive massage can vary from a day to several weak depending on the severity of the injury. As a general rule if touching the affected tissue hurts and your body instinctively pulls away you are not ready for massage.

One that sharp intense nerve pain subsists though there are several reasons why you may want to get a massage. First being compensation patterns. During the time immediately following the injury our body will adjust the way it does almost everything to protect the damaged tissue. This is good and we should thank our bodies for this. Without our bodies doing this we could never heal. That said whatever compensation patterns we concoct to protect ourselves will be biomechanically inefficient. If they were not biomechanically wonky they would be our default patterns. Compensation patterns can put a strain on other areas of the body that while in the short term are ok, over time can cause those long term injuries I talked about last week.

A common example of this is ankle or knee injuries. Our bodies will naturally away from our injured side as to put as little weight on our compromised leg as is possible. It can take a couple of months to heal an injury which means for those months our hips and therefore our backs will be torqued. Once our leg heals it will be weaker from having less weight placed on it. Conversely, our other leg will be stronger by this time and not notice the extra strain on it. Every muscle in our body will have morphed to accommodate our new posture. If we don’t consciously correct our postures though back problem in almost certain.

Another interesting aspect of this is posture can be passed down generationally. There is nothing genetic about this. Glitches in our movement will simply be observed by any infants around. By observing those glitches they can pick up our compensation pattern and incorporate it into how they learn to move.

Finally, I want to discuss our nervous system a bit. At that moment of injury, the nervous system often engages in a complex web of behaviors to keep us as safe as possible. I was reminded of this a week ago when I almost fell off my bike at an intersection when I misjudged where the ground was. I was not hurt in any way, but because I had a moment where I thought I would be my nervous system seized up to keep me from falling. In this case, I'm glad it did as it kept me from falling. This can cause more problems if we do fall through. By tightening up muscles to stabilize us It makes my body more prone to injury if it does fall.

Even though I did not fall my body acquired a tension, along the lines of muscle fibers that when engage was able to keep me from falling. It took a minute to shake off my fear, to loosen up. Over a lifetime there will be many moments like this. It is easy to not take the time to shed these individually minor but unnecessary neuromuscular patterns. By neglecting to let go of this nervous tension we slowly limit our range of movement. And of course the more severe the injury the deeper these self-imposed limitations can be.

That said just like we can with time and diligence unlearn self inhibiting thought patterns we can learn to calm an over the vigilant neuromuscular system.

Anthony Bruni