Its All Connected
anthony bruni
“It’s all connected”. I’ve heard and said those words many times. And while cliche these words are true. Most people understand on an intuitive level, but I like to flesh this ancient oral meme a bit.
At the current count (which is far from settled) there are 37.2 trillion cells in the human body, all of which has their own microscopic social life. 10,000 Shakespeares writing for 10,000 years could not accurately catalog all the cellular drama in one human ape. Let us 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 (collarbone) meets the acromion, on 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 external 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 muscles 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 affect 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 natural 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 in 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 strengthen my injured knee. This gave it the strength to carry my weight in a balanced 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 few 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. It 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 holistically. A right shoulder injury 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 cause readjustments to the whole body. It is my belief so much pain is the body’s way of trying to make these patterns knowable so we can properly heal ourselves
Anthony Bruni