Pain Free Motion 2016: Why Does It Hurt When I Exercise?
As a physical therapist almost every person who comes to see me is struggling with painful movements. As I have assessed people over the years I have begun to see patterns. There is a law that applies to this situation called Paredo’s Law which states that 80% of the problems are from 20% of the possibilities. Basically what this means is that we see a lot of people with the same patterns of movement limitations that are creating pain when they move. But why does it hurt when you move?
Well the simplest way to think about this very complex situation is that when you take any tissue in the body including muscle, tendon, ligaments, nerves, etc to the limit of its ability to move the tissue experiences stress. If you over stress the tissue or increase the stress to the breaking point the tissue will breakdown over time. The breakdown over time then triggers the inflammation system to begin repairing the damaged tissues. If the body does not have enough time to repair the damaged tissues before new damage or stress is occurring the body will be in a chronic state of inflammation. Inflammation creates pressure around nerves and we have pain signals that get sent to the brain.
So if we know that tissues get stressed when they are taken to their limit then if we didn’t take tissues to their limit as often then we would have less tissue damage and less pain. This means that we need to find out where our body is limited in mobility and stability. We need to assess if that limitation is normal or if that limitation is abnormal. If its abnormal we need to then teach the body how to move again to its normal distance, speed, etc.
The easiest way to go about finding out if my body has limitations is to perform a movement screen which forces the body to move into directions that it was designed to move into and then assessing if there is pain, limitations, weakness, etc. This can be done very easily with the use of a movement screen. If you would like more information about movements screens please select the image below.
Cheers to a Pain Free 2016,
Andrew Gorecki