Wednesday musings, 11/18/15

I work with many people post-injury. Some people don’t worry about injuries. There is an assumption the injury will heal, and regular activity will be resumed without any further ado. For others, the memory of the injury lingers. Fear surrounds the activity that initially caused the injury, and sometimes fear exists around movements that have nothing to do with the injury but seem like they could. I trained a woman for years who, when she first started working with me, was scared to rotate because a college physiology professor had told the class rotation was bad for the back. She had occasional back pain and didn’t want to add to it. Her solution was to avoid all things that involved rotation. This becomes limiting, and shrinks our world and experiences. We worked on slowly integrating small forms of rotation, beginning with her head and neck, gradually working into supine shoulder lifts to observe what naturally occurs in the spine until eventually, she felt comfortable with the idea of rotating her torso and was pleasantly surprised when it wasn’t painful. If a movement scares you, don’t do the movement; instead, break it down into it’s smallest parts until you find a part you feel comfortable practicing. While it is true not all movements are appropriate for all people, many of us are capable of so much more than we think. It just requires patience, creativity, and maybe a little bit of hard work to move past physical and psychological sticking points.