How is your movement system negatively adapted? How about injury? We can develop conditioned patterns that we learn in response to injuries, like when you change the way you walk because your ankle hurts. A single change in the way your ankle moves, can affect the nervous system, changing the way your entire body moves when you walk. If this goes on long enough you can adopt a faulty neurological movement pattern that does not go away on its own. This poor quality of movement can eventually lead to an injury.
Musculoskeletal injuries are rarely the result of trauma, usually, they are the result of overusing a maladapted, overcompensated movement system. Pain, stiffness, and immobility are all due to maladaptations of the nervous system to perceived threats. At the end of the day, these symptoms are not just due to a breakdown in structure, they are the result of a distortion in the control of your nervous system.
Movement patterns are stored in the nervous system in what I would call nested layers. They are present when we are born and continue to be learned as we develop.
The deepest layer consists of primitive reflexes that are encoded in our DNA. Right at birth, a baby should automatically turn its head towards its mother’s breast to nurse when it is near and flex its fingers when its palm is stimulated, as a couple examples. The next layer develops as we learn to cope with gravity. These are called postural patterns like learning to crawl and stand up. And then there are patterns we learn with repetitive daily activities, like when we shape our bodies to the position we work in, or play sports in or even play music in.
These concepts are all integral parts of a very important foundation of our Approach…The Nervous System. It is this system that integrates joints and muscles with movement and serves as the premise of our revolutionary approach to pain relief.
