Movement is a beautiful thing. Because of movement, we can experience the joys of life. From walking on the beach on a cool summer evening to climbing to the top of a mountain and enjoying the splendor of the world around us to crouching down to pick up your child and lift them into the air.
Movement can bring us so much joy.
But then again movement can cause us so much pain. We have all reached back to grab something and feel a little pinch in the shoulder or gone to pick something up only to feel our back seize up and leave us hobbling around for the rest of the day.
Movement can bring us so much pain.
How can this be?
Movement is a beautiful thing when it is done often and correctly, just like bathing (sorry stupid joke). When we are born, we have no movement limitations. It comes easily to us.
Over time we start to specialize in our movement. Just like a competitive athletes body develops to optimize their movements for their sport so do we as non-athletes. We get good at what we do every day.
If you are not required to move every day in a variety of movements your body will slowly put its energy into optimizing what you do every day.
That is why you may find one day when you reach back to grab your seatbelt you are surprised by a new feeling of sharp pain in your shoulder. It’s not because this is the first time you have ever done this movement before, it’s because your day to day life requires your body to keep your arms in front of you.
When you ask your body to reach back, you do it with a compensating pattern. Your body wants you to do what you want it to do, and it accommodates your wants, but because we move with compensation it slowly wheres on the joint and the structures around it until one day out of the blue. Your body decides I have had enough.
What do you do?
Slowly start to move more. Start walking, do low-level stretches, work with what your body can give you at the moment.
If you have been living a low movement life for decades, you have to understand that it will take time to get back some movements and some we may lose over time due to injury.
But you can always improve on it. Slowly with time.
If you move a lot, keep moving, if you are sedentary start walking more and work with what our body will give you at the moment and over time slowly explore new ranges of motion.
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