Engaging Muscles Massage

It feels great to be back to writing again. New post.

Bunions are less about genetics and more about wearing athletic shoes with a tapered toe box. Over time, your brain settles into a position of stability where your 1st metatarsal and proximal phalange go in opposite directions, and it's far from optimal.

While the health benefits of taking more steps are parroted by plenty of folks who promote fitness, most of them don't mention that you're walking in athletic shoes that, in more ways than one, don't complement foot function.

Through No Fault of Your Own

Everyone is compensating for pain, injuries, and surgeries.

Because ~99% of physical therapists (PT) don't address compensation before introducing exercise, those common-knowledge exercises add to the compensation that was present before your knee was replaced.

Note: Muscle tightness is due to your brain protecting your knee joint from going into positions it perceives as being vulnerable to injury. The control center between your ears, in other words, is hardwired to protect, and no amount of pulling at the end of the lever to force your leg to go further is going to change the threat of instability that your brain perceives.

When you stretch your quadriceps (quads), for instance, you don't know which one of those four muscles is tight. That's also the case for the PT.

If the PT you've worked with could confirm which quads were tight, they wouldn't be recommending stretches in the first place.

To say the same thing differently, no version of stretching will ever provide the inputs it takes for your brain to remodel itself, i.e., neuroplasticity.

For your knee that was replaced to function better than it did before the pain or injury, your feet, hips, and spinal column also have to be capable of controlling motion as your feet interact with the ground.

After a knee replacement, some or all of your quadriceps are guaranteed to be neurologically inhibited (underperforming).

When muscles are underperforming, it's due to suboptimal neurological feedback from your brain to your muscles.

Besides restricting the range of motion, truly tight muscles make up the difference by pulling the weight that the underperforming muscles are neurologically incapable of lifting.

When you exercise with the thought that you're increasing strength, the quadriceps that are receiving the appropriate neurological feedback will get stronger. The underperforming quadriceps, on the other hand, will continue to be unable to perform their role effectively.

While it's entirely possible that you feel stronger, you aren't functioning well enough to return to the activities that you enjoy.

The disappointment and discouragement you feel stem from muscles that aren't capable of working together to produce motion like a finely tuned orchestra.

As for your iliotibial band (IT band), your gluteus maximus and tensor fasciae latae (TFL) attach to the band, and fibers from both muscles extend down to the end of your femur, above the joint line of your knee. From there, your IT band attaches to your tibia, the bigger of the two bones that make up your leg.

Along with your gluteus maximus and TFL, all of your quadriceps work together to allow motion of your hip, knee, and foot (at the right time).

Note: when your feet interact with the ground, your knee is responsible for motion in three directions or planes of motion.

How many planes of motion have you been trying to get back?

Answer: The one plane that allows for flexion and extension.

The bottom line: Until the underperforming muscles are confirmed and the neurological feedback to those muscles is restored, compensation will continue to accumulate.

When your goal is to emphasize your abdominals with a cable crunch, position yourself so that the cable is behind you. This way, the external force directly pulls your trunk into extension at your spinal joints.

When this woman performed a reverse lunge, her kneecap collided with the ground on every repetition. There are times when getting a full range of motion isn't worth it. This is one of those times.

Because the owners, general managers, and coaches of professional teams, across the board, don't know what they don't know, they can't recognize that their medical staff is incompetent.

Everyone is compensating for a previous injury, surgery, pregnancy, or the delivery of a child.

When it comes to compensation, professional athletes can adapt to stressors better than 99% of the population. That said, when a professional athlete's brain reaches a threshold and can no longer figure out how to manage the accumulated compensation, they will experience pain or an injury.

You can't have tight muscles without underperforming muscles. Yet ~99% of the practitioners that you and WNBA players have access to don't have the skill set to differentiate between tight muscles and underperforming muscles.

If they could provide the level of care in the aforementioned sentence, more injuries could be avoided, players could be back to play sooner, and, unlike the current state of things, they'd be performing better than before the injury.

Most practitioners will acknowledge muscle imbalances or asymmetries, but when everything is said and done in the treatment room, the athlete doesn't function better than they did before the injury.

The reason WNBA players are back on the court after any injury is mostly due to having what David Epstein coined "the sports gene," which gives their brains the ability to adapt at a level exclusive to those with elite athleticism.

When a practitioner tells you that your quads, a group of four muscles located on the front of your thigh, are tight, ask them which quad is tight. Because it only takes one quadricep to restrict the range of motion at your knee.

Follow your first question up with, which muscles are neurologically inhibited (underperforming), making them unable to perform their role to the best of their ability when my foot is interacting with the ground.

When a practitioner on a WNBA team has an athlete foam rolling or stretching their quadriceps, for instance, more often than not, they don't know which of those muscles are tight. So, of course, all of them are collected.

The lack of specificity increases compensation (that's cumulative), putting WNBA players at greater risk of injury.

Playing baseball with Achilles bursitis is a recipe for a bigger injury.

If you've had a knee or hip replacement, no one likely thought to look at the mechanical interrelationship between your rear foot and your knee.

We started the session at 10:30 yesterday morning, and this is the result two hours later, an outcome that's not possible with stretching or actively releasing muscles.