Just these things alone create a lot of imbalances in our body. Taking my progress photos recently, I noticed that I seemed taller on my right side than my left. Yesterday when walking with a new pair of rocker sneakers during my walk, the right side felt odd.
What causes these imbalances or what happens with these things? Muscles tend to go towards contraction when being used. It takes work to increase its flexibility or return it from its uncontracted state. Most people do not rigorously stretch out their bodies nor focus on the things more that causes greater muscle imbalances for them.
For example, if you sit at a desk all day, the muscles of your lower back and hamstrings (the back of your legs) tend to tighten because you're sitting in the same position all day. Plus, if you sit with poor posture or have a non-ergonomic workstation, this makes it even worse. You could be typing can causing issues with the muscles in your arms & shoulders. Poor posture strains your neck/shoulders/upper back.
A tendency I have when sitting is to sit on my left leg. Don't ask me why I do this, but it's almost unconscious. Trigger points develop in the body (I consider these like muscle knots where nerves, blood, muscles, tendons, ligaments just knot up) causing little dams all over. This now does not allow the body to function properly. Sometimes tight muscles that do not get untightened end up pulling on your skeletal structure therefore causing various parts of your skeletal system to be misaligned (this is called a subluxation). You have neural networks, your circulatory system run through your body and when your skeletal system has subluxations, these are also like little dams that prevent your body from functioning properly.
Trigger Point Therapy, Massage Therapy, Chiropractic Care --- these are all 3 different things but they can work in conjunction with each other in assisting your body to function the way God designed it to.
Since I workout on a regular basis, as well as sit at my desk a lot, I'm finding various areas of my body that are imbalanced. Every time I learn something and empower that area, I find other areas that are in need of attention.
The past week, I'd been experiencing some bad headaches. Normally when I have a hormonal headache, I can take an Alleve or just ride it out. It's not too bad. Other times, the headache is in the back of my head, upper neck. So, when I began experiencing these, I thought perhaps it was the normal headache. Each day that went by, my headache continued to get worse and worse with no real letup. Finally I looked up in my Trigger Point Therapy Workbook and saw there were other areas of my body that could have trigger points that could be causing my headache.
The night before, though, my 10-yr old daughter suggested that she let me use the electric back massager on my upper back, which never dawned on me. My upper back was so incredibly tender, that I could barely stand the massager on at a medium setting. She had inadvertantly stumbled on what the issue was without knowing anything.
The next day, I worked vigorously with my gigantic golf massage ball on my upper back/neck/back of head area as well as the upper sternocleiomastoid. Today all this area is still incredibly tender, but I'm more gently working on these areas to continue to loosen those areas up, get rid of the trigger points.
My headache is gone.
There are simple tools you can buy that are inexpensive, or you can also buy expensive stuff. It's your choice. The things I have to help me deal with trigger points are: foam roller, 2 varying sizes of massage balls that look like huge golf balls, a wooden back massager roller thing, a wooden foot massager, a handheld electric back massager, a tennis ball. You sometimes have to be a little creative, but even a baseball & softball would work. You could also use a dumbbell that has a bar.
These are all things you can do on yourself, but you'll need a little patience.
How do you tell if you have a trigger point spot? That area is hard, tender, painful when you apply pressure to it. There are tons of trigger points that you can develop in your body. I can't tackle all of them at once, but slowly but surely, I work on various areas of my body.
As I do this, I find that it empowers me in my workouts, but not only that, every day life things, sleep better, etc. I'll be posting various videos on areas to work.
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