The causes of pain are many and varied, often not due to one specific thing but an accumulation of stresses placed on the system that our body compensates for until there are too many stresses for it to cope with and a failure of compensations occur resulting in pain and dysfunction.
Often a patient arrives in the Osteopathic clinic saying their back “went” for no apparent reason. That they had just bent over to pick up a pen from the table and that was it. Well usually that was just the stick that broke the proverbial camels back!
What did for them was the summation of all the other things their body had to compensated for and which with this last small thing had eventually failed.
Stress, spine and joint pain are the most common causes of sickness absence at work. A department of health report estimated over 12.3 million work days are lost every year due to it.
At this time of year there are other stresses, psychological & emotional as well as physical. Post Christmas is the time of the year with the highest amount of relationship breakdown and divorce being filed for. People are trying to stick to their New Years resolutions, getting fit often when they haven’t done any exercise for years. Trying to give up smoking which has all it’s withdrawal symptoms ( 50% of people have irritability/aggression, 60% have depression & 70% increased appetite – ref ASH, Stopping smoking).
As well as deciding how, what & where to take up your training it is important to also get checked musculo-skeletally before you undertake a new exercise regime. To identify and correct imbalances, restrictions, anomalies and give both you, your trainers/instructors information of areas that they may need to be aware of, to be worked on or for caution with.
Of course the benefits of peace of mind to train and actually training is a great way to have stress reduction and therefore reduced muscular tension, the cause of many structural imbalance, headache and muscular spasm.
Other inputs that can compromise the body and add to reasons of breakdown are old injuries, peoples poor ergonomic work set up and habits, such as carrying bags slung over one shoulder. These should be taken into account and adjusted if they are an issue to allow a larger amount of compensation to be available to both day to day activities as well as any new training.
Ultimately if you are already training and your trainer spots imbalances and restriction they will usually refer you to see the osteopath to identify what is going on… Listen to your trainer and most importantly listen to your body before it screams!
Harriet Johsnon
Bsc (Hons) Osteopathy
Registered Osteopath
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