Muscles should have a certain amount of resting tone, they shouldn’t be limp and flaccid, and they shouldn’t be tense and braced, ideally, they rest somewhere in the middle; slightly engaged and ready to contract further or stretch right out at a moment’s notice. This resting tone is dictated by the nervous system, an electrical grid comprised of the brain, spinal cord and a complex network of nerves that connect everything in the body. We are really just a series of highly regulated sensory feedback loops that allow us to experience the world around us. What we see, what we feel, what we have experienced in the past and what we want to do in the moment will all play a role in the tone of particular muscles in our bodies; our experiences make an imprint on our nervous systems.
Physical traumas, emotional stressors, ergonomic challenges, repetitive strains and learned movement patterns will all be recorded in people’s nervous systems and will all effect the resting tone of different muscles in their bodies. An old, sprained ankle will likely make a person’s calf muscles reactively tense. A history of sexual assault will probably make a person overly guarded in certain situations. A ballerina with a desk job will have a hard time sitting still all day and likely end up bracing her back muscles then slouching on her ligaments in her attempts to deal with gravity. We have a lot of control over our bodies, but we underestimate how much is happening under the surface to regulate our conscious experience.
The muscle tone throughout our bodies is closely tied to how and what we feel. When muscles are resting in an overly contracted state, they tend to restrict the mobility of the joints that they are associated with and can start to develop tender, taut bands that can be uncomfortable. Overly braced muscles will also impair a person’s sense of where their limbs are in space because their brain uses sensory information from their movement to regulate certain holding patterns in their body. The deep muscles in your butt are a good example because they are a place that people tend to subconsciously tense; when these muscles get overly braced, they can rotate your thigh, shin, and foot outward even though you may perceive that your foot is actually pointing forward. There can be a discrepancy between what you see in a mirror and what you feel in your body because you become accustomed to certain states of being, even if they are not comfortable or biomechanically efficient.
A lot of pain gets blamed on inflammation in the medical world, but inflammation in a person’s soft tissues should be viewed as a symptom, not a diagnosis, the root cause is typically something affecting the person’s underlying muscle, fascial or visceral tone in the area. The suffix ‘itis’ implies that a tissue is inflamed; tendonitis is a swollen tendon; bursitis is a swollen bursa sac. The reason most tendons can become chronically painful is because they are the structures that are attaching hypertonic muscles to bones. When a person’s calf muscles are littered with knots, they are much more likely to develop a chronic Achilles tendonitis because the muscles are resting in an overly contracted state and constantly creating undue strain on the tendon that attaches them to the heel. Tennis elbow can last for months even if you rest it because it is usually a subtle nerve irritation stemming from the neck and shoulder that causes the muscles in the forearm to develop too much tone.
It is hard to control the resting state of our bodies because they rely on cumulative experience to determine how they are going to react, so if we find ourselves in an uncomfortable place, we need to help train our bodies and our brains to cooperate, which can take more time than we usually have the patience for. When your nervous system has become hypersensitized globally or in a particular area there are interventional treatments that can help calm it down, but to accomplish long term change in your body your need to adjust your behaviour and progressively allow it to habituate with mindful movement, breathing and exposure to a variety of challenges.
I have learned a phenomenal amount about the non-intuitive interactions of our physical hard wiring and our emotional states by treating people with the combination of IMS dry needling, hands-on visceral manipulation, and getting the opportunity to get to know my clients over a series of weekly thirty-minute appointments. IMS allows me to tap into people’s nervous systems and reflexively change their resting muscle tone in localized areas almost immediately. Visceral manipulation provides me the knowledge of anatomy combined with the tactile skill to feel where people are holding the most tension in their bodies, beyond their muscular systems, and the opportunity to get to know my clients, allows me to assess, over time how much their problems are rooted in the physical, versus the emotional, and adjust my therapy accordingly. It is physical discomfort or dysfunction that tends to bring people in for physiotherapy, but the driving force behind that discomfort is usually rooted in some level of stress and fear combined with a misunderstanding or ignorance of how their bodies work.
The nerves from the mid to lower portion of your neck join together, pass under your collar bone, through the muscles of your shoulder and provide all the electrical wiring to your arms, hands and fingers. Similarly, the nerves from your lower back region join together, pass through your abdomen and pelvis, and extend all the way down to your toes. These nerves are like pieces of dental floss that are strung from your spine out into your periphery and they need to slide and glide their way through your body as you move around. Anything that irritates a nerve closer to the spine lowers the threshold for what it takes to annoy it further down the chain, so quite often aches and pains in your extremities have one or two contributing factors from further up the chain. For example, most foot and calf problems originate with tension in the hips and lumbar spine irritating the sciatic nerve, and most elbow and wrist pains have their root causes in the neck and shoulder.
Compression or restriction of individual nerves as they pass through your body can create localized areas of tension, pain and altered sensations. Poor posture and movement patterns, acute injuries and stress-based, emotional holding patterns are the most common sources of localized nerve irritations in people’s bodies. Emotions are experienced more with the body than the mind, they change how we physically feel inside and out; happiness and pride feel different than sadness, anger, and fear. The memories we have of emotional experiences are more about how they made us feel than what we thought about them, which is why we don’t always have the words to explain what happened to us. There is commonly a discrepancy between how people’s bodies are reacting and how they cognitively feel because we are better at repressing our thought processes than we are at regulating the subconscious processes of our bodies.
People tend to hold more of their day-to-day stresses in their muscular systems and their deeper emotional traumas around their organs, that in turn, will also affect the tension in the muscles in the surrounding area. Busy days at work can cause people to unknowingly clench their jaws, tense their butts or brace their chests in response to the constant pressures of responsibility. The loss of a loved one can create a heaviness around the heart, the anxiety of motherhood can turn the small intestine into knots, and the anger associated with a past abuse can sit as a ball of tension around the liver. Our bodies’ muscles and organs react via our nervous systems, and over time can start to irritate themselves. Nerves are very delicate tissues that pass through muscles, fascia, and organs on their way to or from somewhere else, and persistent, low levels of tension in certain areas of the body hold the capacity to compress and irritate them. Nerve irritations typically result in tension, pain, and/or weakness in muscles, altered sensation in the skin and irritability in the normal function of organs.
There are a few crossroads in your body that a lot of important anatomy pass through making them vulnerable to stress and common sources of dysfunction. The first being the area under your collarbone and sternum because the nerves from your lower neck pass through to your arms, the subclavian arteries extend up from your heart to your arms, and your vagus nerve sprawls down from your brain to many of the organs in your body. It is no surprise that stressed-out people tend to guard their shoulders up and forward to protect this part of their bodies. The second crossroad is the lower abdomen, especially in women, because the bladder, uterus, ovaries, intestinal tract and all the nerves to the lower body are stuffed into a relatively small pelvic area with a wide variety of functions and emotional connections. Finally, is the upper neck and its connection to our eyes, ears and dura that help us make sense of the world around us and where we are in space.
As a physiotherapist, it is my job to understand the interactions between anatomy and human nature. There are very common structures that get irritated in people’s bodies and there are very common stories that seem to get them there, but every person has their own journey and needs to learn to take ownership of their own problems. Interventions like IMS and visceral manipulation can help release tension and promote nerve and blood flow through people’s bodies to make them more comfortable, but mindful awareness of posture, movement, breathing and presence are the keys to long term health and happiness.
To learn more about how your body and mind work read or listen to my new book Why We Hurt: Understanding How To Be Comfortable In Your Own Body
