Emotional Support Sisters

Have you ever known you were doing something wrong, but no one has been able to tell you how to do it right? I have, especially with exercise and posture.

Last year I went to a migraine clinic that worked a multiple prong approach. Parts of it worked, but one part didn’t, and that was the posture part. They gave me a posture corrector and strengthening exercises. The posture corrector vibrated when my posture was bad.  I could be sitting/standing and the device wouldn’t indicate poor posture, but I could tell I still had poor posture. I brought this up to the Dr asking for help to know which muscles to engage, where my shoulders should be, etc. He just told me as long as my nose is parallel to the floor I can’t cheat. Oh how wrong he was, I was very much cheating. Hypermobile people can move in ways that people aren’t supposed to move.

Fast-forward to this summer when I moved and needed to find a new chiropractor. I found a clinic that has medical, chiropractic  and physical therapy all working together. So I’ve been receiving trigger point injections, adjustments, and physical therapy all in the same place, on the same day by practitioners who communicate with each other. It’s been a great learning experience, even though I haven’t gotten all the results I’d like (I’m still having regular migraines and tension headaches).

Things I have learned.
1. No amount of physical therapy was going to help me until my muscles let go of their trigger points.  The only thing that has gotten any of them to let go has been the trigger point injections (my neck is still being a bugger and not letting go). With my trigger points releasing I’m able to engage muscles correctly and move in ways I didn’t know were possible without causing injury. It feels good. I’m now learning to have good posture engaging the correct muscles.

2. My nervous system doesn’t generalize skills. The PT I’m working with breaks things down to as basic as I’ve ever seen. Instead of telling me to engage my core, he makes sure that I can engage each muscle in my core.  Turns out my psoas didn’t engage, so he worked on just psoas activation. Once I got it activated laying down we tried exercises for other things sitting up, but sitting up it no longer activated, so we had to teach it to activate sitting up. All of my muscles that weren’t working, but are now activated, needed to go through similar training. If I do a new exercise that uses a muscle in a different position then I’ll have to retrain that muscle to activate in that position. After 6 weeks of work I’ve developed the strength to stabilize when I conscientiously think about, but it is still not an automatic response. Also sleeping seems to deactivate my muscles, so now I have a 15-20 minute routine to wake up my muscles before I even get to strengthening them. After discovering this and working the last 6 weeks my hip and low back pain are down significantly.

Missy