Corey Walden - The End Of Back Pain

The End Of Back Pain

Corey Walden BS CPT

The Human Athletic Machine

Tensegrity And The Kinetic Chain

Upper And Lower Crossed Syndrome

Myofascial Release

Inhibited Muscle Activation

Unwinding And Decompression

About The Author

The Human Athletic Machine

For somewhere between one and two million years, humanity has walked the earth in some fashion. For almost the entirety of this; all but the last few thousand years, we have spent it walking for hours a day to forage for nuts, berries, tubers, and other plant food sources. We have tracked and chased down animals to hunt or trap, or in many cases may have run from predators. Whether you believe in evolution or intelligent design, our bodies were in one way or another designed to be more and more efficient for this life; a life of walking, crouching, lifting, throwing, and running. Over these millions of years our bodies design improved, as athletic machines with the goal to survive these days packed with a myriad of activities.

A little more than 7000 years ago humans some tribes switched from just hunting and gathering to keeping domesticated animals as they moved across the land. Bit by bit farming and more static sources of food were developed and most of humanity moved into permanent settlements. This still meant hard labor, however. Farming with rudimentary hand tools for most of the day, essentially year round, which was possibly even more rigorous than a hunting and gathering society, but had certain safety measures against starvation. Farming did not guarantee availability of food, and the work was not necessarily efficient, so it took a lot of work to get done what was needed.

The next phase in human life only happened in the last 200 years or so for most of humanity. Industrial production of advanced machines and modern technology were developed to make it possible for more of society to utilize their time and labor saving benefits. Farming became a quicker work process and required fewer workers, yielding more food per unit time and effort. Working days got shorter and easier, and fewer people were needed to make the food for the population. All other activities, from building shelters to making clothes and so on started to benefit from the same types of modern technology progressively to the modern day.

For around two million years we were athletes and our bodies were well adapted machines for these survival activities. In the last 200 years or so much of humanity, and essentially the entire Western World, transitioned from spending more than half of our day walking, lifting, and in other activities necessary for life as a hunter gatherer or farmer, to being essentially sedentary for the majority of the day.

How many of you spend 8 or more hours sitting at a desk, probably spending some of it typing. And how many of you drive at least 30-60 minutes a day, sitting in a car seat, arms up and extended to hold the wheel? Very few people spend much time being anywhere as active as our bodies were designed for, and most of us virtually do not move at all. Even more active jobs like the people who fill your gas, or walk around on a sales floor all day is a long way from where we have spent 99.999% of our biological existence, with construction workers and some other highly active fields being the only ones still close to our natural state.

The whole point of this first section is to get it framed in your mind that our bodies have been designed and have existed from our inception to be athletes, spending a large portion of every day being active. Our bodies were not meant for the lack of activity caused by living a modern Western or typical urban lifestyle, as well as the motions and positions that we do hold ourselves in throughout the day, often in severe repetitious excess. This is namely sitting, our head, neck, arm, shoulder and back position while typing, using a mouse, and steering wheel. Slouching is particularly damaging to our body, placing chronic and considerable pressures on our lower spine instead of the muscles that were made to hold the weight.

Tensegrity And The Kinetic Chain

You all know we are made up in large part by bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, and a bunch of organs. In order to move this body around, many of these bones, muscles, tendons and ligaments form a specific order of joints that we call the 'kinetic chain.' While most of our joints can move in multiple directions, being meant for multiple actions, each joint in the kinetic chain has a more dominant role of either stabilizing or mobilizing. When we do repetitive tasks, motions, and hold positions where these specific joints switch their dominant role we force the body to adapt in ways to compensate for these altered behaviors, which lead to predictable joint dysfunctions and make it harder to do anything except the one action, motion, and position weve repetitively trained the joint for.

The human body is highly adaptable, so this doesn't sound like a big problem does it? Well in the short term it may be uncomfortable, but no. However, if you're spending 40-80 hours a week sitting, typing, forcing your body to hold positions nearly nonstop it wasn't meant for? This is why we see nearly 70% of Americans reporting some degree of back pain. Im talking about sciatica, herniated disks, blown knees, problems sleeping, headaches and migraines, impingements, interruption of hormone function, organ compression and many other side effects and injury risks on top of just plain chronic pain, all because our posture is poor.

There isn't real change to the bones and joints themselves, though weight bearing activities in general do harden specific parts of bones depending on where the tension is being applied to the bone. The maladaptations that happen are mostly to the muscles and their connective tissue. Most joints allow movement in more directions than a hinge joint like the knee and elbow that generally just move back and forth, but lets keep it simple for an example as the theory is the same. Any given joint has muscles that work on opposite ends of a motion. If you wanted to extend your arm, there are muscles that contract to do this. To reverse the motion and flex your arm, the muscles on the opposite side of the arm contract to pull it in that direction.

Where imbalances happen with these muscles is one side might get a lot stronger than the opposing muscle and then the stronger muscle gets tight while the opposing muscle gets too loose (flexible) because it is being pulled by the stronger muscle. Alternatively, the muscle may simply be held in a shortened position for hours each day (like your hip flexors, the muscles that go from the top of your legs to above your hips and pull your legs and torso together) such as when sitting at a desk. This chronic shortened state will actually cause both tightness in the muscle sheath and actual shortening of the muscle fibers.

Either of these will create a long term loss of tensegrity (muscle joint balance), so the joint is then held at an entirely different position when in what should be a neutral position or may move in a different way that it wasn't designed for. Think of someone who is stuck hunched over, especially some older individuals that may have their torso nearly horizontal while standing. This is because of a muscle imbalance at various joints in their upper spine and shoulder which doesnt allow their joints to be aligned in a way that let them stand vertically. With proper strength training to rebalance and regain tensegrity, such a hunched position could be reversed.