Allison Ishman - Safety Muscles Guide

This guide is not intended to be a replacement for medical diagnosis or advice. Always consult your doctor before beginning any exercise regimen.

Written for educational purposes.

Distributed by Ishman BodyCare Center Inc. or NaperMed Inc.

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Table of Contents

These are the
7 Safety Mus cles

S afety muscles are the small postural muscles used to balance your muscle strength, improve your posture, and reduce risk of injury and common pain problems like neck or back pain, hamstring or groin tears, rotator cuff pain, and related shoulder and hip problems. The safety muscles balance the muscles you normally use in daily activities. The wisdom of safety muscle strengthening is that establishing better muscle balance allows you to more easily sit, stand, and do activities with better posture and less pain, and can reduce risk of injury. This is the safety net of mus cles.

When I was in my 20s, I used to help my friends move, and would always do my safety muscles the day before I helped with the move. I never got sore if I did that. When I was seeing 6-8 patients a day in my clinic and felt a headache coming on or had a stiff back or neck, I did my safety muscle strengthening to immediately reduce the pressure of a headache or to balance my tight neck or back muscles. Over the years I shared this with my patients. Today, I am sharing this insight with you. This is a maintenance plan for the body. This is the little black book of tricks to keep your body humming when its threatening to keep you from what you planned to do today! You have the 6 muscle group keys to better health in your hands right now.

Balanced strength around your joints and a tendency toward good posture has additional benefits, such as relief from tension and muscle pain, improved productivity, increased sports performance, and reduced risk of injury to muscles, tendons and joints. If you dont believe me, just try it for yourself. It takes about two weeks to take these weak muscle groups from zero to noticeable tone, and get out of the old, creaky body that may have inspired you to read this book at all!

Physically, the safety muscles include the small muscles that stabilize your shoulders and your hips. The areas we will focus on are lower shoulders, abdominals, and thigh muscles. These neglected areas are the key to balance in the body.

What difference does good posture make?

Most people think of walking with a book on your head, or of your mother telling you to sit up straight when they think of posture. These are interesting guidelines for looking good. We can even find scientists who study how good posture affects depression, self-esteem, positive outlook and other emotions. Studies about people-related jobs such as sales or marketing evaluate how posture is a reflection of your willingness to buy, how open your are to influence, and when you are really saying no to a sales p itch.

I am concerned with posture here as it relates to your abilit y to:

1. Stay strong, so you can do whatever activities you want to do, such as travel, go to events, and enjoy playing with friends and chil dren
2. Perform activities in your life without pain and discomfort during or after ward
3. Feel healthy and be willing to participate in achieving your fitness goals as well as being a part of active social groups. If everyone is taking a walk or a hike, you should be able to go too!

In this guide, when I talk about evening out muscle tone or strength, I am referring to having balanced strength or muscle tone. Balanced or even strength gives you better protection of joints, reduced wear and tear on soft tissues in the body, and a higher energy level. When your muscles are in balance, you are not using up your chemical energy maintaining tension in muscles you rely on for pos ture.

With a healthy posture, you will look better. However, you will also feel better and stay healthier . So, in this situation I am not your mother Im your health care professional telling you to sit up straight, and giving you the information you need to do that more easily and natur ally.

Why Call These Safety Mus cles?

Too many people get injured when starting a strength-training program, or develop recurring and annoying pain or tension in their body due to muscle imbalances. I see this all the time in my clinical therapy and fitness work. Sometimes the pain comes and goes, and people begin to just tolerate it. This can range from hand or shoulder pain to back pain, or even menstrual cramps. Other times people will accept constant tension as part of life, such as tension in the neck and back, or a calf or hamstring that is always tight, is prone to tears, or herni ates.

What hurts on different people always varies, as we are all doing different things with differently shaped bodies, differing genes and unique nutritional habits. But over the years, I began to see a pattern of the most commonly weak postural mus cles.

These exercises balance the vast majority of postural problems that cause pain and nagging tightness, leave you prone to repetitive stress or sports injuries, make you slump and sag, and contribute to making you feel tired and sluggish. This is your guide to balancing the most common tight muscles in your body with the typically weak muscles that oppose or balance them.

Why are there commonly weak postural mus cles?

Why are these typical weak muscles weak? The answer is because we dont use them. Lets consider our overall activities and how they affect our postural mus cles.

Our tasks today seem to be relatively similar. We sit, stand, walk, run, ride bikes, carry things, and lean over. We also pick things up from the floor or shelf. As a whole, thats about it. Of course there are also less common actions such as slipping, falling or occasional heavy lifting. We will talk about the common actions first, and the atypical actions at the end. Lets di g in!

Sitting Back and Abdomi nals

People today do a good amount of sitting. We sit at a desk, in a car, at a table, or on a couch. Sitting in chairs allows us to be upright without using our midsection much for stabilization. If we lean, we dont require very much abdominal strength to stay upright. So, as people sit forward on chairs, or slump in a chair, they dont use muscles ev enly.

Even worse, if you sit in the chair and dont use the back support, your back muscles are always contracting to hold you up. So, your back muscles get tighter as you neglect to use your abdomi nals.

When sitting, with abdominal muscles getting little activity, we start to use muscles in our arms and legs for more motions. Our weak abdominals dont activate when we get up and down from chairs, and dont bother to wake up and help us when we climb stairs later in the day, since theyve been at rest all along. With the increasing popularity of core training, people are beginning to learn that stronger midsections lead to less wear and tear on the muscles of the legs and arms, and help the body work as a unit. So, our first exercise below is for the abdominal mus cles.