MUSCLE IMBALANCES
What is a muscle imbalance?
Muscular tension is a force (or pull) created by muscles as they contract. Managing tension around our joints is the way the body controls posture, balance, and movement. “A muscle imbalance” is a short way of explaining that the muscular tension in a group of muscles is out of balance.
Muscular imbalances occur when a stressed or injured muscle loses its ability to contract. This loss of tension, known as inhibition, can be usefully described as a “muscle weakness”. The brain and central nervous system (CNS) compensate for muscle weakness by increasing tension in other muscles; this is commonly called “muscle tightness”.
The combination of muscle weakness and muscle tightness (the imbalance) can cause a number of problems such as:
You are almost certain to have a number of muscle imbalances in your body, created by injuries or over exercising in years gone by. Because your body finds ways to compensate for these, you may not even be aware of them until the strain of the compensation starts to plague you in middle age – luckily though we are able to track these imbalances in just a few minutes of testing, and do something about them now. Let’s explain.
Some simple science to explain muscle imbalances
Well I am hoping to keep this simple, but the body is so complicated that we need to go in to more detail here.
Whether we are moving about, or just holding ourselves still, our muscles are busy – working in synergy around our joints. This synergistic relationship that controls our joints is often described as using opposing muscle pairs. Although an oversimplification, it is helpful to understanding what happens. For example, when you flex your elbow joint, your biceps muscles contract to increase tension, and thus shorten to create movement, while your triceps muscles reduce tension and thus lengthen to allow movement. (And when you straighten your elbow, the exact opposite happens. Neat, isn’t it?)
To keep muscle tension in balance relies on a constant sensory feedback from our muscles, joints and ligaments. The feedback informs the brain and Central Nervous System (CNS) about the exact length and tension of every muscle and the position of every joint in your body, and all of this occurs – amazingly – every hundredth of a second. The feedback allows the brain and CNS to orchestrate a “muscle contraction solution” (contracting the muscles you need upon demand).
With this mind, when a muscle or group of muscles become inhibited and stop providing feedback, the brain and CNS then create a solution to the problem – which is to compensate by tightening other muscles. Therefore muscular tightness can be described as a “neuromuscular tension solution”. In other words, a neurological protective mechanism to help minimise injuries and degenerative joint wear.
What causes muscle imbalances?
Because stress is the number one cause of muscle inhibition, the solution needed is also neuromuscular. The three main stress factors effecting muscular function are: emotional, biochemical and physical.
The effects of microscopic trauma will usually be experienced within twenty-four hours of the causative activity as achy, sore muscles. This is very common with people who push too hard or try to progress too quickly with their exercise regime.
A further and common temptation when working out is to focus on one’s strengths – but doing this runs the risk of making the strong muscles stronger and the weak muscles weaker; thereby emphasizing the imbalances. As a result, this kind of training can actually contribute to injury, rather than preventing it!
When the muscles and joints become overstressed, the result is pain. As we have seen, muscles control body movement, and if the muscles are imbalanced, they can’t function properly, so the body gets out of alignment and can no longer perform correctly. These imbalances in turn affect other parts of the body, causing a downward spiral in the whole body – leaving you feeling well under par, but without realizing why.
A new way of thinking
The traditional approach to correcting muscular imbalances is to treat muscle tightness as a cause. Thus it attempts to release the tension through manipulation soft tissues and joints. But there is a major problem here. Remember that the brain and CNS creates muscle tightness for a purpose, as a protective mechanism. Removing the protection without correcting the reason for its existence can leave you more vulnerable to injury.
Thus, before restoring a muscular imbalance, one must first consider what the CNS is protecting and why – so that one can deal with the cause, ie the weak muscles. At Life Activation we use a treatment method that does just that called Muscle Activation Techniques™ which addresses muscular inhibition, the weakness. Once the weak muscles have had their strength restored, the brain and CNS can choose to remove the protection to the joint, and thus restore the normal and correct tension balance.
