Move Well with Functional Movement
Move the way you were made to move
Do you ever wonder why as you get older you start having aches and pains that you didn’t have when you were a kid?
When we are young, our movements are perfect. Watch a baby or a toddler move. They can squat perfectly, over and over again, and they crawl, roll, and walk all day, day after day, without pain.
So what happens as we age?
When a child starts grade school, they begin to sit for hours every day, and this begins a process called “deconditioning”. Deconditioning is when we lose proper movement mechanics due to poor posture and underuse of some muscles, and overuse of other muscles. Sitting creates weak abdominal muscles and weak gluteal muscles. In response, our body tightens other muscles to compensate, for instance, the back muscles which leads to low back pain, or the gluteal muscles, which leads to knee pain.
This process happens slowly through long school hours, and tends to amply once we reach the workforce, where the majority of Americans sit for 8-12 hours every day. Now add in a long commute and sitting on the sofa watching TV, and most of the day is spend reinforcing these negative movement patterns and deconditioning.
When you finally try to move, the body no longer moves properly, and you develop pain doing activities that you should not have pain performing, like gardening, picking up your kids, even sitting or standing for extended periods of time.
Chiropractic helps because it stimulates the nervous system and helps reactive the muscles that have been deconditioned. It also helps because adjustments tell the body to release endorphins, which relieve pain. But this is only part of the story. Chiropractic adjustments will get you out of pain and moving better, but it will not necessarily prevent you from throwing out your back again in the future.
That’s where functional movement comes in. Functional movement builds on the nervous system stimulation that you get from chiropractic adjustments to retrain your body how to perform complex and essential movements like bending, squatting, lifting, and reaching.
Chiropractic adjustments restore segmental movement and helps each individual joint function better, functional movement training helps the whole body move properly. Thus by combining these, you will not only fix your current issue, but prevent subsequent issues from arising.