Muscle Imbalance and Postural Dysfunction
What is Muscle Imbalance?
Your body has muscles (or groups of muscles) that are attached to either side of a joint and work against one another to control the movement of the joint. It’s a bit like the handlebars of your bike: you can ride with one hand, but two hands working against each other gives you much better control.
When one side of the opposing muscles is stronger than the other, you have a muscle imbalance. For instance, if you regularly use the muscles on one side a lot more than the other, they get stronger muscles – and shorter and tighter. On the other side, the muscles get weaker – and longer and looser. The shorter, stronger muscles pull that part of your body out of position, and your whole body will end up making adjustments to compensate.
In the bicycle analogy, if one of your arms was slightly shorter than the other you would have to adjust your riding position slightly to keep riding in a straight line.
What causes a Muscle Imbalance?
Muscle imbalances are often caused by something you do as a habit. You might regularly sit slumped at your PC for a long time, or maybe you train one group of muscles but not the opposite group.
What is Postural Dysfunction?
We all have positions we spend a lot of time in. If one of these positions puts your spine and other joints out of their normal balanced alignment, this is a postural dysfunction – and your muscles will adapt and become unbalanced, as described above.
What is the end result?
When a muscle imbalance pulls one of your joints out of position, this puts a strain on that joint. When that strain stresses the nerves around the joint, you feel pain. If your body readjusts itself to ease the pain, other sets of muscles can become imbalanced – and the cycle can continue. A small, local problem in some muscles can become a neuro-muscular-skeletal problem that affects distant parts of your body.
Postural problems can manifest in a wide range of different ways such as:
- Lower Back Pain
- Facet joint and ligament strain
- Slipped discs
- Shoulder Impingement and Rotator Cuff tendonitis
- Headaches and Neck Pain
- Trapped Nerves
- Sports Injuries
- Hamstring tears
- Anterior knee pain
What can be done about it?
Once properly assessed, muscle imbalances and postural dysfunctions are fairly easy to correct. Generally we focus on three main areas:
- Mobilising joints and releasing short, tight muscles and soft tissues
- Strengthening the longer, weaker muscles to correct the body’s alignment and movement control
- Identifying and changing the lifestyle and working factors that are contributing to the underlying problem
Contact us for a detailed assessment of your postural alignment
Learn more about Neck Related (Cervicogenic) Headache…
Learn more about Information Age Syndrome…
Learn more about Sports Injuries…
