An interesting paradox I'm caught up in is trying to make people aware of mobility/movement restrictions they have by posting about problems these restrictions cause... while trying to also promote how any restrictions & diagnoses you may have are perfectly ok, are changeable, and do not define you as a person... so you shouldn’t actually worry about them that much.
It’s a complete contradiction:
You are definitely messed up! But you are probably fine!
When I meet someone who's been having major pain or injury issues for a long time and I am talking to them about their training history, lots of terms come up like: shoulder impingement, anterior pelvic tilt, leg length discrepancies, disc degeneration, kyphosis, lordosis, scoliosis, hip impingement, you name it! Then, their actual movement or training history is left right to the end... brushed over like it's not important.
It's upsetting to me that people that have either been told or self-researched that they “have” something, but they have not been told that just a few of the right exercises will fix it! The timescales can vary, I have seen people make instant changes, whereas some people take months, but they always find improvement if they work on it.
When I was designing The Simplistic Mobility Method, my main aim was to find correlations between the most common "issues" people have and the exercises that people struggled to do. They actually became quite easy to narrow down, the more people I worked with, the more the same patterns kept emerging. This set of exercises alone would cause a knock-on effect of “fixing” (for want of a better phrase) most, if not all, labelled problems or issues - through a persons own power, which is incredibly important.
The hardest part of what I do is trying to change someone’s attitude. Coming from someone that was in immense chronic pain for such a long time... you kind of lose your ability to be light-hearted and easy going... and trying to be positive can be incredibly hard. Not in a weird, life advice kind of way, but always remember there's people out there right now that have problems way worse than yours; past and present; and they're probably fine! Why wouldn’t you be? What would actually make you so special that your problems can not be helped? This was a good thought process for me anyway, might help you too.
The people that I notice that make the best progress are the ones that are positive and motivated to make a change - they believe they can get better, and so they do. In the grand scheme of things, when I finally decided enough was enough, my pain and improved my mobility extremely fast! Mindset isn’t everything but it does help you to be consistent with what you need to do at the time. 52875316_782043052194505_2741397876084047872_n.jpg92.67 KB
The biggest problem when people become hurt or injured, they decide to rest completely. The body is all connected, and I don’t mean in some softly spoken weird yoga type way (sorry Jenni 😆) I mean, if you pick up an injury all of the surrounding structure will try to help out to protect it. If you just wait till the pain goes away you will be left with a ton of tightness and random weakness in more places than just the original problem area... which sets you up for more aches and pains later.
Injuries & restrictions don't mean you’re doomed and incredibly unlucky, it just means you are a little out of sync and you’re body is trying to tell you! It's not a big deal unless you let it be. Most things are completely reversible, you may have a few hiccups along the way but you are always LEARNING and IMPROVING, there are always things out there that you haven't tried! Explore these and get active in your recovery! Don't just be a - “oh here we go again" injured Annie! (apologies to any Annie’s out there...)
So yeah, my coffee is nearly done so I’m gonna wrap this up. Have you ever had been told you 'have something' that you actually worked through using movement?
