Now in part one of this blog we learnt that pain is a vital part of our survival but sometimes it can persist for longer than we need. So now I’d like to share with you some of the longer term changes that can occur as discovered by pain scientists (Hodges & Tucker, 2011). These adaptations give us a road-map on how to use exercise and movement to free ourselves from pain.

Pain leads to changes in the way we move

Think of a time when you may have hurt yourself and you were in pain. A very common occurrence is twisting your ankle. Sometimes this doesn’t create much tissue damage but it can have a very significant pain response. What you’ll notice is that you’ll limp, maybe just for a little while, as the pain changes the way we move so that we don’t load the affected area too much.

Our muscles around the area will “splint” to stiffen the area up and we’ll subconsciously take load off of the affected side. Now as I stated in part 1 of this blog, this is really useful during the first few months of tissue healing. But long term this can have other consequences. Some common examples are that if we were to injure a joint (let’s stay with the ankle). It can increase the load in joints further up the chain (such as the knee or hip). Alternately, let’s say that we injured our right ankle, if we don’t correct the way we are limping, we’ll place more weight through our left side making it work harder. This could then make the left leg more predisposed to injury.

Now many of these changes in how we move are subconscious. A lot of people don’t realise they are limping long after their initial injury. So sometimes we need to retrain our body to move freely and more evenly again. This is where specific corrective exercise can be useful.

Pain changes the way our muscles fire!

Not only does pain change the way we move, in doing so it also changes the way our muscles fire.

Some muscles will become facilitated

That is, they increase their tone to help protect and splint a particular area. Again while this might be useful for the first few months, these muscles tend to get tight and overworked in the long term.

They also become over-sensitised to pain to the point where even a gentle stretch, well below the threshold that would create tissue damage, creates a pain response. This is where it is important to get these muscles moving freely again, even if it is a little uncomfortable at first. In doing so we are retraining our protective response. Over time our brain no longer deems the use of these muscles as threatening and our pain will gradually decrease.

Some muscles will become inhibited

Now interestingly, while some muscles increase in tone others will “go to sleep”. These are quite often called inhibitions and the long term consequence of these muscles not firing properly can place undue stress on other tissues.

I don’t know whether anyone really knows why this occurs. Perhaps it is part of our short term protective response to prevent us from using a particular area and allow for healing. However we do know that in the brain the areas that fire a particular area become “smudged”. That is when we try to fire a particular muscle we might get a whole group of muscles firing (quite often the protective facilitated ones).

What we find is that we need to “wake up” these inhibited muscles which are quite often muscles that are important for the long term use of our past injured joints. And it is not until these muscles are firing properly again that our pain will subside.

Everyone’s protective pain response is individual

Finally, and most importantly, what we know is that our response to an injury and pain is unique and individual. How we move after an injury depends on what we were doing to cause the injury. How we splint and what muscles tighten up is very individual. And what muscles go to sleep and lose their capacity to fire can be different as well.

Interestingly, all of these people though may have the exact pain in the same location. So it is important that we don’t just focus on the area of pain. In fact, sometimes this can just feed our pain response as it make this area even more sensitive. We need to assess the way you move to see if you are still protecting an area long after it has fully healed. And we also need to identify what muscles are not firing appropriately and what muscles are still stiff and tight trying to protect.

Now this detective work is not always straightforward, particularly if like many of use you’ve accumulated multiple injuries over the years. But unraveling this tangled rope might be one of the best ways to do this and it is probably why good quality movement and exercise is shown to be one of the best ways to free yourself from pain.

 

References:

Hodges, PW & Tucker, K (2011). Moving differently in pain: A new theory to explain the adaptation to pain. Pain 152 S90-S98