Now lets look at our lifestyles, one that of a sedentary, 8-12 hour a day office worker. Posture tends not to be the best. Certain muscles worker harder than others, and all of a sudden you are having a ‘fascial tug-of-war’ going on in your body. You go to train, your shoulders are feeling tight so your roll out your lats. Feels better, you do your workout and by the end of cooling down it tightened up again. Sounds like you? Or on the side of the coin you start doing pull-ups, lots of pull-ups and develop inner elbow pain (golfers elbow), you do a heap of mobility in your forearms, get treatment in your forearms with needles and every other gadget, get temporary change but does not last.
Sounds familiar?
Read on
Most people now can appreciate that for the body to perform at its best it needs to work as a whole functional unit. So what we used to sing as kids with the ‘hip bone being connected to the back bone’, actually now makes a lot of sense. So on the topic of connecting the dots, there are two muscles that play a massive role in how we move and perform as a whole being. They are the psoas (hip flexor) and the latissimus dorsi (muscle side of your body). The reason being is that they connect the upper body to the lower body. This blog will concentrate on the lats.
The lats are a super powerful extensor (arms back) of the shoulder and due to its fascial attachments downstairs; it also helps to extend the low back. On the topic of fascia,the lats are also part of the ‘posterior oblique sling’. Translated in English, your lats connect to your opposite butt. In a nutshell, it is super important in the movement game.
Moral of the story were you think the problem is it isn’t. Instead of releasing the tight area, try strengthening the area where it may be weak. The lats and psoas are common, very common contributors.
At Kinetic Healthcare, we utilise Neurokinetic Therapy (NKT) with a sports chiropractic approach to work out if that pain in your butt is literally coming from there or somewhere completely different.
Contact the clinic on (02) 9262 6473 to find out more information on NKT or to have a chat about your movement issues.