Understanding Postural Imbalance

There are two main principles that can be used to aid the performance of movement: the essence of life itself. The first is that all postural alignment patterns, all muscle use and development, all human body movement is directed and coordinated by the activity of our nervous system, in other words, our thinking. Therefore, in order to change our body shape or our movement patterns we must change our neurological activity. Although most of this neurological activity is habitual and/or non-conscious, changing our exact conscious goals affects this extensive subcortical, unconscious process.

The second principle is that "dis-ease," joint and muscle pain, and limited movement range and vocabulary are all products of imbalance. The human body, being an unstable structure, is constantly in motion, constantly vibrating like a tuning fork around the point of mechanical balance but never settling fixedly upon it. The more closely the body approaches this balancing point, the greater the balance of muscle action around joints. This minimizes the stress on the joints and ligaments and lessens the possibility of chronic pain or injury. If the muscles around the joint are all working in a balanced way, none of them is constantly contracted and none is constantly at rest. Their alternating rhythmical activity serves an important function in pumping blood through the body and maintaining flexibility and strength. 

When there is poor balance so that weight is not transferred through the centers of joints, some

of the muscles must contract continuously to counteract the pull of gravity. This limits our movement range because a constantly contracted muscle is both a fatigued muscle and an inflexible one. Other muscles may be constantly relaxed, resulting in excessively

unstable joints and rapid fatigue when movement is performed.

One condition that seems to be a prerequisite for chronic pain is a habitual imbalance of muscle usage around a particular joint or joints. Some of the muscles crossing a joint are weaker than others, some are stronger. There is a situation of relative weakness but not of absolute weakness. Your own muscles have to counteract each

other in order to cause movement. Furthermore, if weight is habitually never transferred through the center of a joint, some of the muscles that cross the joint are constantly being stretched while

others are more contracted and unable to stretch nearly as much.

There are three kinds of muscle contraction. A muscle can contract and shorten to cause move-

ment at a joint (concentric contraction). This happens in the muscles across the front of the hip joint as you flex to bring your leg up

in front of you. A muscle can contract and neither shorten nor lengthen, as when you are holding your leg up in the air for a while (isometric contraction). A muscle can also contract and lengthen, which is what happens in the muscles across the front of the hip joint as you gradually lower your leg back to the floor (eccentric con-

traction). Practicing one kind of contraction enables you to do more of just that kind, but it doesn't help you with the other two kinds. In

other words, what you practice is what you can do. There is no one all-around exercise that prepares you for everything else.

Determining which abilities an injured muscle lacks or has in excess abundance is not simple. The likelihood of finding a single exercise that performed three times daily will cure us is very very slight. When even a single muscle or ligament is injured, the whole body compensates for its temporary weakness. 

Once the injury is healed, the whole body has to readjust so that the now whole part is not still favored and thereby further weakened by misuse or even non-use. Indeed, there is often a tendency to favor a particular body part before the injury. The injury only reinforces this habit pattern. Once an injured muscle is healed, it is inevitably a little weaker, less flexible, less enduring, and even smaller than the other muscles that were still functioning while it was hurt. For this reason, one cannot immediately go back to making the same demands on it that one made before. One must gradually retrain it in all its functions if one does not want to run the risk of maintaining the idiosyncratic movement patterns of pain. This is, of course, a new training-learning to use the muscle more effectively than before the injury.