I can’t tell you how often people come to our clinic because they “threw out their back” and need help. At Delos Therapy, we see many different types of people for many different reasons, but one common thing we see among clients is the sudden onset of pain from a recent event in their lives.
A few days ago, one of my powerlifter clients came to me with this type of sudden body pain and he couldn’t figure out where it came from. He is a mountain of a man who lifts thousands of pounds per workout, who has a recorded squat of over 700 pounds and is a busy medical professional at a hospital. While doing food prep for the week, he was suddenly overtaken by pain in his trapezius muscle down into his deltoid. How is it possible that a man capable of lifting hundreds of pounds could get injured doing a simple chore? Well, as I explained to him, it wasn’t what he was doing at that moment that caused the issue, but rather the accumulation of things he had been doing for a long time that finally caught up to him.
Why Sudden Pain Isn’t So Sudden
Day in and day out, we repeat movements or hold sustained contractions. Whether we are sitting at a desk typing or out being active, our muscles are constantly engaged in repetitive movements and sustained contractions. During these daily movements, our bodies are constantly rebuilding themselves with a continuous buildup of collagen to help us do these repetitive movements as fluently and efficiently as possible. This collagen buildup is being laid down in organized tracks throughout our soft tissue to help facilitate contraction. It is basically designed to enable movement of repetitive actions.
But how does this create pain? Over time, the build-up collagen becomes excessive and begins to restrict muscle fibers until the muscle tissue becomes hardened and stays in a fully contracted state. A muscle should never feel hard. Once it is hard, this is now a relatively permanent change to the tissue, which can create pain. A hardened muscle cannot elongate, thereby creating less range of motion and closing gaps that were once wide enough for muscles and nerves to glide freely within the body.
Another factor that can cause pain has to do with the fascia itself. Fascia is a constantly changing organ in the body that can be just as congested by collagen as the muscles. With 6 to 7 times more sensory nerve endings in fascia than other tissue and a constant rebuilding of the body by fibroblasts, the layers of fascia within, around, or between muscles can adhere to each other. This creates instant pains that were not there a week, a day, or even minutes ago. On top of that, there is also the possibility of dehydration within the fascia. When fluid is removed from the fascia, the collagen bundles that make up the layers of fascia immediately bind together. Over time, this could lead to dry, brittle tissue that will manifest as stiffness in the body.
All of this congestion is created over a period of time. Other contributing factors are the genes that we were born with, the foods that we eat or how active we are. All of these are factors that impact how our body responds and rebuilds itself on a daily basis. The symptoms of pain can therefore occur anytime – they happen once the congestion and the hardening of the muscle tissue and fascia reaches a point where the body begins to notice. In my client’s case, it happened while he was cooking, but it wasn’t the simple act of cooking that caused it.
So what are we to do to prevent sudden body pain? The first thing to do is to understand that it actually isn’t sudden and that it is simply a manifestation of accumulated tightness in the body over some period of time. The second thing to do is find an effective way to break up the collagen buildup causing the tightness.
Breaking Up The Collagen Buildup Causing Tightness
At Delos Therapy, we go into these specific areas of tightness with multi-directional pressure to break apart these adhesions that have built up over time and restore the body to its normal anatomical state. This has to be repeated as a regular part of our lives because the muscles and the fascial system never stops rebuilding themselves. And as we grow older, the layers of collagen continue to build and muscles get weaker due to the binding of muscle fibers which are not allowing them to do their job. Nerves continue to get entrapped, creating pain.
We are constantly finding out more about how our bodies work. At Delos, we educate our clients about the importance of regular muscle maintenance to keep us all from these sudden pains that we always blame on what was going on in the moment. Instead, we must understand that it’s a lifetime of movement or inactivity that is actually causing the problem, way before it’s manifested by sleeping the wrong way or sneezing.
- Intermittent Fasting, Autophagy and Physical Changes In The Body - June 16, 2020
- Why Sudden Body Pain Might Not Be So Sudden - May 7, 2019
- What Jiu-Jitsu and Delos Therapy Have Taught Me About Muscle Health - November 1, 2017