Motion is Lotion: Training Your Brain Out of Pain Patterns
As we get older, our bodies become less resilient. We spend less time in movement. This could be because we have stationary jobs and little free time to engage our bodies. We are limited by injuries and pain, we grow stiff, sore, immobile. Muscle and connective tissue shortens and tightens if we don’t regularly move them through their full range of motion. Exercise, stretching, and the skilled hands of a manual therapist produce physical movement that lubricates joints and soft tissue.
While a typical Swedish relaxation style of massage can be beneficial, I have picked up techniques that challenge and stimulate your body in ways that leave lasting benefits. This includes joint mobilization, engagement, pin and stretching or twisting your tissues into engagement, relaxation, and pain reduction. These movements lubricate joints and soft tissue by stimulating muscle and fascial tissue out of their usual pattern of immobility. This can restore capsular flexibility, enhance joint movement, and encourage pain-free ranges of motion.
Many people avoid activities that they fear will cause their pain to flare up. This progresses into faulty pain perception and nervous system hyperactivity, as the fear centers of our brains begin to respond to the threat of the possibility of pain. Pain can persist beyond an objective threat to the body, because chronic pain can cause our brains to respond to the memory of pain, rather than the actuality of it. The brain generates pain from a network of neurons and structures, and it will do what needs to be done to “protect” you from feeling it. Feelings can be involved in our pain. Frustration, anger, grief, stress, and fear of pain or disease can increase pain experience with or without an actual injury.
Passive movement techniques I listed above (joint mobilization, engagement, pinning and stretching or twisting your tissues into engagement) allow you, the client, to remain in a relaxed state. Your brain focuses on the new stimuli of passive movement that I, the therapist, engage your body in. This allows your body to move past painful movement barriers in a safe way. If the pain or restricted movement is based on a muscular issue, passive movement will not hurt. The muscle, in passive movement, is relaxed and not active, which bypasses the pain and muscle guarding response.
It’s an option to try! What’s important is to find methods that work for you. A skilled manual therapist will have multiple techniques to bring to work with you to decrease and manage your pain. Communicate with your therapist or seek out a more specialized form of therapy to try if you find yourself wondering what’s out there. It is completely valid to have a relaxing massage, but a therapeutic style (myofascial release, medical massage, neuromuscular massage, stretching, sports) is available if you find yourself wanting to see progress in pain management.
Best of luck on your journey to feeling better!
