How Does the Body’s Alarm System Keep Us From Healing?

Do you have clients you work on weekly/frequently whose chronic problems don’t resolve?  I have found it’s not possible to force tight muscles to let go when the body’s survival system is saying ‘stay tight’!    One of these challenge spots is the sub-occipital rotator system.  

The body is always trying to follow your orders.  If you established a strong imperative in a time of injury or shock, your survival system will persevere with that strategy, using every ounce of available energy to keep that survival strategy it chose at the time of a threat.  If you succeed in softening a tight tissue using deep tissue or trigger point approaches, it’s likely the body will begin to recreate that strategy as soon as your client is up off the table. 

I posted recently about Achilles Tendonitis and Plantar Fascitis.  The remarks I got showed me that some therapists do not understand the role of the ANS in preserving our current movement and postural strategies.  In that post I mentioned that chronically tight muscles in the back of the body due to hyperactivity of the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) would make it hard for the body to ‘heal’ from inflammatory conditions such as inflamed Achilles and Plantaris tendons.  Inflammatory conditions are the result of heavily using a muscle that is inhibited or weak. The current medical approach of ‘resting’ in order to recover do not resolve the source of the problem. They fail to identify that the muscle is weak or to look for the cause of this problem. 

Sympathetic vs Parasympathetic is a fascinating thing to think about in relation to bodywork techniques. Internal conditions such as fear cause a universal release of adreno-corticoids and cause a predictable set of muscles to fire. They put you 'on your toes' and shorten the back of the neck in a cringe, which puts your neck in front of your body for instance. Your Psoas tightens also. All of these things propel you forward, preparing you for action. Because you are now weighted forward on your feet, your calf muscles and plantar muscles activate also.

Because these patterns of tension/contraction are wired to the stress response, in reverse, chronic tension in posterior chain muscles is wired to the same metabolism and can provoke the same underlying feelings that adrenal corticoids did in the original incident. In the emotional energetic body a vague anxiety, restlessness, inability to meditate, concentrate, digest, breathe in the diaphragm, accelerated heart rate inability to heal are all possible symptomatic effects of chronic tension. The body is all one. External stimuli affects body chemistry and muscle contraction and internal circumstances such as chronic muscle contraction will elicit feelings and thoughts.

There is a great deal of literature on the subject of Parasympathetic / Sympathetic expressions of the ANS. I was first exposed to these concepts through Educational Kinesiology, a world wide movement originated to help kids with learning disabilities, kids who have ADHD for instance, and regular kids whose mental processing is slow due to stress effects keeping them in sympathetic hyperactivity and slowing their learning capacity. An NMR student from Australia sent me a video of a young man he works with who is a ‘toe walker’ and has been on this toes as a preference, all his life. Just the little bit of work we did in class with toning down the SNS had this young man walking flat on both feet. In Educational Kinesiology the remedy to help get kids shifted to a more balanced ANS always involved stretching the extensor line of the body.

I studied Educational Kinesiology 40 plus years ago and have incorporated what I learn into my work with my clients' structural problems. The inclusion of approaches to shift clients toward the Parasympathetic side of the nervous system is part of Mod 1 Intro to NeuroMuscular Reprogramming. Actually it's the clients who must do the work. It includes a few breathing practices, and the incorporation of a couple of simple techniques from Educational Kinesiology which have become very popular with Chiropractors in the last decade as they choose to expand their clientele to work with kids who have mental processing problems. NeuroMuscular Reprogramming NMR® incorporates some of the basics and teaches it at a level that can make a big difference to clients progressing toward their goals of reduced structural pain and improved ROM.

In my intake forms I look for signs that this may be a contributing factor. For some people the hindrance is cognitive and for others it's structural/functional and for others it has evolved into metabolic disturbance disrupting digestion and elimination.  

How do you 'measure sympathetic tone'? I look for common clues that indicate problems with the fundamental coordination system such as the inability to rotate the T/L junction with reciprocal ease in both directions, obsession and pre-occupation with one's problems and the tendency to a fast pace and tension in expression of the components of them, fast blinking of the eyes while performing muscle tests, and cognitive delays in response to instructions just to name a few. 

3 is the Key to Learning

THE BODY LEARNS THROUGH REPETITION.

The first level of learning is getting the message through to the muscles. This involves neurological learning. Neurological learning boosts the brain’s learning facility which is usually knocked out by stressful experience, accident or trauma. When you try something new for the first time, your coordination system doesn’t know how to do it. When you try it again immediately there may be a glimmer of ‘almost’ understanding. It is only on the 3rd try that your coordination system begins to really ‘get it’; and OWN the new movement possibility. Sometimes it takes even longer than 3 repetitions to get it, but 3 is the maximum number of ‘trys’ that should be engaged on the first time around.

REPETITION EXHAUSTS THE NERVOUS SYSTEM.

Unlike the muscles, the nervous system becomes quickly exhausted when pushed too hard to do new activities. It is important to understand and expect that anything you just tried, your body intelligence will continue to integrate even as you sleep. (This has been validated in movement physiology research). When you perform the same activity the next day you may find it much easier.First you have to prepare the body for new learning. This is where NMR starts. Lesson 1: 1st Important Consideration in Corrective Bodywork.  https://vimeo.com/395854829

New NMR Trainings begin January 13 - 15th 2023 in person or Live Streaming via Zoom. Find them at NeuroMuscular-Reprogramming.com/events.