Tag: pain clinic

The Only Gym In San Antonio With…

Posted on by Michael Devon

We’re the only gym in SA to offer a 25 FOOT pulley machine to train the specifics of the human body in motion. This new piece of equipment allows our trainers and their clients to truly test their body’s function!

This pulley machine has a 25 foot cable length and provides resistance for dynamic exercises that mirror walking and running. Plus other aspects of human motion like rotating and throwing. This cutting edge piece of equipment will allow us to continue treating clients with pain, compression, scoliosis, joint restrictions, movement impairments, muscle atrophy, joint replacement rehab, athletic performance, injury prevention, general function, better movement, and more!

Call us today to set up your initial consultation with one of our Human Biomechanics Specialists! 210-947-4597 or safunctionalfitness.com

Pain Is Not Normal

Posted on by Michael Devon

Pain isn’t something to accept with age or with injuries that weren’t properly rehabbed. Pain is your body telling you that something is wrong and ignoring this warning only compounds the problem as times goes on.

Pain will start interfering with your daily life more and more. It can impact your sleep, energy, strength, and function. And when these aspects become affected, other aspects of wellbeing become worse as well.

We’re not the typical “no pain, no gain” kind of gym. Our team works one on one with you to battle against muscle dysfunctions that are causing your pain in the first place. In other words we work to get to the root of your problem, rather than working around it.

What happens when the real world demands more of your body and you can’t “work around it?” Pain and injury manifest! So avoiding a certain function during an exercise because your PT or trainer told you to because it hurts when you do it, is not fixing the root of the problem.

Physical pain stems from the body being out of homeostasis and chaos ensues when your body starts compensating to make up from lack of balance. Muscles start working the wrong way when you move, and when the muscles start malfunctioning they contract at the wrong time, or use the wrong muscle to move your body around the pain or issue that you’re dealing with. These compensations compound over time and lead to pain expanding to other areas of the body or worse, eventually cause an injury.

Think about it, when your ankle starts to hurt, eventually your knee and hip might start to hurt too. The body is an interconnected web of muscle, and that muscle supports your bone alignment and the integrity of your joints. When one muscle is not functioning properly, it’s going to impact other muscles normal function- which has a direct correlation to how well your muscles provide strength, stability, and support for your body.

When you’re dealing with pain in a particular joint or region of the body, that might not be the source of the pain, but rather a symptom from a malfunction elsewhere in the body. If you (or your trainer) look far enough and evaluate deep enough to determine what is the cause of the pain, then you can formulate a game plan and create exercises tailored to your needs, to start fixing the underlying issue.

In other words you don’t have to live with the pain. You can stop compensating around a pain and prevent a new pain from occurring because you’ve been compensating. You can reprogram new function to support your body to eliminate the pain and restore balance.

Remember, pain is not normal. It’s not something to live with, wake up with, or work around, it’s something that has a source and cause. Once we figure out that source, we can engineer a training program to treat the cause, rather than the symptoms. That’s what we do at this gym. (Then once your body is healed from its pain, we start training your muscles how to exercise to keep the pain away for the long term).

We do things differently at this gym, call us to find out more about our approach!

210-947-4597

safunctionalfitness.com

Pain Isn’t Normal

Posted on by Michael Devon

Muscle aches and joint pain aren’t a normal part of exercise. They may be fairly common, but they aren’t normal. Exercise should serve as a form of medicine for the physical body and mitigate knee pain, lower back aches, and inadequate function. If your body is beaten up after exercise and broken down in life outside of the gym, that’s not the purpose of exercise. Exercise is medicine when the exercise respects the way the human body was designed to move.

Exercise should stimulate muscles the way they’re utilized in given scenarios, in the real world. Every time we move, our opposing limbs connect (contralateral reciprocation) so exercise patterns should prioritize this function if you expect to move well in reality. Moving your body up and down under a bar or relying on a machine to stimulate a body part doesn’t replicate the multiplanar movement it encounters in real life. If you expect to live life free of aches and pains, it starts with how well your body can move in real life.

The reason exercise is so important is because it aims to prepare your body for life and if the exercise patterns don’t account for the way the human body was created to function, the body will lose it’s ability to function efficiently. It will start to compensate when it moves, whether that’s 10,000 steps a day from walking, running through the park, throwing the ball with your dog, playing tennis or golf, lifting weights, or any other type of movement that stimulates your muscles. Movement, in general, will start resulting in muscle twinges and joint stiffness, due to the body moving inefficiently. The movements themselves don’t cause the pain or flare ups, but they often get blamed. It’s the result of poor exercise habits, because the body isn’t equipped to handle any sort of 3-demensional movement in the real world since it’s been trained to move under a bar or isolate muscles on a machine in the gym.

When the body begins to compensate during foundational movements, like walking, it will start to move poorly in any given scenario. As the movement becomes more advanced, acute injuries and chronic aches result because the muscles aren’t conditioned to perform in multiple scenarios.  The muscles are stuck in the same repetitious patterns on a leg extension machine or bench press, that the body only learns how to move in that plane of motion, then when it encounters various forces in reality it gets jerked around because the muscles haven’t been taught how to balance the body’s center of gravity against life.

Integrated Fitness

Posted on by Michael Devon

The human body was designed to move as one fully integrated unit. The muscles connect with each other through patterns such as walking, running, and even throwing. When the muscles connect (talk) with each other, the body functions efficiently and compensations during movement are kept to a minimum. Poor movement compensations are the cause for most of the body’s aches and pains, and can be prevented by training the body the way it was designed.

If you want a fish to get better at swimming, you wouldn’t teach it to walk on land. The body of a fish is designed to swim, the same way the human body is designed to walk. Walking is a fundamental movement that every body utilizes at some point in their day. Whether you walk around the neighborhood, to and from your car, in the grocery store, or at the park, your muscles are engaging through reciprocal sequences (opposite limbs connecting) that allow it to propel itself through space. When exercise doesn’t account for reciprocation of body parts and the muscles get trained through isolated movements, it conditions the body to disconnect during basic human movements like walking. When the body is disconnected that’s when movement compensations arise, so every step you take, while you’re walking the dog around the block or walking into the gym, is a step that’s forcing your body out of its natural alignment. If you don’t do anything to remain aligned then every time you move, you’re telling your body that this misalignment is the new normal, and your body gets stuck in this position. In order to regain better alignment, you need to train your body the way it naturally moves, by engaging the myofascial sling system.

The body has a sling system that is interwoven in the myofascial network and those slings are responsible for connecting the upper body with the lower body, the same way they connect when you walk, run, or throw. (Yes your lower body is involved when you play fetch with your dog- if it’s not, then that’s a shoulder injury waiting to happen). The slings connect the right shoulder, through the external and internal obliques, to the left hip, and all the way down the front of that leg. Then around the bottom of the foot, back up the rear of the same leg, to the left glute. From the left glute, up across the spine towards the right lat, which then finishes back where it started, at the right shoulder. Then you have an identical sling connection connecting the left shoulder to the right hip. This is an in depth view of whats typically referred to as the body’s “X.” When you move, force is transmitted through the sling systems and balanced between the two sides so that you move efficiently. All of our muscles are encompassed in these slings so they’re working in harmony to balance out your movement. When muscles are isolated during exercise they stop working in harmony, so now the slings aren’t balanced the way they were designed. It’s like removing the lower left section of the “X,” it’s not going to be able to stand the way it was, instead it’s going to have to lean to one side to find balance. Our body works the same way, when the slings disconnect, you can still move, but you’re going to move with more imbalances.

If left untreated, muscular imbalances cause disturbances in your gait and shifting in your posture that contribute to joint pain and muscle aches. Since the body is no longer working optimally, the joints absorb the forces that the sling systems should be balancing. Imbalances in the sling systems cause some muscles to overwork to pick up the slack of the primary movers, leading to strains in those muscles. For example, if your hamstrings aren’t engaging when you walk, the calf usually picks up the load and since the calf wasn’t designed to handle all the responsibility it gets tired and the muscles in the bottom of your foot start to work by themselves. Hello plantar fasciitis. The same can be said of the lats and pecs not working in unison with the sling systems and being plagued with rotator cuff issues.

If you expect to live a pain free life and move freely, then exercise must account for reciprocal movements that engage the myofascial sling systems through Functional Patterns that mirror real life. Sitting on an exercise bike or a weight machine at the gym is good for your health, but it’s not preparing your body for life outside of the gym to the extent that sling training will. All exercise is better than no exercise, but not all exercise is created equal. Depending on what you want to get out of your time spent working out, evaluate what is going to be the most beneficial for your goals. Do you want to be really good at rowing or cycling for an hour but unable to run to save your life or do normal activities of daily living without experiencing aches or pains? It’s your life, build your body for how you want to live it.