The body compensates or works around a (neurological) weakness as a form of protection from injury or instability. The body avoids positions of weakness and favors positions of strength as a safeguard. The body’s goal is to protect, conserve and heal and if it can’t heal, it will continue to protect in as many ways as possible for as long as possible. When a person squats and their knee dives in, there must be a muscular weakness/inhibition that they are avoiding, and as a result, the body is favoring a position of strength and taking a “detour” around the position(s) of weakness.

How do muscles become neurologically weak in the first place? Stress, trauma and overuse shut down the connection between the brain and muscle rendering muscle contraction less efficient and effective or completely absent. This connection is necessary for proper muscle function. Net effect: your muscles won’t contract when you need them to or may not contract at all. This makes you vulnerable to injury because you are more unstable. This may not seem like a big deal but wait until one weakness stacks on to another and the entire functioning of your body is affected because your body is compensating around a singular dysfunction.

How can we function if this is the case? The reason we get around so well is that our nervous systems find ways to work around the weaknesses. Like a road closure that makes you take the long way around, the ‘detour’ your body takes to avoid the weakness isn’t as efficient, may look odd and could even be causing imbalances at your joints. Over time joints can easily get worn out when muscles aren’t doing their job to support and protect them and even render activity painful. Compensation is a work-around that is necessary until we activate those weak links and get back to our proper biomechanical functioning.

Once we get muscle function back, your joints are more balanced taking the stress off of them and for most, decreasing pain and stiffness and increasing motion. Post treatment mostly everyone reports feeling different when they walk. They have also observed feeling looser, more agile and the complaint they came in with typically changes in quality and severity and this progresses over subsequent treatments. The way your body feels improves gradually over the course of treatments and you begin to feel relief. Many clients haven’t returned because the problem they came in with is gone.

The major flaw with Western Ideology is that if you feel pain in a specific area, than that is the area that needs to be targeted. Knee, Hip, and Shoulder replacements that are generally not even necessary in the first part. Compensation generally always occurs above or below a joint. Lets take knee pain for starters. If you lack Ankle mobility, than it will increase the pressure on the knee sometimes causing it to hyperextend to compensate for the lack of mobility. If you notice your feet point out to the sides when you walk, you generally feel some pressure/mild irritation on the outside of your knees. This is generally caused by a dominance effect in your Adductor/Abductor. Where as Shoulder impingement issues can be caused as a result of tight Lats that inhibit the Range of Motion in the shoulders.

I will be posting further posts on how to spot Muscular/Neurological compensation and also ways to fix them. Ways that have worked perfectly well with my clients.

TheeVoodooMaster