The Pain Cycle
The Pain Cycle is the way people move their body to avoid pain. As people try to protect their injuryʼs, most of the time they make their problem worse. The body adapts to poor posture and poor balance. Therefore the injury is unable to heal properly.
When a person injures an area and is in pain, they try to find the most comfortable position to avoid the pain or at least to decrease the pain. Once they find the most comfortable position to move they adapt to the position or the way of moving around to avoid the pain. People will automatically try to overprotect the injured area, therefore those areas become dependent of only doing certain type of movements, and they automatically become more chronic.
Due to overprotecting the injured areas the muscles become very tight due to no use. The muscle will also weaken as the injured areas are avoided. The way we move our body affects our mechanical function in many ways, for example bad posture or unbalance patterns of motion can cause some ligaments to shorten and others to stretch, as some joints stiffen and others become more unstable.
Because the cycle begins with unbalanced motion from the injury, the body compensates from pain by moving differently. Adapting and compensating is a bad choice, as it worsens posture, balance and increases biomechanical stress.
Over time the bodyʼs poor posture and poor balance motion create the Pain Cycle; resulting in body stress, join degeneration, and chronic pain. Therefore the injury will never heal, instead it will adapt to inappropriate movement. Which will worsen the persons health situation.
Heidy Cervantes
Back In Action Holistic Health Center
