3. Range of Motion

Alright, so we’ve covered Hydration and Breath Control. If you’re unfamiliar with what I’m talking about, please review those posts. This is a step by step process I’m covering on Rituals of Preventive Maintenance. Keep up.

Range of Motion is a term used to describe the span of distance that a body part can travel pretty easily. There’s Passive ROM and there’s Active ROM.

Passive ROM is somebody moving your arm overhead.

Active ROM is moving your arm overhead yourself. Easy enough.

There’s also Functional ROM and its antithesis. This is the Range of Motion that you can move a joint through without pain or physical impediment. What kind of physical impediment to movement might there be?

Well, restricted and shortened fascia is often referred to as “tightness” and is LARGELY responsible for people’s inflexibility. Grouped into the category of tight fascia would be short ligaments, like the ligaments in someone’s knee after replacement surgery.

Bone spurs also create a hard stop in a joint’s Range of Motion depending on where the spur is located.

Pain can induce a severe spasm of a muscle and limit the function of movement in a muscle group, which also definitely creates a hard stop with an attached “pain-wall”, as in the case of Frozen Shoulder. Anyone who’s had it would rather have a “pay-wall” instead where they could bribe the condition to quit.

Have you ever had a moment where your shoulder is in an absurd amount of pain for seemingly no reason? Where it becomes very hard to use and exercise its range of motion? Where the shoulder’s ROM becomes limited because of its “pain-wall”? Here’s where we put into practice what we learned from the previous two blog posts.

Let’s run with this example: You’re a side sleeper, you wake up one morning and your left shoulder won’t allow you to move it without a ton of pain. Thank God it’s only one shoulder and not both! You also recognize that you have a hard time turning your neck away from that same shoulder. What do you do? You’ve gotta drive to work and check your blind spot with every lane change, and you’ve only got 90 minutes before you need to have your butt in the doorway to your workplace/ meeting room/ home showing/ presentation!

These are the questions you ask yourself if you speak the “language of the body”:

Question 1 - How much water did I have the day before and what am I doing to hydrate right now?

Question 2 - When I move my neck and shoulder, am I holding my breath and wincing with every excruciating shift? Or am I being patient with my movement and deliberate with the flow and rhythm of my inhales and exhales while I do what I can to take my shower, drink my 1 liter of morning tea (hint hint), put on my shirt, and kiss my babies (fur babies and plant babies count) goodbye for the day?

Question 3 - What’s my ROM when I’m well and painless, and what’s my ROM now? Shoulder check, neck check. Rotate left and right, lift up and down. What are my painless angles of travel? Are they the same from side to side?

Once you gather your data after testing your ROM, You can then devise a plan to therapy the muscles back into proper behavior.

Here’s my plan every time, and it works for long-term recovery. By practicing to slowly lean into the end range of motion where the pain begins to kick in and breathing through that experience, holding the painful position with every inhale and gently stretching with every exhale, you can eventually coerce your muscles to improve their cooperation and decrease their pain. It takes a LOT of breathing and a lot of patience, especially on days one two and three, but a lot of progress can be accomplished in a day/ week/ month to recover from the spasm that your muscles experienced as you woke up that fateful morning.

(I have personal experience with this scenario more than once, so I have reason to believe it is common and you’ve probably experienced it too in one way or another. Could be a low back spasm where the back just “gives out” or “tweaks”. Maybe a situation when the knee had a stabbing lightning bolt of love and made you take a bow at random.)

Now, when I say move slowly, I mean stupid slow. Like an ancient underwater astronaut turtle-sloth kind of slow. If you experience muscle pain and you don’t move slowly being disciplined with a very controlled manner in your movement AND breath, your body will win the ROM battle every time and punish you with more painful lashings and an even tighter grip on the already isometrically “stuck” muscles. It can be ruthless, and you’re on the losing end of a primal battle to the death.

Think of it this way. Your body behaves like an animal. Novel thought. When an animal is injured, what’s the right way to approach it to take care of it? Slowly, with caution and good intentions, respecting the animal’s boundaries while gently stretching them, and with lots of treats, right? Not just bolting toward it to rush in and tend to its injury, or even worse taking the animal on a run, ignoring the injury altogether, while relentlessly yanking on its leash demanding that it “keep up the pace.” Use the same thought process with injured body parts. Every muscle is its own animal and must be treated as such. Did I mention patience by chance? It’s literally a battle between your sentient self of however many years young you are and your eons of biological wiring.

Also know, this is not a forever sentence. You have to take things slowly for a spell, whether that be a week or a month, but with deliberate and intentional practice with every painful pang, you will sense that progress is being made as you learn to speak the language of your body. It takes time to build fluency and command over the body, but it’s worth it.

The benefit of using this knowledge to your advantage is that if you ever have a muscle cramp or spasm, or if your body just isn’t cooperating with you and you are experiencing pain from it, you can actually begin teaching your body how to behave so that it stops working against you. It requires a compassionate mind frame to accomplish this effect. If you see your body as your favorite animal (and assuming that you love animals), you will naturally begin behaving with your body in such a way that produces this desire for it to work with you instead of against you.

Here’s the action step in case you missed it, just copied and pasted from above:

”By practicing to slowly lean into the end range of motion where the pain kicks in and breathing through that experience, holding the painful position with every inhale and gently stretching with every exhale, you can eventually coerce your muscles to improve their cooperation and decrease their pain.” There’s always pain BEFORE there’s harm if your nerves are working properly. Learn to recognize which is which, and learn to listen to your body continuously, respecting its boundaries while also lovingly stretching them.

LOVE TO ALL!

You’re favorite LMT,