What’s up everybody! Patrick Lerouge here with Evolve Restorative Therapy. You can you find me at livepainfreeprocess.com. I’m a restorative therapist that helps people that need to live an active life, eliminate pain for the long-term using self-care techniques. Today what we are going to be talking about is: You will never eliminate a pain in your body by working on just one area.

There are many reasons for this. The body is hard-wired to adjust and adapt to whatever you need. So if it complained about every little thing to you, you would never accomplish those hard feats that deal with fear, such as climbing a mountain or running a marathon. Your body would stop you from doing it. It does a very good job at stopping you if it doesn’t want to do it. However, if you run and hurt your leg, it won’t necessarily show you that it’s hurt, if it doesn’t view it as necessary. So what does that mean? When you are in “fight or flight” the body is designed to not give you certain sensations so you can ‘fly’ away from the situation. We are in a society that is always stuck in “fight or flight” where we have to fight our way out of it. This is because are stressors are everywhere so our mechanism is consistently taxed. So we are not feeling anything. Additionally, the body has many different adaptive ways of working. If you are hurt in one area, it might not say anything but it will make another area compensate. You can’t do just one thing. You have to do multiple things to restructure the compensation pattern. For example, if your knee is hurting, you will never clean it up by focusing on just that hip. You have to work on the hip along with other areas to get the hip to work. We aren’t feeling anything we need to feel in the first place, and it’s compensating on top of that. That means you will never know what’s wrong with you, when something is wrong. I’m going to show you one of the many reasons why the body has different methods of compensation.

The body has what are called fascial trains, which are composed of fascial lines that run from your toes to your head. One of the trains called your spiral, runs through your left knee and hip and up to the right shoulder. So if you have a hip issue, the fascial line will start to bunch up in that area. Consequently, it will start pulling on the fascia from the knee. This means your hip pain could be giving you a knee issue or vice versa. Yet since it forms a spiral, it could also be giving you problems in your opposite shoulder. Unless you clean up the hip, knee, and opposite shoulder, you’re never going to effective clean up your body because you don’t recognize your shoulder is hurt. If you keep doing foam rolling on your hip and your knee starts to get better but your hip is still hurting, that means you aren’t hitting all the spots. If you keep doing things over again, and you are not getting cleaned up, you aren’t hitting the right core trigger. Your core trigger might not be your hip at all and instead, the opposite shoulder. So the better the shoulder moves, the better your hip moves. This causes better blood flow and indirectly more effective healing.

Now when you think about movement, where are you being stopped at? Is just that hip? 85% of the time the answer is always ‘no’. It is always someplace else. I understand there are time constraints and you have to do stretches real quick, but this is something that needs to be planned. You have to do your restorative work consistently. Once you do that, you are no longer just working on one area, you are doing different areas in different days of the week. So now you are clearing many areas of the body all the time. This is where you start to get efficient. Now the body has different ranges-of-motion and different ways of constructing compensation patterns. That’s the way you want to start addressing your body. It will never pin-point the problem. You are going to have to explore and see how your body responds and talks to you. You have to do something and see how it affects the whole. This is when you can start finding your problem or your skeleton key. You will start finding different things that unlock other areas.

You will never get it on the first shot. It just won’t happen because the body is designed to not tell you everything. It’s designed to do so, so stop trying to find the one thing. The majority of the time, you are going to need someone’s help to find it. The body knows what it’s doing, so let it do what it’s doing. Until next time. Bye!