The hip bone’s connected to the…

When I first started getting remedial massage treatments, I was getting mostly maintenance treatments to help me move better in the gym, and to help with my power output. But after I got my first injury, the intentions of my treatments changed. All of a sudden, I didn’t care as much about lifting big numbers because my priority became taking my son out of his car seat without my back going into a painful spasm.

I was very lucky to be receiving treatments while I was actually learning about what was going into them. So to me, parts of my thigh being jammed up which then caused my glutes to turn off which then caused my back to take load made sense. But, if I hadn’t learned about how one part of the body affects another, I would have been SO skeptical about someone treating my inner thigh area when I’d walked into a treatment with back pain. I mean, so what if my legs were funky? My BACK is where the problem was! Right?

What we need to remember is that pain is a symptom, not a diagnosis or cause. If you imagine a yacht, it has lines everywhere that are connected to all kinds of moving parts. If you pull one line tight over here, something moves over there. So, let’s say you have a sail stuck at the wrong angle and that one sail is affecting the movement of the boat. Sure, you can walk over to it and try to push it back into place, but chances are you’ll be fighting a losing battle. It’s not the sail itself that’s the problem - it’s just telling you that a problem exists. The best way to fix it in the long term is to untangle the knot in the line that’s keeping it there.

Think of your body like a sailboat. Sometimes untangling that knot takes time and patience. As hard as it can be, if you can try to give yourself the time to become untangled, you won’t find yourself fighting against the wind. And what’s more, understanding that you’ll still need to find something to anchor that line to. This is where it’s so, SO important to do some capacity of resistance and/or mobility training whereby you’re targeting the muscles that have become weak to cause that line to tangle in the first place.

So I’m all out of boating references, but I hope that gives you a little bit of insight as to why treating areas that might seem “irrelevant” to your pain are in fact helping you in the long term.