Modern Roots of Musculoskeletal Pain
Let’s go right back to the basics!
Watch the video to hear Jessi and Squeaks explain what happens when we decide to move. Understanding this is the first step to comprehending the cause of your pain (even though it's a kid's video, it's worth the watch).
It's crucial to understand that the body maintains balance. Every muscle has the ability to act as an agonist and antagonist, meaning that when one muscle contracts, its opposite relaxes, and vice versa. Complex systems of muscles and joints work together to maintain functional balance and accomplish our daily tasks. This makes the human body a dynamic and versatile machine, capable of moving in many ways to achieve different tasks, whether for work or leisure.
These complex systems make the human body highly adaptable to different environments and situations. Throughout history, we have evolved to cope with the demands of our specific environment. We can walk upright on two feet, run, jump, throw, climb, swim, multitask, and operate complex tools. However, not all modern tasks are best suited to our evolved anatomy.
Our current physical form is the result of generational adaptations to make us as efficient as possible at completing our most common tasks. We can make temporary physical adaptations, called "soft" epigenetic adaptations, and "hard" genetic adaptations. These soft and hard genetic layers interact to create your ultimate genetic expressions, which determine how you look, feel and perform in different situations. Soft adaptations can be made over a relatively short time compared to hard adaptations. Hard genetic adaptations passed through humans can take longer to surface than other animals, such as rats, which reproduce quicker and, as a result, evolve their hard genetic makeup at a faster rate.
Considering our evolutionary timeline and how long we have spent in each phase, we have spent a significant part of it living in the wild as packs of hunter-gatherers. We would use manual tools for hunting, building, cooking, and cleaning and mostly rely on our bodies as our primary mode of transport. This means that over hundreds of years, our bodies have had time to become highly efficient at performing those tasks, and the better we adapt to them, the higher our chances of survival. Given our human knack for creativity, we have also managed to continually find ways of completing our tasks more efficiently.
As our survival is no longer as dependent on how many physical tasks we can perform daily, some of our generational adaptations may no longer be as useful as they once were. The innovations are endless: electric bikes, self-driving cars, fast food delivery, working from home, etc., and they all make demands on our bodies less strenuous. Our cultural and technological environment is also evolving at an unprecedented pace, with paradigm shifts to our lifestyles that may have taken several generations to emerge in the past now being presented to us more frequently, urging us to adapt.
So, after sitting or slouching for most of the day, it's time to stand up and move, but your body isn't as practiced at this as it used to be. For example, when your body needs to use the quadricep muscle to balance the hamstring when walking, it may not be able to do it as well as it should, causing an imbalance. But you need to walk. This is when your body decides to use other muscles to support the movement, muscles that aren't designed to balance the hamstring. Then those muscles put other muscles out of their usual use (as everything is connected), leading to an unbalanced movement pattern.
Unbalanced movement patterns are problematic, especially as they don't align with how your skeleton has been designed. Movement creates dynamic forces through the body, and your muscles are designed to support your bones and joints under those loads. When there are imbalances, those areas of imbalance are where forces will aggregate. Complex areas such as your shoulders, hips, and ankles often struggle under these unbalanced loads. Like a house built on weak foundations, something may eventually give, and you will begin to feel pain or injury.
Thankfully, our bodies can also make faster adaptations based on how we choose to use them. This can look like an increase in muscle size, shape, or tone or feel like an increase in strength and decreasing recovery time—all of which can help us overcome these modern obstacles and live pain-free. However, unlike hard genetic adaptations, which can hold firm, maintaining our physical integrity is more like maintaining a sandcastle—it takes continual effort.
The solution? It's simple: Get moving again! Try to make lifestyle choices that incorporate mindful and goal-oriented movement into your weekly routine, and you will quickly see the benefits—not just physically but also mentally. It's very much a case of use it or lose it. Maintaining a pain-free body is a worthy investment as the rewards can last a lifetime.