Pain Free Performance — Egoscue Certified

Posture Alignment Therapists, Certified by Egoscue University

hips

BACK PAIN

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If you suffer from back pain – the kind of back pain that can go from 0 to 100 in a flash – you innocently reach for something and your back goes into spasm – or you have chronic never-ending back pain that eats away at your work, your play, your sleep, your relationships and every aspect of your life. At best, your back pain is exhausting and debilitating.

I know, you have a diagnosis, your back pain has a name – you have a bulging disk, a herniated disk, scoliosis, spondylolisthesis, maybe even a spinal fusion. I get it that you feel that you just have to suffer with the back pain that you were dealt.  Maybe you take some meds or get an injection or even contemplate surgery if you really want relief from your back pain.  Not so fast.

What we really need to do is stop the back pain before it begins. How do we do that?  First, we have to ask the question, what is the cause of your bulging disk, herniated disk, scoliosis, or spondylolisthesis?  With rare congenital exception, these are maladies that occur second-hand from misalignment elsewhere in the body.

That’s where we come in. To treat your back pain, we actually need to focus on your muscles, not just the bones in your spine.  The spine consists of 33 individual vertebrae that stack one on top of the other encasing the spinal cord. The muscles surrounding the spine – healthy and functional – are the real work horses helping to maintain the balance and erectness of the body.  It’s amazing.  However, if the muscles become inactive, weak or atrophied, other muscles begin compensating – the integrity of the spine becomes compromised – alignment is lost – your excruciating back pain is just one of the possible results.

As a Postural Alignment Specialist certified by Egoscue University, we can unravel the dysfunctions in your body that are causing your back pain and safely return you to a pain free lifestyle. Check out this video on back pain by Pete Egoscue to show you how we would begin that process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6pTC4JvMjc

The human body is amazing and has a miraculous natural ability to heal. Yes, even your back pain. Let us show you how at Pain Free Performance.

 

 

SCIATICA

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Over the holidays, we’ve had a number of clients come in to the clinic with sciatic pain. This symptom can present in very different ways.  For some, it’s a painful sacro-iliac joint that stays in that one hip area and perhaps into the gluteal muscle.  Others will feel a twinge of pain in the hip and then a pain in the calf of the same leg.  The classic sciatic symptom is pain in the hip and all the way down the back of the leg.  At times, this pain can feel debilitating – if you have had that pain, you know what I mean.   Take a deep breath, there is hope without taking pain relievers or having back surgery.

The sciatic nerve is the main nerve that feeds all the other nerves through your legs. Think of it as the main electrical feed that comes out of your spine at the top of the sacrum goes through the pelvis and down the back of both your legs.  Where that nerve comes out of the spine (on either side) and crosses through the pelvis (either side) there is not a lot of clearance.  This makes it imperative that your pelvis is bilateral and symmetrical and your spine is equally bilateral and centered on top of the pelvis.

Sounds simple, right? Well it is and it isn’t.  The pelvis is 3 bones and they can be off in any of the 3 planes of movement and the spine sitting on top that can be off in those same 3 planes.  What holds all this in the proper position?  Muscles.   Lots of them.  And, they all need to work equally as a team.  In order to work as that team, they need a wide variety of movement.  More and more in our culture and environment, we are getting less movement and less variety of movement.

We think driving to the gym and doing a cross-training work out every day is enough. That is good, but nothing compared to what our bodies really need – we need to run, jump, twist, throw, climb, push and pull.  Ideally, we need to do these things for hours every day.  We are not meant to sit still.

Stand normally in front of a full length mirror and look to see where your feet and knees point. Your feet and knee position will tell you a lot about your hips.  If your knees and feet point straight ahead equally, then your pelvis is in a good position; if one or both of either your feet or knees point in different directions, possibly both halves of your pelvis is out of position.  You can change that with a bit of work and the right exercises to get the muscles working appropriately again.

That is what the Egoscue method is all about. It is what we do at Pain Free Performance.  Call us or come and see us and we can enable you to alleviate your sciatic pain.

Shoulder Pain Connected to Hips

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I have shoulder pain…..Why are you working on my hips???
When a client comes into Pain Free for an Egoscue session, the therapist will look at the position of the bones. We evaluate:
1. head position
2. neck position
3. shoulder position
4. hip position
5. leg position
6. foot position

Why does this matter?
You can have back pain that comes from a misalignment somewhere else in the body. You can have shoulder pain that comes from hips that are misaligned.  You can have neck pain that comes from your back being flexed forward. You can have any number of combinations of imbalances causing pain somewhere else in your body. The point is,  focusing on the area of pain will help treat the symptom but it will not treat the real problem. [Read more…] about Shoulder Pain Connected to Hips