Category: hip pain

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Managing Ageing Successfully Means Continuing to Mature Well

Somatic Education Exercises for Aging Exceptionally Well

by Lawrence Gold

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Certified Hanna somatic educator

Hawaii
Popular belief holds that the pains and stiffness of aging are inevitable and to be expected: that aging results from time passing. “You’re just getting older,” your doctor and your family say, and there the conversation usually stops.

The thinking is that your parts are wearing out, and that they’re supposed to. It’s how people think of the human body — as a “marvelous machine.”

Don’t buy it. There’s more to it than the passage of time and the human body is more than a marvelous machine. You are more than a marvelous machine, aren’t you?

While certain aspects of aging are linked to our genetic destiny, other changes have nothing to do with our genetic destiny, but with how injuries and stress leave their marks upon us as changes of movement-memory, of muscular tension, and of posture. Those changes are, in most cases, within our power to to reverse, normalize, and improve to superior levels.

Is there a hidden and larger significance to the observation that active people age better than relatively inactive people? There is. (It goes along with the saying, “Retirement is the waiting room for death.”)

There exists a seemingly innocent condition that underlies much of the pain and stiffness attributed to aging: accumulated muscular tension. Accumulated muscular tension underlies the joint compression and breakdown diagnosed as osteoarthritis.

Accumulated muscular tension often goes unnoticed because it builds so gradually that we get used to it, because we don’t recognize the significance of poor posture, and because medical practitioners are not trained to recognize its larger significance — other than at the sites of pain or grossly restricted movement. Desensitized as we are to our own condition, muscular tension accumulates and so do the consequences: being off balance and prone to falls, feeling tired all the time, depressed mood, and the appearance of chronic ailments. Accumulated muscular tension is a drain, an inconvenience, a degradation of life, and ultimately, a hazard.

By dispelling accumulated muscular tension and preventing tension from accumulating, you can prevent your joints from degenerating, improve your movement and balance, and feel more energetic; you can reclaim much of your flexibility. You can forego the cane, get off the walker, or avoid the wheelchair.

It takes more than massage. It takes self-grooming of a particular kind — the kind that removes the lingering effects of injuries (the limp), purges the stresses of life (the stoop or bad back), and liberates you from the ten thousand shocks flesh is heir to (pain).

This entry talks exactly about that form of self-grooming (it’s not strengthening, stretching, or cardiovascular exercise, not diet — but something rather more direct and immediately effective). Because it’s new, you’ll learn something, here.

THE OBVIOUS SIGN OF APPROACHING DECREPITUDE

Here’s a leading question: How can you tell an “aged” person at a distance? It’s by their posture and movement, isn’t it? Our posture goes into our habitual way of moving.

Much has been attributed to osteoporosis and osteopenia — loss of bone density — as causing changes of posture. While true to some degree, it’s largely a “red herring”; muscular tensions cause much more postural change than does osteoporosis. Muscle tension shapes our posture, limits our flexibility, and affects our comfort. The posture of aging reveals accumulated muscular tensions that you may have carried for years, largely without knowing it.Does this seem all too obvious? Then why don’t most people do something about it? Why do so many people resign themselves to the cane, the walker, the wheelchair?

Maybe, it’s because the usual methods of muscular conditioning and therapy don’t work very well; maybe it’s because people get so tight and stay so tight that their joints break down. Have yours?

SOURCES OF PAIN AND STIFFNESS

When muscles get tight and stay tight, they cease to be elastic; they restrict movement. That sense of restriction is what people confuse with stiff joints and call “stiff muscles”. (Muscles can’t get stiff; they can only tense or relax.)Muscles held tight for more than a few seconds get sore and prone to spasm (cramp) — the proverbial “burn” of exercise that athletic trainers say to go for. It’s muscle fatigue, nothing more glamorous than that. It’s the product of tight muscles, an unhealthy sign, when it persists.

Muscles held tight days, weeks, and years compress the joints they pass across; joint pain, breakdown, inflammation and dissolution follow. The name for cartilage breakdown and inflammation is, arthritis (literally translated from Latin: “inflammation of a joint”). Even if there were a genetic origin to arthritis, it would be in addition to this compression process, which causes joint breakdown all by itself.

The combination of muscle fatigue (soreness) and joint compression create much of the chronic pain and stiffness of aging.

“Sore to the Touch”

Most people are sore to the touch in one place or another — not because they are “old”, but because they are tight, and their muscles, fatigued.The problem exists, however, not in the muscles themselves, but in the brain that controls them. The problem is one of “muscle/movement memory”, which controls movement, tension level, and posture.

The reason why skeletal adjustments, massage and stretching so often provide only temporary relief is that muscle/movement memory runs the show. You may temporarily force muscles to relax with massage or a quick stretch, but of muscle/movement memory is set to a high tension level, we get tense, again, in short order — whether hours or days.

Forming Tension Habits

People go through a lifetime doing either one of two things: tensing or relaxing.Think back to a time in your life when you were in a stressful situation — one that you knew might last a while or that lasted longer than you expected. Notice how you feel when thinking about it. Do you tense or relax, thinking about it? How were you, then?

Did you manage your tension or ignore it? Did you turn your attention to “more important things”? Did you get used to your tension? If so, you probably lost some of your ability to relax (in the muscular sense, as well as the emotional sense). Over your lifetime, did you get more flexible, or more stiff? Sudden onset of stiffness or an episode of pain is how you know it’s muscle/movement memory. Joints don’t change that quickly.

Another way tension habits form is through physical injury. It’s not the injury, but the reaction to it, that triggers tension habits. When we get hurt, we guard the injured part by cringing — pulling out of action. Many injuries make such an impression upon us that we continue the cringe for decades, automatically and without awareness. We may not notice low-level cringing, but as tension accumulates, a low-level cringe often becomes a high-level of contraction that at last surfaces as a mysterious episode of pain — the cause having occurred years ago.

Even physical fitness programs can lead to chronic tension. Many kinds of fitness training emphasize strength and firming (tightening) up. Rarely do they teach a person to relax. More often, they teach a person to stretch and “warm up”, which is not the same as teaching relaxation. So many fitness programs (or at least the way some people do them) cause them to form tension habits.

Thus form tension habits that lead to chronic pain, stiffness, inflammation and joint damage. Even without arthritis, accumulated tension adds drag to movement. The combination of drag and pain drains us and makes us feel tired all the time, “old”.

It’s not age; it’s pain and fatigue. Seem familiar?

So, it’s not so much our years as the tension that accumulates over the years that causes the pain and stiffness of aging and the loss of the agility of youth.

BACK TO EASIER MOVEMENT

The pain and stiffness of aging start out as temporary tensions that become learned habits. Those habits can be unlearned, pain dispelled, comfort restored, stiffness softened, mobility improved.

The odd thing is that our tension often seems to be “happening to us” — rather than something we are doing. Much of it exists below our “threshold of consciousness”. We’re “used to it”; we don’t notice it.

“Somatic education exercises” effectively soften the grip of tension — not merely temporarily, but cumulatively, progressively, durably.

The word, “somatic”, refers to your sense of yourself, as you are to yourself. It means “self-sensing, self-activating and self-relaxing” — the way you sense and control chewing.

Somatic education exercises are an entirely different class of exercises from strengthening exercises or stretching exercises (whether athletic stretches or yoga). They have a quality to them akin to yawning. By instilling healthier patterns of muscle/movement memory, they improve posture, flexibility, and coordination. Tension eases and pains disappear. They make movement without pain possible, again.

Healthy aging is more likely if you eliminate the causes of aging you can control. Age management involves more than drugs for blood pressure, crossword puzzles for your brain, cardiovascular exercise for your heart, weed which you can buy weed online in Canada if you live there, or stretches for your muscles; it involves grooming yourself of the accumulated effects of injuries and stress — not merely psychologically, but physically. A healthy diet, a rich social life, and pursuing our interests are important aspects of successful aging. So are somatic education exercises — without which, you now know the probable consequences.

R E S O U R C E S
You are invited to take a free preview
of the somatic education exercise program, The Cat Stretch Exercises
The Myth of Aging series.
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Regrow Cartilage

QUESTION from a reader who asks how to regrow/repair cartilage:
“Hi Lawrence. Do you have any information of how to 1) repair or regrow cartilage in the joints, hips specifically, and 2) how to eliminate bone spurs? I’m having great progress with somatics to improve posture and reduce tension and muscle pain, but I still get a sense of a deeper soreness and also grinding in the joint which feels like it could be from the cartilage wear and spurring that was detected in my joints. Any advice on this? Is it indeed possible? 😉 Thanks!”

ANSWER:
To regrow cartilage, you need some cartilage in the joint; the remaining cartilage is the “seed” for regrowth.  Then, you need to remove overcompression by freeing the surrounding musculature

If there’s no cartilage left, I don’t know.

Sometimes, muscular soreness near a joint is mistaken as joint pain. In that case, there’s no need to regrow cartilage.

For hip joints, the muscles involved are the gluteals (see The Cat Stretch Exercises, with a modification of Lessons 1 and 5 for the gluteus medius muscles) and Lesson 3, the adductors, hip joint flexors and psoas muscles (Free Your Psoas), and the deep adductors (obturators)(The Magic of Somatics).

With the pressure removed, cartilage can regrow (slowly). I don’t know the value of chondroitin sulphate for growing cartilage, except that when muscular tension around the joint is high, it’s impossible to regrow cartilage.

As to bone spurs (osteophytes), same thing. Bone spurs grow along the line of pull of chronically tight muscles, at their tendonous attachments.

So, bone spurs and cartilage loss come from the same cause:  muscles held tight over a long period.  Bone spurs can dissolve, and cartilage can regrow, when the cause is removed.

Please also see, “Completing Your Recovery from an Injury”.

in your service,
Lawrence Gold

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Somatic Exercise Cycles — The Power of Integration

Somatic exercise cycles are sequences of somatic exercises done repeatedly to accomplish a purpose.

Somatic exercises are methodically-done movement patterns that work with so-called “muscle memory” (actually, better stated as “movement memory”) to dissolve habitual patterns of movement memory (implanted by trauma and stress, such as pain and stiffness associated with aging) and to replace them with healthier, more variable and free patterns of movement memory.

Now, if you’ve got that paragraph under your belt,
we may continue . . . . .

If not, better go back and get it, as everything that follows builds upon it.

There.

Now, each somatic exercise works with a single movement pattern — examples being inhalation, exhalation, backward bending, forward bending, twisting, etc.

In life and movement, at least two movement patterns are always involved with any action.  Every bending movement must have its opposite straightening movement; every twisting, its untwisting.  Without its opposite, we are stuck.  Imagine going through life bent over and twisted.  Know somebody like that?

That’s a small clue to the use of somatic exercises to undo unhealthy stuck patterns of movement.  (What makes them unhealthy is the excessive muscular tension and lack of suppleness that’s involved — leading to nerve impingement, joint degeneration, chronic pain.)  Movement patterns assemble into patterns of coordination.

Hence, the array of somatic exercises found in Thomas Hanna’s “Myth of Aging” series and in my own “special purpose” somatic exercise programs.  They fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to constitute patterns of coordination for activity in daily life.

Somatic exercises work two ways:

  1. to undo the habituation we might have in a posture or movement pattern
  2. to develop healthier patterns of posture and better control of movement — generally free-er and better-functioning

To do so, somatic exercises awaken awareness of how we are habituated/stuck and develop voluntary control of those habituated patterns (generally, simultaneously) so that we can either do habitual movements more freely or move differently, freely and at-will.

So far, so good.  Still with me?

OK.

Now, just as visual depth perception requires two viewpoints (left eye and right eye), and just as visual depth perception gives us more and different visual information than sight through one eye, more than one somatic exercise can address a habituated/stuck movement pattern or posture, and when more than one is used, we get a kind of kinesthetic depth perception that gives us both more sensory information and more control than we can get by one somatic exercise, alone.

Here’s where somatic exercise cycles come into play.

There exists a way of using more than one (and more than two) somatic exercises to address especially stuck conditions or to get larger changes faster with not-so-stuck conditions.

The steps are these:

  1. Identify two or more related somatic exercises that either belong to the same larger coordination pattern or that address the same muscle groups in different ways.
  2. Practice each exercise until well-internalized (remembered and fruitful in producing its specifically-intended change.  (rule of thumb:  seven cycles or until “milked for all it’s worth”)
  3. Cycle through the identified exercises, one after the other.

I’ll give you some examples of related somatic exercises that can be assembled in this way.

RELATED BY LARGER COORDINATION PATTERN

example:  Lesson 1 of The Myth of Aging series
Landau Reaction is a movement/action pattern involved in sitting, standing, and walking.  It involves the backs of the shoulders, spinal erector muscles, buttocks, and hamstrings.  Its purpose is to bring the person erect through the action of backward extension.

Lesson 1 of this series, therefore, involves movement elements for each of these places, first done individually, then assembled into a single, larger pattern.

This exercise, when followed by Lesson 2 of The Myth of Aging series (which addresses the movement of curling forward), constitutes a “unit of movement” — straightening and bending.

That understood, I can now identify four entire somatic exercise lessons that, when learned and then put into a cycle, get more done than any one of the exercises can, by itself:

  1. Lesson 1 of The Myth of Aging series
  2. Somatic Exercise for Hip Joint Pain (posterior)
  3. Free Your Hamstrings
  4. The Athletes’ Prayer for Loose Calves

Each of these exercises gets something done that is not done well by the others; each addresses an element of Landau Reaction; each provides its piece of the “jigsaw puzzle”.  I’ve noted four movements; you could do three or two, but more movements provide higher integration.

The proper approach is to learn each of these exercises well and to get the result of each, then to cycle through them, (1.) – (4.), repeatedly.

Of course, other sequences of exercises, related by function, exist.

In the program, Free Your Psoas, the first exercise, “Locating the Center of Breathing”, produces system-wide changes in the direction of greater freedom.  The second exercise, “Slide and Turn”, disarms muscular restrictions that force legs into a knee-out or knee-in twist that would interfere with the third exercise, Walking into the Floor, which requires that freedom (and awakening of sensory awareness) to reach the psoas muscles.  The exercises that follow integrate the freedom resulting from the earlier exercises into a well-coordinated pattern.

So, I’ve just outlined two different approaches to using more than one somatic exercise to accomplish a single purpose.

RELATED BY THE SAME MUSCLE GROUP BEING INVOLVED
There exist situations where the trauma of an injury is so great that a person contracts (involuntarily) a single muscle or muscle group so strongly (with the physiological intention to immobilize), and in entanglement with other muscular actions that no one somatic exercise is sufficient to disarm the situation.

Here’s where two or more somatic exercises that address the involved region can get the job done.  It’s a little like having more than one person reassure you that “everything is all right”, vs. having just one person reassure you.

example:  The Gluteus Medius Muscles
A condition of having your leg yanked in an accident (such as falling off a horse with your foot caught in the stirrup and being dragged for a quarter mile) provides a protective response of holding on to your leg for dear life.  You prefer to keep your leg attached.  So you (reflexively) contract all of the muscles around your hip joint.

Well and good.  You’ve kept your leg; but you’ve lost freedom, as now those muscles are painfully contracted all the time.

It’s not about any one muscle, but about an action involving muscle pulls from many directions, at once, but all summating/adding together to hold onto your leg.

The glueus medius muscles have several movement functions:

  1. providing stability during walking or running, as the pelvis turns from side-to-side (i.e., active external rotation of the thigh in the hip joint)
  2. movement of the leg backward (extension)
  3. pulling your hip bone and thigh together (hipbone/iliac crest down) in an action that lifts the opposite hip, in walking
  4. (Note that although these muscles can abduct (move sideways) the leg, that’s not their typical function.)

In the situation described, no one somatic exercise addresses all these movements.  However, a combination of exercises can address these movements.

A corresponding combination might be:

  1. Lesson 4 of the Myth of Aging series
  2. Somatic Exercise for Hip Joint Pain (posterior)
  3. Lesson 8 of the Myth of Aging series

You first learn each of these exercises well (memory plus results); then cycle through them repeatedly — according to your energy level, result obtained, and interest.

So that outlines the principles and practices of cycling through somatic exercises.

MORE:
Muscle Memory Isn’t Muscle Memory
An Entirely New Class of Therapeutic Exercises
All Somatic Exercise Programs | Free Your Psoas | Free Yourself from Back Pain

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