Are Your Muscles Balanced When You Are Working Out?
4 Kinds of Muscle Imbalances and How to Correct Them
With the new year, as people are getting back to their fitness routines or starting new ones, often what sabotages best-laid plans is pain or injuries caused by muscle imbalances when working out. As you get active, previous imbalances are exaggerated by the exercise. Supportive tissues are pulled, bent, compressed, and stretched by the uneven pressure. It happens more and more over weeks, months, years, and decades. It may happen even with regular daily activities like walking or sitting at a desk. It can be further expedited with the repetitive movement of cardio, or heavy lifting with strength training.
I’ll go over the Basic Anatomy of Imbalance, some of the most common kinds of imbalances, how to know if you have them, and how to address them if you do.
Neurological Imbalances
Strength Imbalances
Left-Right Imbalances
Front-Back Imbalances
First, let’s start with a really simple lesson in the anatomy: What is the purpose of muscles? Put simply, when it comes to moving your body, your muscles and bones are like pulleys and levers. Muscles move bones. More generally, some muscles stabilize in one area, while others engage movement in another area. Have you ever thought about this? While a certain muscle engages, what does the opposite muscle do? Well, it relaxes of course! All this is happening all the time without you even thinking about it.
But what coordinates all those functions? It is the nervous system! The muscles don’t engage on their own. It is nerves that tell muscles to contract or not contract, and how much, and which muscles at what times. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it. But sometimes there is interference in that nervous system caused by physical, chemical, or emotional stressors or traumas. That is why the first of the four types of imbalances is neurological imbalances.
Neurological Imbalances
This is the root of a majority of imbalances, and therefore almost more of an umbrella to the other three types. Patterns become hardwired into the nervous system because of a repetitive pattern, an injury, or a compensation for an injury. Over time, even if the activity or injury is no longer there, the pattern perpetuates because your nervous system has learned this new pattern. This is one reason why the approach I use works directly at the root with the nervous system, rather than working directly with the muscle or the bone further down the chain.
Strength Imbalances
Imagine you were doing a bicep curl only on your left arm all day long. If I looked at you, I would expect to see that your left arm has become more developed than your left. This is much more rare but it happens sometimes. Often when I see it, it is caused by an underlying neurological imbalance. For example, in people who lift heavy weights, I often see the muscles in their lumbar spine area are unevenly developed. This obviously isn’t because they were trying to work one part more than the other.
Unfortunately, it is very common for an imbalance like this to be diagnosed then treated with strengthening exercises without first addressing the underlying nerve system issue. If you don’t make sure the nerve is working properly, strengthening the muscle is going to be an uphill battle. This is common with the next two imbalance types.
Left-Right Imbalance Patterns
When people learn to pay attention to their form while exercising, they will often start to notice that for example they feel twisted while doing squats, or uneven when doing situps or a plank. This is often a sign that something is not right in their spine. It is very common that when people come into my office I see that their spine that is supposed to be straight has curves or has shifted laterally (to one side). When we do a scan on the motor (muscle) part of their nervous system, we see that the muscle firing patterns are locking their spine into that position.
Front-Back (Flexion) Imbalance Patterns
An overwhelming majority of the people who first come to my office have a Flexion Imbalance Pattern. Commonly referred to as just “Bad Posture”, it is so much more than that. Let’s face it, everything that we do in our world causes this forward leaning posture: driving, texting, computer work, sitting, stress… the list goes on. The muscles on the front side of your body are contracted more than the muscle on the back side of your body, and this is neurologically hardwired.
So, just like when you flex your bicep and your tricep on the opposite side turns off and relaxes, when the muscles on the front side of your body contract reflexively, the muscles on the backside of your body turn off and stop working properly. This means that exercises to strengthen your back or forcing your body into better posture won’t work. First you have to train your nervous system to stop firing the muscles on the front side of your body. Also, it is very common that when people first come into our office, the natural, healthy curve of their neck has become straight, or even reversed! On the scans we can see their body working on overtime to try to correct an imbalance that has formed.
Luckily, these are all imbalances that we work with and see change every day in our office. They are easy to measure and can be improved. We know because we use the scans to see them change over time! So you can see (and feel!) them change too. The first step is to get a clear picture of what is going on, and the easiest way to start that process is with a visit to our office, or an offsite screening. Call or schedule online. Our office has one of most comprehensive processes you may ever experience to understand your body better, and we will walk you through each and every step, so you feel empowered throughout. We will also be doing complimentary screenings at Anytime Fitness Miller Trunk in Duluth on Monday 1/29 and Friday 2/9, from 4-7pm.
You won’t believe how having a healthy, clear, balanced, and aligned spine and nervous system makes you feel. Imbalances can hold you back, but when they are liberated it will change more than just your workouts. We are grateful to be here to walk, run, and cycle with you to greater heights in wellness.
Dr. Lara Hill is a Holistic Chiropractor in Duluth, MN. She does a different kind of chiropractic, focused on root cause, not symptoms. Gentle yet powerful care for your best living.