Why Does Your XYZ Hurt? (Your Pain Explained)

Often times, pain in the body is associated with injury or illness of the patient. Pain is not, however, as straight forward as it may seem. There are quite a few misconceptions about what pain means, or what causes pain itself. Here are a couple facts about pain:

I want to start off by saying, just because you’re in pain, does not necessarily mean you’re injured or ill. Pain can be your body’s way of telling you that a dysfunctional pattern needs to stop. When you overuse a muscle, it’s gonna say, "hey, give me a break." As Lorimer Moseley puts it, "100% of the time, pain is a construct of the brain." Basically, this means that it is the brain sending messages of pain, not the muscles. A lot of people seek out temporary cures like cortisone shots, NSAIDs, ice baths, etc., when what they really need is some corrective exercise. This will stop the pain response in the long term by treating muscular imbalances, rather than temporarily treating the symptoms.

Mirror therapy tricks your brain to believe that the
missing limb is still attached to your body.

• Similarly, you can feel pain on a limb that's not even yours. Yes, you read that correctly. Take, for example, the case of phantom limb pain. Patients often report feeling shooting pains in an appendage that was removed years ago. A technique called "mirror therapy" has been very effective in treating this phenomenon: "a procedure utilizing the visual recreation of movement of a lost limb by moving the intact limb in front of a mirror, has been shown to be effective in reducing [phantom limb pain]. However, the neural correlates of this effect are not known." While the exact science of phantom limb pain and its treatment is still widely a mystery, this just goes to show that pain is multifactorial and complex.

Conversely, if you’re injured, you might not necessarily experience pain. Not every torn ligament, disc herniation, etc. is symptomatic. There are people with disk herniations who experience 0 pain, and they're able to continue on with their daily activities: "On MRI examination of the lumbar spine, many people without back pain have disk bulges or protrusions... Given the high prevalence of these findings and of back pain, the discovery by MRI of bulges or protrusions in people with low back pain may frequently be coincidental," noted a study executed by Jensen et. al.

Your body remembers previous traumas, and “pain” pathways form in your brain. So, if you suffered from an injury a few years ago, you may experience pain in that same area without having re-injured it. Let's say, for example, you fell while you were ice skating and sprained your wrist two years ago. Now, your brain forms a negative association with ice skating. You may notice your symptoms reappearing every time you go back to the rink, even though you've long since healed.

Emotions can influence your symptoms. We can physically manifest stress in certain areas of the body. If something in your body is bothering you more than usual, consider other environmental stressors that could be contributing to the pain. Did you lose your job? Are you fighting with a friend? Neuroscientist Dr. V.S. Ramachandran puts it succinctly: "Pain is an opinion on the organism’s state of heath rather than a mere reflexive response to injury … Pain is an illusion.” This can mean that if you're upset about something, or you've convinced yourself into thinking there's something wrong, then your brain will respond accordingly by sending a pain response to the area.

Treating the pain symptoms (i.e. taking NSAIDs, icing, etc.) does not necessarily treat the cause of the problem. These will work as short-term solutions. See a doctor, physical therapist, or a chiropractor to figure out the source of the pain before you try to treat it on your own.
There are a million different factors that contribute to pain. Here are a few listed by Dr. Kathy Dooley:

1. Environment
2. Memory programming of pain (i.e., cerebral programming)
3. Systemic inflammation
4. Pain receptor irritation
5. Heightened awareness, due to neurotransmitter activity/inactivity (i.e., drug exposure, depression)
6. Circulatory issues (i.e., blood stasis)
7. Fatigue and energy deficiency
8. Improper hydration/dehydration
9. Psycho-social components (i.e., your back hurts because you hate your job)

The moral of this article is thus: don’t just lump “pain” into one category. Pain does not necessarily mean something is horribly wrong, but you do need to look at why the pain is occurring in the first place, if you want to eliminate it in the long term. Be your own detective.

Why You Need to Have a Big Butt

Having a big butt is certainly preferable for models twerking in rap videos, but it's also extremely important in athletic performance. Weather you're a soccer player, a running back or just simply working out to maintain a healthy lifestyle, you need to make sure you're giving your butt the attention it deserves.

I know what you're thinking: "But Arianna! I can squat 250 pounds. My glutes are really strong!" In a perfect world, you would achieve glute activation in the back squat, but many of the back squats I see people execute in the gym make use of the anterior quadriceps muscle and recruit minimal activation from their posterior chain. The truth is, if you are a predominantly sedentary person (meaning you sit for 4+ hours a day at home or at work), you probably don't know how to correctly activate your glutes because you're not using them for the majority of the day. Fear not--you are part of the American majority who sits at a desk job all day. It's no wonder that we don't know how to activate the right muscle groups considering we don't use them as often as we should.

Underactive or weak glutes can cause a ton of problems, including lower back pain, knee pain, IT band syndrome, and a whole slew of other maladies. Your quadriceps may be strong enough to squat 250 lbs, but guess what? If you learned how to activate your glutes properly, you would easily squat over 300 lbs.

The gluteus maximus (one of three muscles that make up what we collectively call the "glutes") is the biggest muscle in your body. Now, if we learn how to properly employ the strength of this tremendous group of muscles, we are going to see some real magic happen. Whether we're doing a deadlift, a squat, a box jump or a clean and jerk, we need to learn to properly harness the power from our glutes in order to move the most amount of weight and avoid injury.

In order to utilize the strength of the ever-powerful gluteal muscles, we must focus on activating them. Some great exercises can be found in my previous article about warm-ups, but I'll list a few more that I really like here:

• Single leg or weighted glute bridges
• Banded walks
• Reverse hyper extensions
• Single leg Romanian deadlifts
• GHD raise
• Bulgarian split squats
• Reverse lunges
• Side plank with abduction

Once you learn to properly engage your posterior chain, you will see tremendous gains in strength while simultaneously protecting your body from injury. If you have humongous quadriceps and a small butt, that should be a red flag to you that your glutes needs some more attention. Channel your inner Nicki Minaj and start building a bigger booty!

Sitting Is a Killer

What are you doing right now?

Chances are you're sitting at your desk as you read this. We sit on the couch to watch TV, get up to sit in our cars, sit at our desks at work and then repeat this vicious cycle the next day. Nearly all of us are guilty of spending too much time on our bums.

Unless you're one of the lucky few (like me) who work on her feet, you're probably sitting down for at least 8 hours a day. The unfortunate truth is that, even if you workout semi-regularly, when we sit, we are wreaking havoc on our bodies. Low back pain? Tight hips? These things are likely the result of you being seated for extended periods of time.

Human beings are not meant to be sedentary animals. We evolved as hunter-gatherers, and at that time, we were probably not sitting for any length of time; we were out on our feet for hours on end trying to find food to feed our families. Even when we were sitting, we weren't sitting in a "chair" as we know it today--we were probably sitting on the ground or a stone/stump/something of the like. We are meant to be active, and our bodies were made to move.

Image courtesy of www.drfox.co.uk

So why is sitting so dangerous? For one, when we sit, our hamstrings are shortened, and our glute activation turns off. Further, our hips are closed for extended periods of time. Our bodies adapt to what we do often, and if sitting is what we are most frequently doing, it will adapt to sitting! If our hips and hamstrings are shortened for extended periods of time, our muscles and connective tissues become adaptively short to accommodate this position. It is no wonder why our society is so inflexible!

Here are some other scary truths about sitting:

• Energy expenditure drops to 1 calorie per minute
• Fat burning enzymes decrease their rate by 90%
• After two hours of sitting, your HDL cholesterol drops by 20%
• People with sitting jobs are 2 times more likely to get some form of cardiovascular disease
• Sitting time has increased by over 8% since 1980

So what are your options? The standing workstation has gained a lot of popularity within the past year or two. If this is not feasible for you, your best bet is getting up every 30-45 minutes and stretching, maybe taking a lap or two around the office.