Advanced Understanding of the Injury Cycle

by ThePB4RGuys · February 13, 2015

Okay, so you know about muscle pain, trigger points and foam rolling. But exactly how pain is perceived by the body and how your body moves relative to the pain is not always at the forefront of every athlete. This article sheds light on why you constantly need to work on your body to avoid pain during your workouts.

Injuries to joints and muscles can occur either suddenly or gradually. The latter is often the type that plague most fitness enthusiasts such as CrossFitters. In Part I of this series, we explored the anatomy of our fascia (muscles). Now we turn our attention to the process of injury in order to gain a better understanding of how injuries can manifest themselves over time.

Understanding the Injury Cycle

Trigger Points

Trigger points are little knots that can reduce our balance, stability, power output, and overall ability to protect ourselves from injury during movement.

Throughout our daily lives, the repetitive motions and postures, nutrition, lack of hydration, and other factors can cause changes in the composition of our fascia. When this happens, it can lead to the development of localized areas of hyperirritable neural tissue lying within taut bands of Fascia and muscle called Trigger Points. These areas are essentially places where “The fuzz” no longer slides correctly and becomes “glued down”. This can lead to pain, altered proprioception (see below), muscle spasms, poor muscular contractions, and an overall massive wasting of energy.

In the most basic sense, trigger points are little knots that can reduce our balance, stability, power output, and overall ability to protect ourselves from injury during movement.

Luckily, this can be prevented through adequate nutrition, hydration, and mechanical stimulation of our myofascia through movement and myofascial release techniques.

Proprioceptive Effects

Proprioception is your body’s spatial communication with the external environment; it combines sensory input and helps properly coordinate the neuromuscular system to create movement.

Unhealthy fascia and decreased mobility ruins your body’s ability to know where it is and how to properly adapt to its surroundings and create coordinated movement.

For a clear picture of what this means, close your eyes and raise both of your arms out to your side. Now, keeping your eyes closed take your right finger and try to touch your nose. Then do the same thing with your left and repeat. This is your proprioceptive system taking in information about where your nose is and then contracting and relaxing specific groups of muscles to allow you to eventually touch your nose with your finger. This system of movement coordination is your proprioception.

Unhealthy fascia and decreased mobility ruins your body’s ability to know where it is and how to properly adapt to its surroundings and create coordinated movement. This will, once again, lead to reduced ability for your body to provide balance/stability, power, strength, and prevention of injury.

Joint Positioning and Power Output

Did you know? There can be irreversible joint degeneration from just one week of joint immobilization.

When adhesions/trigger points, reduced mobility, and proprioception are interrupted within our bodies, serious consequences in the ways that we move inevitably follow. This in turn leads to various movement complications. Here are just a few examples:

Immobility

Poor movement patterns due to immobility can lead to acute wear and tear on the cartilage of joints, leading to erosion and arthritic joint changes. Joint dysfunction and inability to go through full range of motion can also have degenerative effects. A 2011 study out of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Tohoku University School of Medicine in Japan showed in an animal study that there can be irreversible joint degeneration from just one week of joint immobilization. Although this type of study cannot be performed on humans due to the serious implications, it does show the drastic complications of joint immobilization and improper movement. This is why CrossFit, mobility, and healthy movement of your joints in general are essential to keeping your joints pain-free and functional.

Length-Tension Relationships

The Length-Tension Relationship is the relationship between how far a muscle is stretched and how hard and fast it can contract from that point of tension.

We can also have a disruption of Length-Tension Relationships within muscles. Imagine if you were holding a slinky. If you pull the slinky apart a couple of inches and then let go, it would snap back together. If you pulled it a little farther apart, it would snap back together faster and with more force. If you pulled the slinky so far apart that the spring was completely stretched out and lost its structural integrity, it wouldn’t snap back at all because its structure was compromised. Your muscles act the same way. The Length-Tension Relationship is the relationship between how far a muscle is stretched and how hard and fast it can contract from that point of tension. If it is short and is not stretched at all, there is little force production that can occur. If it is too stretched, it will not be able to contract forcefully. Myofascial release allows us to restore good length-tension relationships within our muscle groups for optimal force contraction.

If Length-Tension Relationships are altered due to immobility, this affects the sequence in which your muscle groups activate — otherwise known as the synergistic relationships within your muscle groups. Kelly Starrett often speaks about load ordering, movement task priorities and how pivotal the set-up of a movement is to injury prevention and force production. Mobility to get into a proper set-up position allows your body to activate the strongest, most efficient muscles to perform a task. When this is impaired, it can lead to improper muscle-activation sequencing, overload of the wrong muscle groups, reduced power output, and potential injury.

Clearly, regular movement is vital to the health of your muscles and joints. However, the quality and volume of movement are key factors to consider when engaging in high-intensity movements. Are you moving efficiently? Are you taking the necessary steps to ensure that pain and possible injuries are mitigated?

In the final part of this series, we will explore in detail the solutions to both prevent and treat poor movement patterns and injuries.

References

1. Macdonald G, Penney M, Mullaley M, Cuconato A, Drake C, Behm DG, Button DC. An Acute Bout of Self Myofascial Release Increases Range of Motion Without a Subsequent Decrease in Muscle Activation or Force. J Strength Cond Res. 2012 May 10. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 22580977.

2. NASM: Essentials of Corrective Exercise Training. 1^st. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2010

3. http://www.gilhedley.com/ghvideo.php

4. Myers, Thomas. Anatomy Trains. 2nd. Churchill Livingstone, 2008. 440. Print.

5. Reversibility of immobilization-induced articular cartilage degeneration after remobilization in rat knee joints. Ando A, Suda H, Hagiwara Y, Onoda Y, Chimoto E, Saijo Y, Itoi E. Tohoku J Exp Med. 2011;224(2):77-85.

6. www.mobilitywod.com

Original Article by: Matt Smith at TabataTimes

Advanced Understanding of the Injury Cycle

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Immobility

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