ch01.qxp 6/4/01 12:33 PM Page 1
Part One
ch01.qxp 6/4/01 12:33 PM Page 2
ch01.qxp 6/4/01 12:33 PM Page 3
CHAPTER 1
Healing Muscle Pain
ur muscles are designed to be flexible, strong, and smooth, with the
O ability to contract and relax painlessly. After we have suffered long-
term or repeated muscle pain, however, we can easily forget how our mus-
cles are supposed to feel. In fact, muscle pain tends to become such a
normal part of our everyday lives that we seldom try to treat it until we are
forced to quit working or engaging in our favorite activities. Yet much of
this muscle pain is unnecessary and its consequences avoidable. Caring for
our muscles and relieving their pain can be easier than we first assume. We
can restore well-being and health, first of all by eliminating the factors that
cause the pain once we learn to recognize these. Second, just as we are
taught to brush our teeth to avoid tooth decay, we can learn some simple
techniques to treat our muscles in order to both relieve and prevent mus-
cle pain.
Understanding the factors that influence the health of our muscles and
contribute to pain is as important as knowing how to treat and relieve the
pain. In an ideal world, we could count on our doctors and other care
providers to explain such things to us. More often, however, we leave their
offices with at least as many unanswered questions as we came in with.
One reason why it is hard to get answers to questions about muscle
pain is that many of the answers are yet to be found. Although medical
research has yielded much knowledge about what leads to pain in the mus-
cles, many unknowns still exist. Contrary to what most people believe,
even the most widely experienced pain of all—exercise soreness—has not
been fully explained. Muscle cramps, spasms, stiff neck, and many other
common ailments are on the long list of everyday muscular conditions for
which medical research still cannot provide clear answers.
The reality, that there are too many contradictory factors to fully
explain muscle pain, is certainly not the fault of doctors. But because of
what is not known, the medical profession has fallen into the habit of say-
ing nothing at all to patients about their muscles. Most people, therefore,
know very little about how their muscles actually work, what contributes
to pain, and what can be done to relieve and prevent it.
3
ch01.qxp 6/4/01 12:33 PM Page 4
4
As laypeople, we need not concern ourselves with the complex ques-
tions of medical research; the knowledge we need in order to care for our
muscles and solve our pain problems is much less complicated. But we do
need to know some basics. Doctors, physical therapists, and massage ther-
apists have a thorough understanding of the basic functions of the muscles
in the body and the processes that most affect muscle health. In order to
help the medical professionals heal us—and in order to heal ourselves—
we also need to know these fundamentals. Without this understanding,
healing is a difficult and often aimless process.
What This Book Will Give You
This book will help you to better understand your muscle pain, and guide
you on the path to overcoming rather than being defeated by it. In addi-
tion to grounding you in the basics of how our muscular and related sys-
tems work (and don’t work), the book will teach you how to locate muscles
in your body, how to experience them moving, and how to treat and
relieve key muscles in your body. You will learn that just as our posture and
unconscious movements over the course of a day can create our muscle
pain, it is during our day that we must make the changes that will lead to
healing. Throughout the book you’ll find many boxes containing exercises
designed to jumpstart the healing process and give you quick relief from
your muscle pain and tightness whenever it appears—anytime, anywhere
during your day. You can use these in combination with the longer-term
stretching and strengthening exercises to put you on the road to fast and
permanent muscle health.
How to Use This Book
The book is organized into two sections. The first section provides you with
the knowledge to understand what is going on in your muscular system.
The second section presents you with the tools to apply that knowledge.
The book is organized sequentially, so that with each chapter you read,
you will be adding a new layer of information to your understanding.
However, if your concern is to relieve a specific, distracting pain first, it is
okay to start by going directly to Chapter 8 and consulting the step-by-step
guide. It will direct you to the specific chapter that can help you develop
and work through a strategy for resolving your pain. Here is a list of the
steps and the chapters in which they’re discussed:
ch01.qxp 6/4/01 12:33 PM Page 5
5
Step 1: Find Your Key Muscle. Attempt to identify and locate the muscle
that’s causing the problem. See Chapters 8 and 9.
Step 2: Get to Know Your Key Muscle. Learn what the muscle does (its
job) and what most commonly stresses it. See Chapter 9.
Step 3: Test Your Key Muscle. Check out and analyze the condition of
your painful muscle as well as related muscles that might contribute to
your pain. See Chapter 11.
Step 4: Start the Healing Process. Choose from among different pain-
relieving and healing techniques the one that suits your needs the best. See
Chapter 5.
Step 5: Stretch and Strengthen Your Key Muscle. Carefully exercise,
stretch, and strengthen the muscle back to health. See Chapters 12 and 13.
Step 6: Be Mindful of Your Muscles During the Day. With the knowl-
edge you’ve gained, you can learn to give relief to your pained muscles dur-
ing the day as tightness and pain appear, catch problems before they start,
and take proactive steps to avoid generating new ones. See Chapter 4.
Step 7: See the Bigger Picture of Your Pain. Identify and treat the other
muscles that work with and impact your problem muscle. See Chapters 4
and 9.
Changing the Way We Think
An important reason why we often fail to understand our muscle pain is
that we commonly start far away from the cause-and-effect logic of the
body and the muscular system—which is not surprising, since the neces-
sary information has not been available to us. Typically, all we have ready
access to is a lot of diagnostic terms. There are almost too many to chose
from: thoracic outlet syndrome, carpal tunnel syndrome, tendinitis, run-
ner’s knee, tennis elbow, and many, many more. Naturally, we want to be
aware of these so that we can decide if they fit our own situation. However,
such conditions do not appear out of nowhere. As you learn how your
muscles function and how the different parts of the musculoskeletal sys-
tem work together, you will understand how pain can develop based on
ch01.qxp 6/4/01 12:33 PM Page 6
6
the logic of this system. Furthermore, you will be able to remove, one by
one, many of the factors that are causing your pain.
But first, changing the way you think is the first step toward resolving
your muscle pain.
Six Myths about Muscle Pain
Even though the logic of cause and effect may be obvious in theory, when
you start applying it to your own situation, many habitual thought pat-
terns interfere. The following six powerful myths prevent many of us from
successfully relieving our muscle pain:
1. My muscle pain is so complicated that I cannot possibly understand it.
Everyone’s muscular condition is unique and different. However, painful
muscles, wherever located and for whatever reasons, usually have similar
traits. If you look at the basics of how the muscles react to changes—for
example, changes in posture and activity levels—problems become under-
standable. Becoming familiar with the general principles of how muscles
operate and how they react can give you a new understanding of your own
specific problem.
2. Muscle pain is just something I have to live with. There is nothing I can
do about it. If your muscles hurt, they are communicating that some-
thing is wrong. And they will continue to hurt until you hear what they are
telling you and respond by doing something. When you have learned to
follow the signals and respond with activities promoting muscle health,
you will begin to experience genuine relief from muscle pain.
3. Stretching does not work for me. I tried it, and it only made the pain
worse. Feelings of increased tightness and pain—maybe even spasms—
caused by stretching occur for logical reasons. These sensations are due to
monitors in the muscle that regulate and adjust tightness in reaction to a
stretch and the way we stretch. Learning what these monitors are and how
to stretch in cooperation with them will make the stretch work and stimu-
late pain-relieving changes. When you understand the mechanisms that
are activated in the muscle as you stretch, you will not be surprised at the
different sensations in and around the muscle during and after stretching.
4. If I rest my painful muscles, they will heal. It is true that when you
experience an acute injury to muscles or tissue, resting is the best and most
appropriate response. Most muscle pain, however, has developed over a
ch01.qxp 6/4/01 12:33 PM Page 7
7
long time. The damage has become chronic, and in this situation, resting
does not have a healing effect.
5. I exercise, work out, and lift weights. Therefore, my muscle pain will go
away. Aerobic exercise, such as walking or running, can be the ultimate
cure for pained muscles. It brings fresh, healing blood to the painful areas,
helping to improve circulation. However, when you lift weights, you
strengthen the muscle fibers. If the muscle is ready to be strengthened and
if you know that strengthening one muscle necessitates strengthening the
other muscles in its group, lifting weights can be an excellent way to heal
muscle pain. But strengthening unevenly, without paying attention to how
the muscles work together, can actually launch you into an increased cycle
of pain, rather than take you out of it!
6. Of course my muscles are painful. That’s a natural consequence of
aging, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Recently, as a result of
increased studies of exercise activity in elderly people, a rush of data about
how aging really affects the body has emerged. These data prove that it is
decreased levels of activity, more than degeneration of muscles and tissue,
that cause increased muscle aching with age.
Understanding Your Muscle Condition
This book will show you many ways to provide self-massage to bring relief
and healing to your muscles and tissue, as well as how to improve the
ranges of movement of your joints and how to impact the tension, length,
and strength of your muscles. But the most important thing is how to
understand your own condition.
At your first appointment, therapists concentrate on attempting to
understand your particular condition. While you may want to hurry on to
treatment so you can start to relieve your pain as soon as possible, thera-
pists spend time asking questions, moving things around, observing, and
thinking. What they observe provides them with a world of information
about your individual muscle condition. This information is exactly what
you need to avoid muscle pain. Had you had such information at hand
yourself, you most likely would not have needed the therapist at all.
Unfortunately, some therapists forget to provide a running commen-
tary as they carry out their examination, leaving patients in the dark about
their own body’s condition. Others talk, but in an incomprehensible jar-
gon of complicated terms that obscure the logic and importance of what
ch01.qxp 6/4/01 12:33 PM Page 8
8
they are saying. Many therapists, however, explain what they are doing
while they perform their information-gathering examination. If you listen
carefully, you will discover that they are looking to see how your particular
situation deviates from established standards of normal, pain-free move-
ment, strength, and health. Even small deviations can cause large amounts
of pain, and small corrections can relieve large amounts of pain.
The message of this book is simple: Much of the muscle pain we experi-
ence is unnecessary; not only can it be soothed, but it can be healed and
prevented. Most of us take our pain for granted. We have been dealing with
stiff, aching knees and sore lower backs for so many years. We have given
up on our favorite activities because they cause more pain than enjoyment
and have reserved our visits to the doctor for more “serious” complaints
because we did not think there was anything we could do about it. When
we learn to understand and work with the versatility of the muscular sys-
tem, the thinking patterns that have kept us from restoring our muscular
health will be replaced by productive knowledge and pain-relieving skills
we can apply every day.
We do not have to live with muscle pain, and healing need not entail
painful, expensive, and time-consuming treatment.
Who Is This Book For?
This book has been designed to be used under a variety of conditions:
whether you are a patient under a doctor’s and/or therapist’s care or sim-
ply someone who has been coping for years with aches and pains you
didn’t know you could do something about.
Terms
A time when you are in pain is not the best time to learn a new vocabulary.
Therefore, we have decided to use the following descriptive words and
phrases instead of medical terms:
• Key muscles are the 36 muscles we have chosen to present in this
book. There are many more muscles in the body, but these are for the most
part primary movers of your joints. The idea is that when you learn how
these 36 muscles work, you will be able to use medical books on your own
to study other muscles that might be relevant to your condition.
• Muscle job describes the motion the muscle is causing at a joint.
ch01.qxp 6/4/01 12:33 PM Page 9
9
• Bony landmarks are the important landmarks in the body for finding
the muscles and their attachment sites, which is a large part of the method
used to treat the muscles in this book. These are names such as “small
outer elbow bone” instead of lateral epicondyle and “tip of the shoulder”
instead of acromion process. You will get comfortable with these terms as
you use the book, since they are used consistently throughout.
• A muscle attaches to the bone in two places. We will use beginning
tendon to describe the attachment closest to the center of the body, where
the tendon attaches to a relatively stable bone. This replaces the medical
term origin. Ending tendon will be used to describe an attachment usually
farther away from the center of the body, where the tendon attaches to a
more mobile bone. This replaces the medical term insertion.
• Primary mover (which replaces the medical term agonist) describes
the muscle that is mainly responsible for a movement, for example, bend-
ing the trunk forward. The opposing muscle (which replaces the medical
term antagonist) is the muscle that does the exact opposite of the primary
mover, and assisting muscles (which replaces the medical term synergists)
help the primary mover.
• Abuse describes any kind of overuse, misuse, or injury to a muscle.