| Degenerative Aging | Muscle Imbalances | Back Pain | Neck Pain | Muscle Dysfunctions | Flexor Muscles | Musculoskeletal System |

It’s NOT Caused by “Degenerative” Aging
You CAN Fix IT
Tying All the CAUSES Together

The Myth of Aging and the Riddle of the Sphinx
This is a simplistic yet powerful title. The Riddle of the Sphinx may help to explain.

According to Greek mythology, the Sphinx provided a riddle: “What has one voice is four-footed, and two-footed, and 3 footed? Oedipus, correctly answered: “The human being who crawls on all fours as an infant; walks on two legs in adulthood; then leans on a cane in old-age.

The obvious question according to Thomas Hanna [¹] is “why is it that humans, having learned to walk up-right, may lose this ability, often ending up walking with a cane?” “Clearly it is to grow older is to become crippled.”

In other words, when the word “aging” is spoken or thought of we equate it with becoming crippled and infirm – we are “degenerating.” Our spines and joints are “degenerating.” This thinking was accepted as far back as the 5th century and for the most part is still believed today. Furthermore, we see it happening in people everyday. Aging = Degeneration.


Is This Truth or Is it Nonsense?
What is not explained here is why we see a 30 year old, who was a perfectly happy active 10 year old, with a straight, flexible spine, who is now showing all the physical signs of being “old,”

The very degenerative “signs” we have been led to expect we will see in ourselves, as our end of life approaches.

Everyone has seen people like this - they hobble down the street, bent, perhaps even using a cane or walker. And, who has not also seen an 80 year old, striding along with a strong, graceful gait, and their body straight? Genes, you say? Perhaps.

Certainly, genes play a role, but if we exclude people born genetically crippled from the age degeneration equation, then what is left is weakness in genes.


Not Genetic
Weaknesses that interact with negative aspects of how we live, eat, breath, and move – can lead to a quickening of some “aging” processes.[²] And without question, some of these can add to muscle dysfunctions. However, metabolic muscle dysfunction can also occur without the presence of any genetic anomalies. Such muscle dysfunction is a direct result of side effects from commonly used pharmaceutical drugs; and certainly from toxic chemicals, xenobiotic hormones, metals, pesticides/herbicides, food additives, and on and on.

But, we are not talking here about the metabolic changes discussed in our article on premature aging.

We are looking at a functional, physical, simple to fix, muscle-to-brain communication malfunction. A malfunction that results in various Muscle Imbalances and appears to be the underlying “cause” for a very high percentage of back and neck pain suffering.

A malfunction, having nothing to do with pathology (dis-ease caused)

A malfunction that creates changes in otherwise healthy spinal movement leading to a host of painful back and neck “conditions” – all of which is blamed on AGING.

Those of us who have or will develop progressive back or neck pain episodes and increasing disability, as the years go by, have been programmed to believe this is simply the result of “aging” and its expected degenerative changes. After all, medicine can show us these “degenerative” changes on our X-Ray or MRI – once such changes can be seen and identified, we are counseled, “to come to grips with the fact we are aging. It becomes simply something we must accept and learn to live with.”

So, how did we manage to progress from an active, flexible, healthy child, with a lust for life, to a sedate, inflexible, inactive person living with back or neck pain, some of who are less than 20?


We Start to Grow Up
From birth an intricate complicated system of internal and external communication sensors, is how our muscles “learn” processes, which allow our “body” to hold itself “up” against gravity while keeping our head lined up with the horizon. Without this, our balance would be compromised.

During the first 2-3 years of life, our muscles have “learned” their role to help us reach our individual musculoskeletal functional ideal. For the rest of our lives those sensors are used to constantly check in on our bodily position, weight, or movement of the muscles, tendons, and joints - making any necessary adjustment to the muscles to preserve our ideal posture and balance, no matter the activity. The muscles of our spine and limbs have the potential to work and move our bodies in perfect, flexible, balanced harmony.

Our muscles help the spine to develop the natural curves it requires to share both the loads of gravity and the loads we place on in through our various forms of movement. This allows us to walk, run, jump, flip over, roll over, climb, crouch, lift, bend backwards, forwards, side to side, and rotate. As children, life is an adventure and we use these abilities to have fun - through personal exploration and play – at the same time developing our strength, endurance, agility, and greater control over fine motor movements. Thus, beginning the process that helps us learn who we are, how we relate to the world and others. Optimal, symmetrical movement for the longest duration is our evolutionary prize. But no matter how much fun we are having using our newly developed abilities, eventually we begin to “grow up.”

We begin to have to “DO” things that aren’t “fun.” We being to realize the difficulties in meeting obligations most never knew about as a child. Relationships become more complicated, sitting for hours at school and work. Then there’s finding a job, having a family, worry about that family, worry of meeting the bills, keeping the boss happy, illness, death, losing our job and the constant worry for our safety because of events in today’s world. In other words, the real “cost of living” is stress.
 

Welcome to Life!

The “Stress” of Aging
Most everyone has heard the expression – “Life will eventually kill you.” To “live,” means you will experience all forms of stress, physical, emotional, and social, both good and bad. Digestion of food is a form of “stress” for the body. Fortunately, as we were evolving as a species, our body, and brain cleverly developed a variety of methods to manage and reduce the consequences of stress, what ever the stress, “ – good ” and “bad.”

One of the most primal of those methods involves signals to the muscles that result in a specific type of “protective” response. This oldest of methods involves three main signals – Muscle contractions that placed you into the equivalent of the fetal position to protect from danger, called the “Withdrawal Response” muscle contraction for the preparation to fight or to flee, called the “Fight or Flight Response” - and contractions that are the result of trauma, called the “Trauma Response.”

Each “response” has different and temporary consequences to normal posture. When the “stress” condition is removed or dealt with muscles eventually return to their normal resting lengths. At least, they’re supposed to.

But what happens if the “stress” condition occurs repeatedly or never goes away? When this happens, muscles are forced to stay in the configuration that resulted from the “stress” response. This means they remain in a contracted state. Slowly, over time, the muscles begin to “forget” to return to their normal resting length and they “learn” the need to stay in contraction. Unfortunately, we have no conscious control over these muscle changes. What is happening is a reflexive action – a matter between the brain and sensors in the muscles. It all happens at an unconscious level, beneath our awareness.

Stress is multi-faceted and depending which form of stress is being experienced, involuntary muscle contraction behaves very differently. An extreme example of this is the child of war, physical or sexual abuse. These children have already developed various types of muscle contraction imbalances, which can often be seen in their posture even at ages under 10. These postural changes are usually related to the muscles that contract in the “withdrawal response.”

Taking this one step further, it has been proven that when a person experiences a “startle” event, like a loud and frightening noise, muscles of people with a healthy strong self-image rapidly return to normal resting length. Children of war or abuse can find it takes up to several days for this same normalization of muscle to happen. AND “extreme fear” can have this same exact effect on many different people, no matter the state of their self-image.


The Aftermath of 9/11 and Back and Neck Pain
Staggeringly high numbers of people attended doctor’s offices and hospital emergency services for back and neck pain complaints after 9/11 and this continued over the next several months. Many of those people are still under treatment years afterwards. Certainly, we have already explained that the bio-chemical results of fear, no matter if it’s a fear of pain, or a fear for ones safety – “fear” can increase the level of pain. However, this extreme increase in the numbers of people suffering with back and neck pain was more likely due to the muscle contractions caused by the “Withdrawal Response” which was a result of their fear.

It’s helpful to understand the specific types of normal postural deformation changes that result from the muscle behaviour caused by the 3 “stress responses.” Understanding which stress response we are more likely to experience helps us to visualize which of our muscles are most affected. This can help us to understand the origins of our particular back and neck pain. It’s also the turning point in our perception of the role “aging” plays

The “Withdrawal Response”
This stress response involves a forward contraction - a curling into the fetal position. Muscles of the shoulders and back of neck contract drawing the head down and the shoulders up, elbows bend, hands curl. Contraction of the abdominal and flexor muscles curves the trunk forward and draw the rib-cage down, immediately stopping breathing. Knees bend and point inwards; ankles roll and feet turn inwards; toes curl up, and the crotch tightens. The body is flexed and crouched. You “freeze.”

“Fight or Flight Response”
This response sees a totally different set of muscles contract. Our eyes open wide, the head pulls back, the back extensor muscles lifts and arches the back to strengthen our center of gravity. Arching opens up the lungs and heart area allowing for deeper breaths and greater movement of blood. The shoulders drop and the arms prepare for battle or to help us run. The legs bend in preparation for quick movement.

These are also the primary muscles we use as children when we happily progress to meet the wonders and adventures of life. When you are praised, feel confident, are happy and full of life you stand straight maybe even puff out your chest a little and the extensor muscle helps you to adopt these postures. But if negative stressors evoke the contraction of these muscles and if those stressors become chronic so do contractions of those muscles.

The “Trauma Response”
Muscle effects from the trauma response more often affect our side-to-side “tilting.” But it can affect almost any muscle. This happens as the sensory-motor system attempts to “guard” us from pain or the source of pain. If we prick ourselves, get stung by a bee, or get too near that lovely bon-fire, we instinctively flinch away, or cringe. This is the trauma reflex. Any injury to the body, no matter the cause results in our muscles holding a tight protective pattern around the point of injury and this too is the trauma reflex. Discussion of the trauma reflex is an article in itself. For the point of this article, we only need to understand, this reflex not only causes muscle contractions and postural deformations, but it can and does contribute to other types of muscle imbalances, which cause back and neck pain, with new and even greater muscle contractions and postural changes,.

One Additional Unconscious Muscle Imbalance Response

Self-Inflicted Postural Damage
Basically, this simply means that we subject our bodies to physical work and play postures and loads they were never meant to experience. Eventually, our posture begins to deform. Sensors in the muscles tell our brains we are overbalanced, twisted, overworking parts of our bodies beyond the ability, which our musculoskeletal system can bear. It then begins to make compensations. Further down in the article is an illustration that provides an opportunity to judge what possible muscle imbalances will result from a particular self-imposed posture.

Undoing More Degeneration=Aging Connections
In the article on Muscle Imbalances we looked at how muscle contraction affects the smooth, strong, flexible movement of our bones and joints so we need only remind about these effects in the development of back and neck pain. A more important fact of note is that it appears muscle imbalance also create a host of other conditions we now look at as being related to aging.

Remember that “Withdrawal Response?” The posture deformation that results from long term muscle contractions due to this response is one that we usually associate with “old age.” It’s the one that sees an elder person in their 80s bent, chest concave, head forward or down, shuffling or limping along, leaning on a cane. Common complaints from such a person are, poor digestion, difficulty defecating, problems getting enough breath to walk more than a few steps, rapid heartbeat, inability to sleep, painful knees, hips or legs, little desire to eat, and pain. Lots of pain. We have been led to see all this as simply the expected result of “aging.”

But hold on a minute. What about that 30 year old we mentioned? Is this an “old” person? Have they somehow become Aged at 30? If asked, this person will have many of the same complaints as the bent and disabled 80 year old.

So, we begin to acquire a different viewpoint about common “maladies of old age.” We cannot begin to cover all the conditions that can result from this particular dysfunctional muscle/postural condition. Hanna took a book to cover them all. But we’ll look at a few consequence of the “abdominal contraction.” In his book, Hanna [¹] says:

“Not only does this abdominal contraction cause shallow breathing, it creates other problems as well. The pressure on the organs affects all organ functions. For example, contracted abdominal muscles squeeze the bladder, raising its internal pressure. This gives the false sense of a full bladder. Frequent urination is the result. This same abdominal contraction also affects digestion and elimination.” When you consider that the digestive system is the body’s largest immune system organ any disruption here can result a host of body malfunctions. Additionally the contraction of muscle that takes place at the bottom of the pelvis, among other things, causes a reflexive tightening of the anus, which can lead to constipation and hemorrhoids…”