What's a Muscle For?

What’s a Muscle For?

Did you know that muscles are rolled-up fibers, then that roll is rolled with other rolls, and so on? Kind of like braiding a braid into another braid. So that being said, as I shared with the workshop this weekend, a muscle only knows off, in relaxed position and on, contracted.

A muscle is for movement, that is its job. It doesn't have another. Unlike fascia that has so many jobs! Muscles cross joints and when contracted they bend or move the joint resulting in some type of movement. Even the walls of the stomach and intestines, heart, are all muscle, and lo and behold they are creating movement of a substance.

It is when we have bad posture and our skeleton is no longer holding us us up that a muscle has to tighten — contract — to do a support job that it is not meant to do, that we start to have pain in it. Or when we do repeated use patterns that an overused muscle will begin to have pain.  

Another, big issue is when organs are in disregulation, so that the pain patterns go into muscles. (Example: kidney tension goes right into the psoas, the hip flexor muscle.)

The way I look at muscles almost all the time is that they are a map of the symptoms. They clue me in to where I ought to look, as there are common patterns for different muscle groups.