Competitive Edge

An athlete was dealing with a super tight, sore, and stiff neck, shoulder and low back. It has been bothering her as long as she can remember. No matter what she did, massage, chiro, rolling out, physio, it simply wouldn’t help, and often gave her headaches.

I started working on her compensation patterns, looking at local muscle pairs. We found some things, but nothing that I found would stick. We would correct something but it would come right back as soon as she returned to normal day to day movements.

At this point she mentioned her low back pain. Maybe her core wasn’t working, and caused a systemic weakness? Same story with her core, none of the corrections would “last” . It would temporarily make improvements in her shoulder, until she moved it around.

We dove back into the history, searching for the missing piece to the puzzle. We found out that her and her brother would wrestle quite a bit growing up. Occasionally he would put her in a head lock. This has the potential to shift a bone in your throat called your hyoid. It holds your windpipe open and acts like a gyroscope for your body. Because breathing is so important, if this little bone gets shifted even the slightest, your body will turn off certain muscles in an attempt to prevent it from shifting farther, and potentially partially occluding the airway.

I performed an extremely gentle mobilization on this bone, putting it back in its proper place, and worked on some of the muscles that held it out of place.  After a quick walk to let the body reintegrate this new information, we retested. All of the compensation patterns were gone and the improvements lasted!

It might take a couple more sessions to get it to permanently stay where we want it too, but the success we had in the first 20 minutes was remarkable.

Remember that everything is related. Don’t forget to tell your therapist about that crazy throat soreness you had 15 years ago, or that jaw click that has been bothering you, or anything else. Let us sort out if “it’s related” .

 

At Competitive Edge Sport Therapy your recovery is our concern. We will provide caring and professional sports injury rehabilitation in our one hour appointments, one on one with your athletic therapist. We want to help you get back to full health and enjoying the activities you love to do.
Phone: 403-252-6222 Email: [email protected] Website: https://competitiveedgesporttherapy.com