Pain

The Pain, The Problem and The Cause

Your body always functions at 100% with whatever it has available. Problems and pains arise when parts of your body stop functioning the way they should. This is usually due to previous injuries or you haven’t fully used that body part in a long time. 

When this happens, other parts of your body step in to compensate. 

For example, if your hip stops functioning properly, your lower back might take some of its workload. Over time, your back starts to hurt because it’s doing too much trying to do the job of a back and a hip. 

The real problem (i.e. the hip) very rarely hurts, so people focus on treating the pain (the back) which means they never get rid of it.

This is why you shouldn’t chase pain but instead focus on what isn’t moving properly.

The main exception to this rule is if the area of pain has had direct trauma, such as after surgery or a shoulder dislocation. The trauma has likely stopped this area of your body from moving properly, which can lead to pain. But even in these cases, you shouldn’t stop working on the injury itself. A fall that dislocated a shoulder might also affect your wrist, elbow, and/or shoulder blade. They may not hurt now, but the fall could have also affected their movement and might subsequently cause compensations elsewhere in the future – ironically after the dislocated shoulder has been rehabbed.

Rather than looking at pain in isolation, you should start thinking of it as a whole-body problem.