Using Muscle Diagrams to Get Flexible

Image via WikipediaI have some tight muscles and work on them myself. Its not always easy, but without good information, it can be impossible.

Fortunately, there are great resources on the web that show you where your muscles are. Bartleby has Gray's Anatomy online and I can see all of my muscles.

Sometimes a diagram does not display both ends of a muscle. Using the name of the muscle, I can usually find it on exrx or another web site. Exrx shows a muscle by itself so its easier to see where it begins and ends.

Once I've identified the tight muscle, I massage both ends of it. Then massage the muscle all along its length. At this point, the fascia or outer covering of the muscle can also be worked and stretched more easily.

I'm not sure why massaging both ends of a muscle first makes the muscle easier to work overall. But perhaps there is some correlation between acupuncture points or the meridians of Chinese medicine. Maybe its some electrical phenomenon.

Visualizing Problems with Muscle

The problems of muscular trigger points and myofascial adhesions and how they interact are difficult to understand.

I would love to create a flash movie that depicts what happens and how treatment can work to resolve these problems. I think it would really help a lot of people and accelerate therapies that work.

I've scoped out the cost of creating something like this and it looks like it would cost $10-20k. Anyone want to finance this or help me create a non-profit that cold apply for a grant to do this? Contact me.

When Stretching Does More Harm Than Good

Both the muscle and the fascia that surrounds it can be stretched. But certain conditions can greatly reduce the ultimate length that either can be safely stretched.

When a muscle has significant trigger points, many of the myofibrils are very tight and shorter than normal. A myofibril is a string of sarcomeres, the actual structures that open and close when you use your muscles.

When you have a muscular trigger point, you have myofibrils where these sarcomeres are stuck in their contracted positions. Healthy sarcomeres in the same myofibril can still stretch and some may be stretching all of the time.

If you stretch a muscle where things are already stretched to the limit, you risk overstretching. And it does not make the muscle more flexible.

The stuck sarcomeres have to be unstuck. And that's not easy. But its the only way.

Trouble Sleeping?

A lot of people do. The causes are many. Sometimes the problem is muscular and circulatory.

At least that's my experience. When I had tight abdominal muscles, there seemed to be a throbbing that sometimes kept me awake. My theory is the throbbing is your heart trying to force blood into the tight muscles.

When I put ice on the tight muscles, the throbbing went away. Apparently the cold causes something to contract and blood can flow.

Indeed, cold has been used to treat muscular trigger points. Janet Travell, a physician that literally wrote the book on trigger points, used cold to alleviate trigger points.

Resolving trigger points and myofascial adhesions with massage also seems to alleviate the throbbing. Either way, sleeping is much easier when blood can flow freely into your abdominal muscles.

I wonder how many people are taking drugs to sleep when the problem is something completely correctable like tight muscles. We really need MRE.

What is Rolfing?

Rolfing is a form of bodywork that pulls apart myofascial adhesions, the binding that can occur in the containers of muscles.

Rolfing is much easier once the muscle sarcomeres have been opened with Qi Gong or some other method.

If you've been working on your sarcomeres and find the tightness keeps returning because of your activities (or lack of activity), you might want to check out rolfing.

Muscular Trauma, Disability, Homelessness and Early Death

In 2005, The San Francisco Chronicle told the story of Maria King, who was kicked to death in Berkeley.

This poor woman "tried to move a desk in her office". Big mistake.

"The resultant back injury would precipitate her long slide into despair. Surgeons fused her bottom three vertebrae, but it only made the pain worse." She eventually could not hold a job or afford an apartment and she became homeless.

I'm not sure what injury Miss King suffered, but clearly the system failed here. Not the first story of surgery making a problem worse and not the last either.

A fellow that used to cut my hair had terrible back pain and saw many doctors. I remember the day he told me he was to have surgery on his back. He would be away from work for awhile. He never came back as far as I know. The pain became much worse.

Which makes the mission of this blog all the more important. The average person seemly does not have the resources to solve this problem and the medical community is falling short.

We need technology that will the nature of muscular dysfunction and its solutions clear. And its my self-appointed task to get people thinking about whats really going on with our muscles.

What Effective Testing For Stiff Muscles Could Do

A test that could find stiff muscles would change the game and have huge benefits for the world. Not only would problems be found and treated more, but treatments themselves can be better assessed for their efficacy.

In my own experience with traditional medicine, the muscle relaxants I was given for my initial muscular complaint would be completely discredited as a valid treatment once muscular problems are accurately understood.

I also feel much of what many chiropractors do will need to change, as the rearranging of bones pulled out of position by tight muscles is only a bandaid for problems with muscles. Incidentally, without that bandaid, I could not have gotten past some very real pain.

Even physical therapy will have to adapt, with greatly increased benefits and less wasted money.

Not to mention the other therapies I haven't tried, many which may have some benefit or lots of benefit. Solid evidence will cause re-evaluation and improvement, and lead to a much healthier population with fatter wallets.

Detecting Tight Muscles

A reliable scientifically accepted diagnostic test that detects tight muscles would bring greater attention to this problem and its many effects in the body.

Scientists are working on this, using the magnetic resonance elastography (MRE), which can produce images of tissue showing relative stiffness. Wikipedia has an article on trigger points and MRE. and here's the study mentioned on NIH.

This is awesome and hopefully these efforts will succeed. If not, robots will eventually be used to do this same task, albeit with less effectiveness. Many muscles are not easily accessible and magnetism goes everywhere.

Would have been nice to have had such a test back in 1990 (18 years ago) when I first experienced the problem.

Tight Muscles Make You Tired More Quickly

Think about it. If a muscle is tight, blood flow through it is not as good. Its bound to get tired more quickly.

Tight muscles sometimes pull on parts of the body, sometimes making it difficult to sit or stand. Other muscles have to work to compensate. This tires you out too.

Tight muscles have other effects too. Sometimes tight muscles even compress nerves and veins, interfering with muscular function. Again, if blood is poor, energy levels are poor too.

So if you're more tired than you would like to be, look for tight muscles and get them taken care of.

Qi Gong Helps After a Long Day

I walked about 5 miles today up in San Francisco. It was great. The sun finally came out a bit.

Towards the end, my right foot felt a bit tired and tight. So I did some Qi Gong on it and it felt much better right away. Had to do it a couple of times but it was very helpful. The repetitive motion made it tight and Qi Gong loosened it back up.

After the long drive home, the lower back was tight too. More Qi Gong. Then a hot shower and I feel much better.

Obviously I have more work to do on the fascia in these areas so that they stop tightening up. But its nice to know one can get loose any time.

Movement, Softness, Incompleteness, Flow

We seem conditioned in the West to either stretch or contract. Bigger, harder, faster. That is exercise to us.

But try moving without squeezing, without stretching to the limit. The extremes inhibit the flow of blood to your muscles and exhaust the life it brings. Explore your range of motion gently.

Your muscles can't open up until you do.

When Sarcomeres Go Wrong

Last post we talked about how the healthy sarcomere functions. This time we'll discuss one thing that can go wrong.

When circulation of blood through a muscle is especially poor, the amount of oxygen and nutrients available to individual sarcomeres can nosedive. Without adequate oxygen and sugar, the sarcomere stops responding to the electrical impulses telling it to contract. It needs oxygen and energy to do so and these are unavailable.

The contraction of a sarcomere uses energy, not its relaxation, so the sarcomere is shortened when it freezes up. Many sarcomeres affected in this way cause the entire muscle to get shorter and stiffer.

But it gets worse. Because the sarcomere pumps its own blood, when it stops pumping it can no longer bring in fresh blood. The depleted blood remains. So the sarcomere can't recover. It needs an intervention.

The Sarcomere

Sarcomeres are the microscopic structures in your muscles whose contractions do the actual work of flexing your muscles. Strings of sarcomeres called myofibrils are bound together into muscle fibers. When your sarcomeres contract, these muscle fibers stiffen and a force is exerted.

The contraction and expansion of each sarcomere also pumps blood in and out of it. This pumping keeps the sarcomere supplied with the oxygen and nutrients it needs to function.

Even when a muscle is fully contracted, no more than a third of all the sarcomeres are actually contracted. Sarcomeres can’t stay contracted all of the time, as they need to keep pumping blood.

Healthy sarcomeres enable a muscle to contract and expand fully. When a healthy muscle is completely relaxed, it’s supple and doesn’t pull on anything else in the body. But what happens when things go wrong?

After Qi Gong

After Qi Gong, you will find that it is easier to stretch and massage the covering around each muscle (known as the fascia).

Doing so will improve circulation in that muscle because it is no longer trapped inside of stiff fascia during sustained effort (such as hanging your head over a keyboard for 4 hours).

That improved circulation prevents trigger points and lowers cortisol (the fight-or-flight stress hormone) during static activities.

So Qi Gong is great, but go the extra mile and work the fascia. Your muscle will thank you for it.

Qi Gong Works!

Qi Gong is slow movement of muscles coupled with deliberate energetic breathing.

The breathing increases the amount of oxygen in the blood. The movement is slow, so muscles have plenty of time to get fresh blood and more oxygen and nutrients between contractions.

And because the exertion is not intense, so oxygen is less likely to get depleted and that keeps your muscle cells open.

Its good stuff!

Qi Gong can get your muscles healthy. But more is needed to keep them that way. More on this tomorrow.

Flexibility Equals Life

“A newborn is soft and tender,
A crone, hard and stiff.
Plants and animals, in life, are supple and juicy;
In death, brittle and dry.
So softness and tenderness are attributes of life,
And hardness and stiffness, attributes of death.”

Verse 76 of the Tao Te Ching

If you believe Lao-tzu, the author of the Tao Te Ching, stiffness ages you. Stiffness is why older people move slower and can't do what they used to be able to do.

Much of this stiffness is reversible. Muscular stiffness is caused by specific problems with the muscular system that are totally treatable.

A bold assertion and a promising one. We'll see in the coming weeks how true it really is.

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Welcome

Welcome to my new blog. Its dedicated to ridding the world of muscular tension. I'll be discussing what goes wrong with muscles and the causes, effects and solutions.

I hope you find the discussion useful.