Muscular balance refers to the state in which the ability of any muscle to contract and relax fully is unimpeded by excess tension.
When muscles are in a state of balance, there's an equal distribution of tension, strength, and endurance across the body's muscle groups, reducing the risk of injury, improving posture, and enhancing overall physical performance.
There are several components to muscular balance:
1. Agonist-Antagonist Balance: The agonist's muscles are the primary movers in action. At the same time, antagonists work in opposition to control the movement. For example, the biceps and triceps act as an agonist-antagonist pair in the arm. Maintaining balance between these ensures they provide equal force, which reduces joint strain.
2. Left-Right Balance: This ensures equal strength and flexibility on both sides of the body. Imbalances, such as favoring one side over the other, can lead to overuse injuries and issues related to posture.
Scoliosis serves as an extreme example.
3. Upper-Lower Body Balance: This ensures that the strength of the upper body is balanced with that of the lower body, allowing for overall body stability and reducing injury risk during activities that require whole-body coordination.
4. Core Strength Balance: The core muscles (e.g., abdominals, lower back, and hip muscles) provide stability and support to the spine. A balanced core helps maintain posture and reduce lower back pain.
Muscular imbalances can develop from poor posture, repetitive activities, lack of variety in exercise, or focusing too much on certain muscle groups. Correcting these imbalances through Corrective Massage supports a balanced, functional, and resilient body.
Indications that Lower Back and Hips are out of Balance:
- Chronic Pain: Persistent discomfort in areas like the lower back, neck, shoulders, or hips can signal imbalances or compensations in the musculoskeletal system.
- Postural Misalignment: Visible imbalances such as rounded shoulders, a forward head position, uneven hips, leg length differential, or an exaggerated curvature of the spine (lordosis, kyphosis, or scoliosis).
- Restricted Range of Motion: Difficulty moving joints freely or stiffness in areas like the shoulders, hips, or spine.
- Uneven Muscle Tone: Overdeveloped or underdeveloped muscles on one side of the body, often due to compensatory patterns or poor biomechanics.
- Frequent Injuries: Recurring injuries such as sprains, strains, or overuse injuries, which can result from improper load distribution via ‘Core’ imbalance.
- Fatigue or Weakness: A general sense of muscular fatigue or instability during daily activities or exercise, indicating poor core or foundational strength.
- Balance Issues: Difficulty maintaining balance or coordination during static positions (like standing) or dynamic movements.
- Breathing Patterns: Shallow, chest-dominant breathing instead of diaphragmatic breathing, often linked to tension in the core muscles.
- Gait Abnormalities: Changes in walking patterns, such as limping, uneven stride length, or excessive pronation/supination of the feet.
- Joint Pain or Clicking: Pain, stiffness, or audible clicking in joints like the knees, hips, or shoulders, indicating misalignment or strain.
- Headaches: Tension headaches caused by muscle tightness in the neck, shoulders, or jaw.
- Digestive or Pelvic Dysfunction: Issues such as constipation, bloating, or pelvic floor dysfunction, which can be influenced by improper core muscular engagement and alignment.
Addressing these signs through targeted interventions like those taught in The Berry Method® can help restore balance and improve overall well-being.
Remember when our bodies healed more efficiently?
This analogy may help you understand.
Musculoskeletal homeostasis refers to the body's ongoing effort to achieve balance and adaptation by using our muscles, bones, and connective tissues as a personal 'GPS.'
The Car's GPS:
• Goal-Oriented Navigation: GPS guides the car to a specific destination. If the route changes due to traffic, detours, or road closures, the GPS recalculates and adapts the path to stay on course.
• Constant Adjustments: The system continuously monitors the car's position and provides real-time corrections to ensure the car stays on track.
• Compensation for Errors: When the driver veers off the suggested path, the GPS compensates by recalculating, sometimes leading to longer, less efficient routes.
Musculoskeletal Homeostasis:
• Striving for Balance: The body uses its muscles to maintain equilibrium, ensuring that posture, movement, and internal processes support optimal function. Like the GPS, it continuously recalculates muscle tension to achieve this balance. This is called the vestibular righting reflex.
• Constant Adaptation: Muscles, bones, and connective tissues adjust in response to external forces, habitual movements, injuries, or imbalances. These adaptations are the body's way of "re-routing" to maintain functionality.
• Compensation and Tension: Just as a GPS might take a more complicated route to avoid obstacles, the body compensates for structural or functional imbalances by recruiting different muscles or altering movement patterns. This can lead to muscular tension, overuse, and even chronic pain as the body tries to "correct" itself.
The Result:
While the car eventually reaches its destination, repeated recalculations can lead to inefficiencies in the journey. Similarly, the body's continuous adjustments to maintain homeostasis may result in muscular tension and compensation patterns. Over time, these compensatory patterns can disrupt the body's natural equilibrium, leading to discomfort or dysfunction.
This analogy underscores the importance of addressing the root causes of imbalance in the musculoskeletal system, just as proactive driving and accurate GPS inputs prevent unnecessary detours.
The core principles of The Berry Method® acknowledge, respect, and respond to how muscular adaptations and compensations create an underlying tension that impacts the entire body.
'Stuck and Stagnant' is not healthy.
The vestibular reflex remains activated until core muscular-skeletal balance and homeostasis are restored. This interferes with various processes throughout the body.
Taum’s upcoming ‘Rebalancing the Lower Back and Hips’ class focuses on reducing those core muscular adaptations and compensations.
A Holistic approach.
It serves to remember that we, as therapists, do not heal anything. We simply recognize, respect, and support the body's 'built-in' healing ability.
Corrective Massage recognizes the importance of balanced relationships, movements, and interactions throughout the body's soft tissues*. These relationships include natural anatomical positions and functionally balanced movement unimpeded by soft tissue tension.
Functional balance implies that our soft tissues are working harmoniously to support pain-free, healthy movement and function.
In Taum's world of Corrective Massage, considering all bodily movement as an orchestration of soft tissue relationships is a fundamental principle and starting point.
These foundational principles include familiarity with Equilibrium and Homeostasis. AKA Balance.
For example: Walking initially appears to be a simple activity. It actually involves a complex orchestration of numerous soft tissues.
A symphony of movement:
Our body requires over 200 of our 600 muscles to take one step. Of those 200, many serve as compensating adapters working in the background to keep us upright as we walk. While all our weight is on the right foot, those background muscles are adapting and counterbalancing so we do not fall over.
Each and every soft tissue plays a vital role in the body's ability to move and adapt to unbalanced tensions.
Our bodies can adapt to those tensions.
But only so far...
Limping is an example of crossing the adaptation line.
Pain serves as an alert that unbalanced tension has exceeded the body's ability to adapt, and corrective therapy is required.
The foundational focus of this unique therapy is to interpret the alert and then identify and correct the soft tissue tensions and imbalances that have created those alerts.
Corrective massage has repeatedly proven to be an efficient and effective method to reduce and relieve pain.
I hope this information serves you and those you serve.
*Muscles, tendons, ligaments, membranes, and viscera.
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Rebalancing the Knee.
Date and location TBA.Find it, Feel it, Fix it.
This 6-hour class focuses on corrective massage techniques for rebalancing regional soft tissues that often play a central role in maintaining balance and pain-free movement in the Knee. |
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Rebalancing the Lower Back and Hips.
AKA: The Core Tuesday, January 28thFind it, Feel it, Fix it. Location: SLCThe class is full. I will return.
This 6-hour class focuses on corrective massage techniques for rebalancing regional soft tissues that often play a central role in maintaining balance and pain-free movement in the 'Core' region. |
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The Lauren Berry Method® of Visceral Massage. The Viscera, Lymph, and Digestion. Wednesday, January 29thFind it, Feel it, Fix it. Location: SLCThe class is full. I will return.
Stagnant is not healthy. My experience suggests visceral massage should be considered a 'Core' technique included in almost all sessions.
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The Lymphatic classes. Every cell in the body requires moisture.
This work is about much more than drainage.
Taum offers classes in Laurens Lymphatic work in 3 stages. This progression provides a solid fundamental understanding and tactile connection for incorporating Lauren's amazingly unique, efficient, effective, and practical approach to working with the body's primary fluid system into your 'Tactile Tool Box.' |
