Fitness Insights by Jamie Atlas

Nancy Drew and I have a lot in common
(and I’m not talking about our love of tapered jackets!)

Is it just me or is the guy on the left totally flexing for this picture?

I like to think that when the body moves, it gives us clues as to potential problems and reasons for existing ones.
I like to look at pain not as an annoyance, but as something to be grateful for (well, not that I am grateful for others pain, but I am grateful for the signal that lets me know something needs to happen or things are just going to get worse).

The body is letting us know in its own way that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. Once we address that problem the pain will usually go away. What a beautiful system.

If we listen closely enough, we can begin to identify and unravel the clues of the body as they show themselves.

Whenever I hear someone talk about pain in their body, part of me becomes Nancy Drew. Well, maybe Sherlock Holmes would be a better (and more dashing) role to imagine myself becoming.

If you remember the game “CLUEDO” when you were a young tyke, you might have held your cards up high and thrown them down with great force at the same time shouting

“It was Miss Peacock, in the conservatory, with the lead pipe!”

Cluedo – where brutal slayings meet family entertainment

That’s pretty much what I do when I find the cause of pain in the body – wouldn’t it be great if there was a board game where you could get real excited and I jump up and announce to that:

“the pain in your right knee is because of your left inner thigh not externally rotating enough so your right glute is tightening in response to the tight inner left thigh which means your knee has to absorb more shock because your right glute is not moving as well and so your right knee is hurting due to the excessive load it is carrying!”

And then you throw down your cards… maybe not the best board game idea ever, but it would give that damn Cranium a run for its money I am sure! (ok maybe it would be less successful, but it’s a better idea than another monopoly theme knockoff, right?)

To return to the scene of the injury if I may, if I put on my Sherlock holmes hat and think about the human body, there are often many different sources an injury can evolve from.

If we feel pain in our left buttcheek it is our body trying to tell us something. If we listen closely enough – and perhaps ask the surrounding muscles what happened we can begin to develop a theory as to where the perpetrator (and perhaps his accomplices) are coming from.

How we deduce that? Well, that’s a whole new post there… The most important thing to know is just because you catch the muscle with the smoking gun, doesn’t mean you found who dunnit!

Frank should have known better than to have beans for breakfast that morning

If you can sense pain in a certain joint, you always check to see where the source might be coming from. The symptom and the cause are not necessarily always in the same location – We just need to follow the clues…

Did you ever have an injury that started with a different part of the body?