It is important to understand the root cause of pain and mechanism of lower body injury. When we exercise or perform activities, traditionally, we carve out enough time to get warmed up and do the activity. Most people would say their cool-down processes consists of shaking it off for a minute. Then they walk to the car, drive home and sit on the couch without another thought.
That is not how we want you to approach training or approach living your life. Don’t wait until you have so much tension built up in your lower body. Do not wait until you have an injury or pain before you restore balance to the joints and muscles.
You Need to Move
Typically the mechanism of lower body injury has to do with the primary muscles that we use all the time. These muscles go from being very active and then sitting sedentary for long periods of time. Unfortunately what I’ve just described is essentially the contemporary work process. For many, we go to the gym at night or go on the weekends and then most of the week we’re stuck sitting sedentary at work. Our muscles stay contracted in the front of our hips, half elongated and half contracted on the back of our hips.
By doing this, we’re building up tension so the muscles that we’re exercising are getting tighter because we’re building strength and then never really releasing tension from them. We’re also sitting stagnant and the fascia or the connective tissue in our bodies, if you sit still for too long, it’s going to try and ‘heal’ that part of your body in that position.
Sedentary Scarring
If we cut our skin open, we first have to pull the two ends of the skin back together. Then the cut needs to be stabilized with a band-aid or with stitches. If we do that, because it’s not moving, our scar tissue or connected tissue, will knit that wound back together.
Now think of it on a bigger scale. If I’m sitting, the front of my hips are staying still for a very long period of time. During that time, my body doesn’t know any better, and it’s trying to heal me into a seated position. The problem is you can’t feel it happening. However, when I stand up, I’ll get this feeling like, “Ooh, I have to stretch out my hips because they’ve just been stagnant for a long time.”
That feeling of restriction is scar tissue trying to lay down across the joint and force you to stay in this position. The message we’re sending our brains all day long is that we’re keeping something still, so you should heal that. We don’t want that to move and that is the wrong message.
Bring Back Balance
To combat the mechanisms of lower body injury DCT programs will help you will learn how to mitigate tension as you’re forming it and how to use our specialized resistance stretching techniques to restore proper length and function to the muscles; not just how to beat them up and make them stronger. We want to rebalance them and keep your movement in line with the strength of the muscle.
And that’s what makes DCT unique, is the fact that we actually distinguish the difference between the mechanisms of injury. So, just to reiterate, wear and tear is going to be one type of injury mechanism. We have to address that by reversing and bringing balance back to the movements with resistance stretching. Otherwise it’s going to be mitigating and keeping scar tissue from forming across our joints and restricting function that way.
