Move Better

"The bad days aren't as bad anymore. The good days are still pretty good though." That's how Dr. Tyler explains recovery to patients here in the community who feel like they've hit a wall.

If you've had a setback lately, what did you need to hear to keep going?

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Pain tells you what not to do. It doesn't tell you what to do instead.

That's the actual problem most people with low back pain are stuck in. They know certain movements hurt. They avoid them. But the body never learns the alternative.

Once we show the body that "if you do it this way it doesn't hurt," there's an automatic propagation that happens in the background whether we wanted to or not. The body starts to drift toward relief on its own.

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Has your pain ever told you what to avoid but left you with no idea what to do instead?

Heel pain that starts at your eyebrows sounds wrong. But there's a continuous sheet of fascia that runs from the eyebrows, over the top of the head, down the neck, the back of the legs, and blends into the plantar fascia at the bottom of the feet. Restriction anywhere along that chain adds tension to the end of it. That's why forward head posture or stiff hips can show up as heel pain.

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Has your heel pain ever been looked at from the neck or hips down?

Most low back pain isn't a damaged tissue problem. It's a cost problem.

Most people are stabilizing their midline by compressing the passive tissues of the low back, the disc, the vertebrae, the joints, the ligaments. And it does work. It's a temporary fix. But long term, the cost is accumulating stress on tissues that are slow to recover.

That's the ache that keeps coming back.

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Have you ever been told your back pain is just "wear and tear"?

"My only regret as a competitive lifter is I didn't take enough time away after competitions. I would always jump back into it." - Dr. Tyler

Two to three weeks away from snatching and clean and jerking. Spending more time doing things I hadn't done in a while and having fun with it. Then going back slowly. That's what I wish I'd done.

Your body needs time to recover. Deloads aren't optional, they're structural. And after a competition, that means stepping away from the sport-specific work entirely for a bit.

What does your post-competition recovery actually look like?

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If you've been stretching your hip flexors constantly but the tightness keeps coming back, the muscle isn't ignoring you. The brain is recruiting it for a reason, and until we train a different way to stabilize, we can stretch all day and we're not going to have long-term change.

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Anyone in Portland been told to "just keep stretching" and found it wasn't enough?

Maybe you have heard running is bad for your knees, except you're only having pain in one knee, and you run with both legs. That's not a knee problem. That's a pattern problem.

The calf needs to be the suspension. The hips need to be the motor. When those two things get swapped, when the calf is doing all the generating and none of the absorbing, the knee ends up in the middle of a job it was never meant to do.

Nobody's watching you run. We will.

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What's one thing you've been told about your knee pain that never quite made sense to you?

Most neck pain isn't a neck problem. Thoracic mobility is almost always the real issue.

When we see someone with neck pain, we start by watching them walk and screening the lumbar and thoracic spine. Mobilize the thoracics, and the neck pain usually resolves without ever touching the neck.

The neck is a symptom site, not the source.

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Have you ever had neck pain treated without anyone checking your mid-back?