Pilates and sports. Part II

Painful muscles misbalance is caused due to a bad position, poor health, work space conditions, injuries and the repetitive tension over shoulder and back structure. All the joints of the body must be supported in their natural position. The movement muscles make possible that, as their name say, our body can perform any type of movement. They are generally long muscles that work a 40% to 100% of maximum voluntary contraction (MVC).

When your arm moves off of your body, the trunk muscles have top get into action to stop them, that is, to stabilize them. Both types of muscles are needed to work out a prolonged resistance. These are short muscles that work their MVC in only 20% to 30%. When a person moves with a good movement of the stabilizing muscles, there will be a minimum waste of the joints.

Problems start when a muscle gets tensed. The damaged muscle gets stretched and weakened. But since movements still have to takes place, our body uses a different muscle combination to achieve the movement. This is that it establishes a guilty or “fake” movement mechanism. Some muscles that are used in excess are recruited by the brain over the weak ones.

A bit later, the bad position habits start feeling like a normal thing until the pain gets fixed in the muscles, producing shoulder injury, headaches, tension, neck pain, knee injuries, etc.
It is a common mistake in many training programs to focus on movement programs instead of focusing on the stabilizing muscles. What they are doing with this, is repeating the fake movement, leading to pain reinforcement.

Unfortunately, getting out of this way is not so used in sports training, but mostly in professional gyms. Actually, some sports, like tennis reinforce the muscular misbalance- the bad position habits just repeat with each maneuver, reinforcing the guilty patterns of movement that induce to pain.