Common Muscle Imbalance Examples
One of the most common examples of a muscle imbalance
that causes back pain occurs in many people today who work
in sedentary positions. We call it “forward-tipped pelvis.” All
(that sitting tightens the hip flexors (fronts of hips
Meanwhile, the stomach (abdominal), hamstring, and
buttock muscles become weak from being underused
Figure 1: Forward-tipped pelvis versus neutral pelvis
The tight muscles pull the pelvis down and forward,
creating an excessive curve in the lower torso and causing the
abdomen to protrude forward. The resulting pressure on the
lower spine can eventually cause dysfunction and injury, such
as sciatica, a herniated disc, or a muscle spasm.
Another widespread muscle imbalance is one we like to call
“forward head and shoulders.”
Forward Head & Neck
Figure 2: Forward head and neck versus neutral spine
This occurs frequently because people spend so much time
hunched over computers, steering wheels, office desks,
stoves—almost every activity we do requires us to lean
forward.
This causes the muscles in the chest and at the base of the
neck to tighten up, while the muscles in the upper back and
shoulders weaken and stretch out, putting pressure on the
upper spine and causing upper back and neck pain.
There are other common muscle imbalances, but perhaps
you can begin to see how our everyday routines work our
muscles unevenly, create bad posture, and eventually lead to
pain.
Your Muscle Strength: Use It or Lose It
The body is truly an amazing machine. The more you
work it, the stronger it gets. In contrast, if you drive your car
for thousands of miles, it’s not going to drive any faster or get
better gas mileage. If you play your upright piano for years,
it’s never going to grow intoa grand piano. The human body,
on the other hand, responds towork by becoming stronger
and more efficient—especially in the muscles.
As you go about your daily routine, using one hand, arm,
or leg more than the other, that part of the body becomes
stronger. Imagine if you lifted weights with only your left arm
for several months and did very little with your right arm.
Pretty soon you would notice a definite difference between
the two.
When you exercise or use a muscle, the fibers are
stimulated, stressed, or slightly “damaged.” This is why you
may feel sore after a particular activity. During rest, the body
repairs the muscle, building it back up to withstand similar
work in the future. The fascinating thing is that the body goes
the extra mile in reconstruction, building the muscle up
stronger than it was before, so you can handle the same
activity with greater ease.
However, the opposite also is true: When you don’t work a
muscle, it not only doesn’t growstronger, it actually grows
weaker, sort of like a basketball thatisn’t inflated regularly. If
you’ve ever had an operation on one leg or arm and had to
build the muscles back up again, you know this fact well!
Or, if you’ve ever been confined to bed for a week or two
due to a medical condition, you’ll remember how wobbly you
felt when you tried to get up again. This is because your
muscles had already started toweaken from inactivity.
So, how do these uneven muscles result in a tug-of-war
inside your body
Striving for Balance
When we think of balance, we often imagine two things
working in opposition to one another. We may visualize two
children on a teeter-totter, for instance, or the two ropes that
lift and lower a flag on a pulley. Muscles work much the same
way—in twos. In order for you to be able to move forward
and back and side to side, each muscle needs a partner muscle
to pull the opposite way.
If you bend your elbow to touch your neck, your biceps
(the muscles on the front of the upper arm) pull, or contract
and shorten, and the triceps (the muscles on the back of the
upper arm) relax and go into a stretched position. If you
didn’t have the triceps muscles to pull your arm back out, it
would remain bent. Fortunately, when you’re ready, the
triceps contract while the biceps relax to straighten your arm
again. This is why it’s so important to keep both muscles in
an opposing muscle group balanced.
I’m not saying here that both muscles need to be of equal
strength, as some muscles are naturally designed to be
stronger than others.
Rather, each muscle should maintain the state of strength
and flexibility that keeps the nearby joints functioning
optimally. This allows you to moveeasily in all directions in
the way the body was designed to move.
When it comes to eliminating and preventing back pain,
the goal isn’t necessarily to have muscles as strong and flexible
as possible—though that certainly helps. The goal, as we said
in Chapter 3, is balance: Your muscle pairs need balanced
strength and flexibility to support your body height and
weight and allow for normal movement.
Unfortunately, for most of us, keeping all the muscle pairs
equally balanced is a tall order. Not only do we suffer from
working some too much and others too little, we suffer from
stretchingsome too much and others too little. But the even
bigger challenge is that most people aren’t even aware of this.
While this basic understanding of how our bodies work
should be common knowledge, it isn’t, and that’s why so
many people struggle withnagging aches and pains
I Can’t Touch My Toes Anymore!”
Many of us, as we get older, become less flexible. When we
were children we could probably touch our toes, do
somersaults, and even perform splits. But as we get older, our
muscles seem to tighten up like boards. You may be surprised
to hear that age isn’t the main culprit.
-A muscle’s natural reaction is to contract. Just like a roly
poly bug that curls up when you touch it, the muscle—when
you ask it to work—will tighten.
Think of what happens when you touch a hot burner by
mistake. The muscle contracts to pull your hand away,
sometimes before you even realize what’s happened.
Similarly, when you perform an activity, the muscle
contracts to help you perform it. That means for every activity
you do, some muscle, somewhere, is pulling or contracting.
Do the activity frequently and for extended periods of time,
and the muscle is required to stay in that short, contracted
state.
If the muscle is stretched during a resting and healing
period, it most likely will returnto its relaxed, elongated, and
more flexible state. (This is why most fitness trainers, like me,
recommend stretching after exercising, to elongate the muscle
again after it’s been tightened from physical activity.) If it’s
not stretched, it will stay tight, and at the end of the healing
process it will remain a little shorter than it was before.
For most of us who do certain activities over and over
again, but fail to adopt a regular stretching routine, this is
how we lose flexibility.
Gradually, our muscles get so used to being in a
contracted, tightened state that they tend to stay that way.
Suddenly, we can no longer touch our toes—or for some
folks, even our knees!
Muscle Flexibility: Stretch It or Lose It
If you’re a woman who wears high heels, most likely
you’ve heard the warnings: Wear them too much and the
muscles in the backs of your lower legs—the calf muscles
will shorten. And if you haven’t, here it is now: Wearing high
heels is asking for problems, and it’s one of the worst things
you can do to your feet and body. You can visualize this
effect.
Just imagine your calf muscle as a rubber band that
extends from the back of your knee to your heel. When you
wear high heels, the rubber band contracts (or gets shorter) to
accommodate the shorter distance between your heel and
your knee. Over time—particularly if you wear these shoes up
to eight hours a day, five daysa week—the muscle adapts to
this shorter position, so that when you take the high heels off
you feel a pull as the calf muscle tries to lengthen again to set
your heel on the floor
The same thing can happen to the muscles in the backs of
your thighs, called the hamstrings. Visually, you can imagine
the hamstring “rubber band” at a certain length when you’re
standing. What happens when you sit down? The rubber
band—in this case, the muscle in the back of the leg—
shortens to allow you to sit.
If you sit too much, the muscle will adapt itself to that
position as normal and become permanently shortened, again,
reducing your flexibility and causing pain when you stand or
need to bend over. This shortening of the muscles happens
throughout the body, with any muscle that is required to
remain in a shortened position for a long time—and is
stretched too little.
Lack of stretching and overworkof muscles are a couple of
reasons why we lose flexibility. But there is another reason,
which you never hear health care professionals talk about:
excess fibrin. A more common termfor it is “scar tissue.” I’ll
talk more about fibrin in Chapter 6, but for now, understand
that when you work a muscle, some of the fibers are damaged.
This is a good thing, because when the body goes into repair
mode, it typically builds the muscle back stronger than it was
before.
However, part of that rebuilding process involves
producing fibrin or “scar tissue,” which forms a sort of
latticework on which the body can build new tissue. (Picture
the crisscross framework on a building undergoing
remodeling.) To provide maximum structural integrity for
your injured tissues and joints, fibrin is a naturally stiff and
inflexible material. The more fibrin that builds up in your
body, the more inflexible you become.
Typically, once the repair work is finished, a special type of
enzymes called proteolytic enzymes come in to complete the
job by breaking down the fibrin and whisking it away
Unfortunately, as we get older, our bodies don’t produce as
much of these critical enzymes as when we were younger
Without these enzymes doing the cleanup job, fibrin builds
up in our connecting tissues. This is why, when you turn 40,
50, or 60, you begin to feel stiff all over and less springy than
when you were younger.
You can see how our tug-of-war is getting worse. Not only
is it going on between strong versus weak muscle pairs, it’s
happening between flexible versusinflexible muscle pairs. And
guess what’s in the middle of the battle? Your spine_
specifically your neck, back, and hips.
One of the most common examples of a muscle imbalance
that causes back pain occurs in many people today who work
in sedentary positions. We call it “forward-tipped pelvis.” All
(that sitting tightens the hip flexors (fronts of hips
Meanwhile, the stomach (abdominal), hamstring, and
buttock muscles become weak from being underused
Forward-Tipped Pelvis
Figure 1: Forward-tipped pelvis versus neutral pelvis
The tight muscles pull the pelvis down and forward,
creating an excessive curve in the lower torso and causing the
abdomen to protrude forward. The resulting pressure on the
lower spine can eventually cause dysfunction and injury, such
as sciatica, a herniated disc, or a muscle spasm.
Another widespread muscle imbalance is one we like to call
“forward head and shoulders.”
Forward Head & Neck
Figure 2: Forward head and neck versus neutral spine
This occurs frequently because people spend so much time
hunched over computers, steering wheels, office desks,
stoves—almost every activity we do requires us to lean
forward.
This causes the muscles in the chest and at the base of the
neck to tighten up, while the muscles in the upper back and
shoulders weaken and stretch out, putting pressure on the
upper spine and causing upper back and neck pain.
There are other common muscle imbalances, but perhaps
you can begin to see how our everyday routines work our
muscles unevenly, create bad posture, and eventually lead to
pain.
Your Muscle Strength: Use It or Lose It
The body is truly an amazing machine. The more you
work it, the stronger it gets. In contrast, if you drive your car
for thousands of miles, it’s not going to drive any faster or get
better gas mileage. If you play your upright piano for years,
it’s never going to grow intoa grand piano. The human body,
on the other hand, responds towork by becoming stronger
and more efficient—especially in the muscles.
As you go about your daily routine, using one hand, arm,
or leg more than the other, that part of the body becomes
stronger. Imagine if you lifted weights with only your left arm
for several months and did very little with your right arm.
Pretty soon you would notice a definite difference between
the two.
When you exercise or use a muscle, the fibers are
stimulated, stressed, or slightly “damaged.” This is why you
may feel sore after a particular activity. During rest, the body
repairs the muscle, building it back up to withstand similar
work in the future. The fascinating thing is that the body goes
the extra mile in reconstruction, building the muscle up
stronger than it was before, so you can handle the same
activity with greater ease.
However, the opposite also is true: When you don’t work a
muscle, it not only doesn’t growstronger, it actually grows
weaker, sort of like a basketball thatisn’t inflated regularly. If
you’ve ever had an operation on one leg or arm and had to
build the muscles back up again, you know this fact well!
Or, if you’ve ever been confined to bed for a week or two
due to a medical condition, you’ll remember how wobbly you
felt when you tried to get up again. This is because your
muscles had already started toweaken from inactivity.
So, how do these uneven muscles result in a tug-of-war
inside your body
Striving for Balance
When we think of balance, we often imagine two things
working in opposition to one another. We may visualize two
children on a teeter-totter, for instance, or the two ropes that
lift and lower a flag on a pulley. Muscles work much the same
way—in twos. In order for you to be able to move forward
and back and side to side, each muscle needs a partner muscle
to pull the opposite way.
If you bend your elbow to touch your neck, your biceps
(the muscles on the front of the upper arm) pull, or contract
and shorten, and the triceps (the muscles on the back of the
upper arm) relax and go into a stretched position. If you
didn’t have the triceps muscles to pull your arm back out, it
would remain bent. Fortunately, when you’re ready, the
triceps contract while the biceps relax to straighten your arm
again. This is why it’s so important to keep both muscles in
an opposing muscle group balanced.
I’m not saying here that both muscles need to be of equal
strength, as some muscles are naturally designed to be
stronger than others.
Rather, each muscle should maintain the state of strength
and flexibility that keeps the nearby joints functioning
optimally. This allows you to moveeasily in all directions in
the way the body was designed to move.
When it comes to eliminating and preventing back pain,
the goal isn’t necessarily to have muscles as strong and flexible
as possible—though that certainly helps. The goal, as we said
in Chapter 3, is balance: Your muscle pairs need balanced
strength and flexibility to support your body height and
weight and allow for normal movement.
Unfortunately, for most of us, keeping all the muscle pairs
equally balanced is a tall order. Not only do we suffer from
working some too much and others too little, we suffer from
stretchingsome too much and others too little. But the even
bigger challenge is that most people aren’t even aware of this.
While this basic understanding of how our bodies work
should be common knowledge, it isn’t, and that’s why so
many people struggle withnagging aches and pains
I Can’t Touch My Toes Anymore!”
Many of us, as we get older, become less flexible. When we
were children we could probably touch our toes, do
somersaults, and even perform splits. But as we get older, our
muscles seem to tighten up like boards. You may be surprised
to hear that age isn’t the main culprit.
-A muscle’s natural reaction is to contract. Just like a roly
poly bug that curls up when you touch it, the muscle—when
you ask it to work—will tighten.
Think of what happens when you touch a hot burner by
mistake. The muscle contracts to pull your hand away,
sometimes before you even realize what’s happened.
Similarly, when you perform an activity, the muscle
contracts to help you perform it. That means for every activity
you do, some muscle, somewhere, is pulling or contracting.
Do the activity frequently and for extended periods of time,
and the muscle is required to stay in that short, contracted
state.
If the muscle is stretched during a resting and healing
period, it most likely will returnto its relaxed, elongated, and
more flexible state. (This is why most fitness trainers, like me,
recommend stretching after exercising, to elongate the muscle
again after it’s been tightened from physical activity.) If it’s
not stretched, it will stay tight, and at the end of the healing
process it will remain a little shorter than it was before.
For most of us who do certain activities over and over
again, but fail to adopt a regular stretching routine, this is
how we lose flexibility.
Gradually, our muscles get so used to being in a
contracted, tightened state that they tend to stay that way.
Suddenly, we can no longer touch our toes—or for some
folks, even our knees!
Muscle Flexibility: Stretch It or Lose It
If you’re a woman who wears high heels, most likely
you’ve heard the warnings: Wear them too much and the
muscles in the backs of your lower legs—the calf muscles
will shorten. And if you haven’t, here it is now: Wearing high
heels is asking for problems, and it’s one of the worst things
you can do to your feet and body. You can visualize this
effect.
Just imagine your calf muscle as a rubber band that
extends from the back of your knee to your heel. When you
wear high heels, the rubber band contracts (or gets shorter) to
accommodate the shorter distance between your heel and
your knee. Over time—particularly if you wear these shoes up
to eight hours a day, five daysa week—the muscle adapts to
this shorter position, so that when you take the high heels off
you feel a pull as the calf muscle tries to lengthen again to set
your heel on the floor
The same thing can happen to the muscles in the backs of
your thighs, called the hamstrings. Visually, you can imagine
the hamstring “rubber band” at a certain length when you’re
standing. What happens when you sit down? The rubber
band—in this case, the muscle in the back of the leg—
shortens to allow you to sit.
If you sit too much, the muscle will adapt itself to that
position as normal and become permanently shortened, again,
reducing your flexibility and causing pain when you stand or
need to bend over. This shortening of the muscles happens
throughout the body, with any muscle that is required to
remain in a shortened position for a long time—and is
stretched too little.
Lack of stretching and overworkof muscles are a couple of
reasons why we lose flexibility. But there is another reason,
which you never hear health care professionals talk about:
excess fibrin. A more common termfor it is “scar tissue.” I’ll
talk more about fibrin in Chapter 6, but for now, understand
that when you work a muscle, some of the fibers are damaged.
This is a good thing, because when the body goes into repair
mode, it typically builds the muscle back stronger than it was
before.
However, part of that rebuilding process involves
producing fibrin or “scar tissue,” which forms a sort of
latticework on which the body can build new tissue. (Picture
the crisscross framework on a building undergoing
remodeling.) To provide maximum structural integrity for
your injured tissues and joints, fibrin is a naturally stiff and
inflexible material. The more fibrin that builds up in your
body, the more inflexible you become.
Typically, once the repair work is finished, a special type of
enzymes called proteolytic enzymes come in to complete the
job by breaking down the fibrin and whisking it away
Unfortunately, as we get older, our bodies don’t produce as
much of these critical enzymes as when we were younger
Without these enzymes doing the cleanup job, fibrin builds
up in our connecting tissues. This is why, when you turn 40,
50, or 60, you begin to feel stiff all over and less springy than
when you were younger.
You can see how our tug-of-war is getting worse. Not only
is it going on between strong versus weak muscle pairs, it’s
happening between flexible versusinflexible muscle pairs. And
guess what’s in the middle of the battle? Your spine_
specifically your neck, back, and hips.
