forward with all kinds of intricate adjust- ments by wrist and fingers happening si- multaneously as the ball is released. The left arm moves back, also simultaneously, to a position parallel to or behind the body. Meantime counterbalancing action is tak- ing place in the lower body and legs, with the pivot-point being the pelvic girdle. It’s all about balance against the pull
of gravity, with the purpose of harnessing and directing energy into the football, so that the ball goes where you intend and you stay upright instead of falling on your face. Think about it. There has to be a medium that dynamically, instantaneous- ly, in real time manages how much and how far every single muscle fiber in your body is extending or contracting in relation to every other fiber. That’s the fascial net- work -- interacting with the neural, vascu- lar, and other systems to be sure – but it’s the fascial network that’s the prime con- tractor here. Think electro-chemical grid – a medium that is infinitely malleable and responsive to your wishes, until something throws a glitch into it. That grid has built into it millions upon
millions of dynamic relationships – pat- terns of movement that can and do shift as needed in a millisecond. You started laying down those patterns when you were a baby, and as an active adult, you haven’t quit.
Glitch Happens This infinitely variable grid functions
just fine until that trauma we mentioned occurs. Could be anything – an automobile wreck, a swift kick in the butt (literally, it happens, right here in the good ol’ USA), a fall down stairs – but when it occurs, there’s now a crack, a break, an interrup- tion in the smoothness with which fibers pass off action from one to another that no amount of exercise is going to fix. It’s a dysfunctional pattern-within-the-pattern, one that interferes with how muscles move not only internally to each muscle, but in relationship to all others. And, it doesn’t necessarily reside in the muscles that are doing the hurting. For example, in all the examples of
trauma just listed what is inevitably af- fected is the pelvis and more specifically the muscles that are attached to it. One or more of those attached muscles is sud- denly force-stretched beyond its ability to extend. If it tears, the tissues literally break in two, requiring stitches, immobilizing,
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etc. to heal. When it over-stretches – a sprain in ligaments, a strain in muscle fi- bers – injury occurs, but it’s not the kind that shows up on an X-ray or MRI. (For simplicity, we’re going to confine ourselves to strains here, although much of this dis- cussion applies equally to sprains). So you’ve got a suddenly, violently
over-stretched muscle, let’s say in the erec- tor spinae group where it inserts at the occipital ridge – that space between the two boney knobs on either side of your head, at the top of your neck – as happens in what’s called a whip-lash event. It’s not torn, there’re no broken bones, but it hurts. Why didn’t it tear? Because there’s a net- work, a connected series of bungee cords of muscle/fascial tissue behind it, each of which lends some additional stretch so as to cut that section some slack. Why does it hurt? Because it’s stretched to the point where its resiliency is nearly exhausted, like a rubber band that’s pulled as far as it will go before parting. It’s largely in the fascial tissue that this resiliency resides, and the resiliency is only there when the fascia is in the electro-chemical state called sol. Now the fascia has been vio- lently over-stretched, consequently under- going a shift to the gel (relatively hard) state.
Like that rubber band, it can’t imme- diately return to its designed state of resil- iency. Unlike the rubber band,
it can
eventually return to that state, but it can’t do it simply by being worked. We’ll come back to that. Right now, we want to return to the pain in your right lower back. It’s still there, remember, and it’s intricately tied to your neck pain. When the whip-lash occurred while your head snapped for- ward-then-back, the force was being dis- tributed down the erector spinae and other related muscle/fascia groups, each giving a little bit so that the portion at the neck wouldn’t tear. Everybody gave, all the way down to the iliocostalis lumborum, which is an origin of the erector spinae at the pelvic bone. That portion couldn’t give because it was busy absorbing its own violent snap forward, doing its best to maintain its own integrity. The forward snap wasn’t of equal force on each side of the spinal column, either, because the right side was somewhat stiffened by the right leg, which was supporting the right foot, which was firmly jammed onto the brake pedal. The left side gave, the right side didn’t.
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While the left side of the pelvis rotated forward to release the force, the right side was stopped, in effect thrust backward, at the same time the demand for slack for the neck was coming down the erector spinae group. Something had to give. What gave was the portion of muscle/fascia just north of the pelvis on the right side, stretching beyond its capacity to return, virtually sacrificing itself for the neck tissue. Now you felt pain in the neck and in the lower back – with the neck pain being the loud- est overshadowing the back pain – so you sought to resolve that first. If you followed the usual allopathic medical process, you probably took muscle relaxers, pain and anti-inflamma-
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