News Report: Muscle Imbalances Defy Homeostasis, Demand Pay Raise

This news report just in from the world of sport: muscle imbalances - those crazy anomalies that plague athletes everywhere – have been caught defying homeostasis. Not only do they cause every sport injury known to man (or are believed to do so anyways), but they are now defying homeostasis. Homeostasis! Can you believe it? What makes this turn of events more troubling is that they are demanding greater pay for their treatment. Health care experts are reporting that this is sure to become a troubling development for lawmakers in an upcoming November election cycle.

A little satire goes a long way. But the real world isn’t far off this when you hear coaches and clinicians describe “muscle imbalances”. The term is a misnomer at best, and a blatant excuse for interminable treatment at worst.

If you’ve ever sustained a sport injury – or any injury, for that matter - you may have been told that you have one of these dreaded muscle imbalances. Your life was going along fine, but over time you developed this sinister muscle imbalance which has now, inexplicably, caused you to have this knee pain. Or neck pain. Or pain of countless other origins. You are told that your problem has been brewing for years, unbeknownst to anyone including you (or your nociceptors or mechanoreceptors, but I digress), and then, there it was – the straw that broke the imbalanced camel’s back.

Shortly thereafter, you were probably told that your problem, having taken many years to develop, was now going to require on-going stretching, active release, manipulations, or similar. To the end of time – or one day short of it if all goes smoothly. Even worse, you are told that not only has this muscle imbalance caused your injury but it is going to impact your sport performance. Forever. Or two days short of that – unless you stretch, stretch, stretch and stretch some more.

There is a simple caveat in human physiology: the body always attempts to maintain homeostasis. The body will regulate its internal environment and will tend to maintain a stable status. With this in mind, we are always in some degree of homeostasis. If we don’t balance stimulus and response, we are in for a load of trouble attempting to live on the planet Earth. Or any other planet for that matter.

As it stands, we are in balance right here, right now, at this very moment. Muscles are in balance. This balance is defined by our function. The human body adapts to the demands imposed on it. And if we provide a context, an environment, in which the body can adapt, then it will. The self-regulating system does a great job of finding balance, and it doesn’t usually take months or years to find it. It would be counter-productive on many levels to have a system that takes a decade to let us know that a problem exists. In order for us to survive, we need to find balance – and we need it quickly. A delayed response like this wouldn’t be a very effective mechanism for good survival skills, let alone training adaptations and the like.

Add to that one other thing: that pain warns us of harm (or potential perceived harm) on a local or systemic basis. Pain doesn’t serve much value if it is a delayed reaction – again, it wouldn’t provide us with very good survival skills if that was the case.

Begin with the end in mind. Understand the symptomatic and mechanical responses to mechanical loading in order to understand the behavior of the system. Build capacity. Train for function. And forget about the minutiae.

Does this pseudo-scientific diagnosis really tell us anything about our injury incidence or ability to improve our performance? Or is it just another disempowering phrase used to conjure up greater demand for interminable passive treatments?

Photo credits: cogdogblog