Chronic overuse injuries...how they plague you.

Chronic overuse injuries seem to be something that you just have to deal with when you play a sport.  A chronic knee injury, or shoulder pain when you train or excercise too much.  This isn't always true. 

When there is an imblance somewhere in your gait or in your sport, the injury you conitinually seem to be battling, can be just that...an imblance.  The plague you fight each day might be something that is fixable with the proper analysis, exercises and tissue work.  When an injury occurs, your body either fixes it by itself, or it needs help to fix it.  When the injuries are chronic, thats when the body could use some assistance.  With deep tissue work, specific for your problem, and proper exercises that help balance your body, chronic can become a thing of the past. 

Ever heard of people saying that cross training can be a great injury prevention.  When you cross train, your body doesn't pound the same pattern of movements over and over.  For example, when doing martial arts...a lot of the defense techniques are performed on one side of the body.  For instance left, and most training is geared towards front techniques.  So imagine your body, training to stand mostly with your left side forward, and trained to defend with left side forward.  What does the right side of your body look like?  It's slightly weaker and less coordinated then the left.

I pitched softball for 10 years through middle, high school and college.  The entire right side of my body was steller, not to toot  my own horn.  But when I stopped pitching and just began to lift weights to stay in shape...my left side was aweful.  I could curl 25 lbs on the right and only curl 20 lbs (on a good day) on the left.  Same for my legs, abs...all of it.  Not that I wasn't toned, but my strength wasn't the same when compared left to right.  So the point is...when dancing, fighting, jumping, running, spiking etc....if you don't work out in the opposite direction or never challenge your body in other ways, imbalances occur.  Those imbalances become chronic issues and come from over use.. but also from underuse. Stabilizer muscles are weak, gross muscles are too strong. 

Along with proper rehab exercises, deep tissue work needs to be an assistant to the healing process.  When you injure your muscles, you have to give your muscles a way to heal the damaged tissue.  Tissue work allows that to happen.  Breaking down the scar tissue and working with the fascia and muscle tissue allows your body to heal itself.  To keep your body healed and prevent a re-occurance of the same injury, exercises are implemented.  Those exercises maintain the problem areas.