Today's Best Advice: Buy a Lacrosse Ball (cool body engineering: Tensegrity)

As the cover photo to this article shows (and plenty of other vertical structures, just Google "tensegrity" to see them), a structure can be held up quite high simply by sticks and elastics. Our body works the same way, and the people at www.anatomytrains.com have dissected out the paths of the major elastics in the human body, and developed exercises and therapies for a variety of common problems. Their website offers videos, articles, and books so that you can learn more.

Here's a tiny bit of advice with the power to solve a lot of problems. Buy a lacrosse ball, and learn how to use it.

Here's how it works: your muscles and bones hold you up, you know that. But what holds your muscles and bones? Modern anatomists are learning to give more credit to the body's elastics: your connective tissue.

They're also learning that it's actually problems with the connective tissue that cause injuries quite often. Even if your chiropractor punches your bones back into place and your muscles heal from tears, unless the connective tissue is also balanced and healed properly, you'll continue to have injuries and problems.

When you have a bad knee, or a bad back, or a wonky hip, the culprit is often simply that your elastics are unevenly stretched, and they pull everything else out of alignment. If you leave the connective tissue unbalanced for long enough, muscles will start to build (and atrophy) unevenly.

The Tools

Yoga (done properly, i.e. listening to your body and not pressing yourself into injury) can be excellent for the balance of your connective tissues as it works muscle systems, not just individual muscles. Therefore, yoga moves can often highlight where your body's imbalances are. Maybe your knees are sore because your hips are pulled out of alignment. Or maybe it's because your hip flexors are tight, or problems in your feet, or some small not-straightness in your spine. It really is true that the parts all work together, and an issue in one spot almost always shows up in other places, too.

Massage
Massage is like yoga someone else does for you.

When you experience an injury that damages or overstretches your connective tissue (and perhaps the muscles it contains), it is important to keep that connective tissue stretched around your muscles in a balanced and proportional way so that healing occurs properly, without creating unbalanced scar tissue. Massage can be an essential tool in creating those neutral conditions.

Massage is, of course, also an excellent way to relieve the tensions and pains that pile up in our connective tissues due to stress. Piled up stress can cause injury as surely as a sharp impact. The cure? Be aware of the aches and pains in your body, and look to loosen your tissues when you can.

Anecdotal evidence: One wintertime back in the day, I was driving a car that had had the wrong size of snow tires put on the back (different from the front). Somehow it caught a tire in a deep snow/ice rut on the highway, and rolled over.
The tow truck driver was astonished I'd walked out alive (it was probably really lucky that I was driving with the wrong tires on, and not my father, whose car it was. Six inches taller than me, the roof might have crushed his skull when it came in).
Anyway, I more crawled out into a snow bank. Luckily for me, the people driving behind me had stopped too, and they offered to drive me to the hospital. "Nah," I said. I felt fine. I'd be grateful if they dropped me off at work.
So they did.
It wasn't until later that day that I started to feel the pain in my back. X-rays revealed that I had tears on the left and right side of my spine, so that it was pulling the bone into an s-shape.
Very luckily, the emergency room doctor I was blessed with that day prescribed me massage. So I had several massages over the next few weeks, and my back healed straight.

More recently, I experienced a sort of sideways whiplash in a car accident.

I was doing a lot of restorative yoga with an excellent teacher at the time (mainly for my own pleasure and general health), and the instructor was able to help me understand how to make sure those restorative yoga postures worked into the places where I was injured, so that my connective tissue and muscles healed nice and straight around my spine. I used what I had learned from my rollover-massage experience, and instead used restorative yoga to the same effect. As I was doing so much yoga at the time, I was pretty tuned in to where the pain was occurring.

(Full discosure: I also had two chiropractic appointments, the first of which relieved the headache I had on the day of the accident, but the second which didn't do much, I thought, so I saved the money from chiropractor visits and finally bought myself a yoga bolster, which is one of the best investments I have ever made. I spend quality time with my bolster every day now, just enjoying the deliciousness of knowing my body deeply, enjoying insomnia, or just hanging out in the living room.)

Car accidents can be good for your anatomy education! (Or, learn from my mistakes and skip the accidents yourself. :) Less painful.)

The Hot Tub
Yummy, yummy hot water. It isn't just a self-indulgence. Loosening up can keep you healthy.
A supercool thing about tensegrity structures such as your body and the toy below is that when you pull apart two of the sticks (or loosen up some muscles in your body), then contrary to what you would think, the other sticks ALSO pull apart. So if you start to loosen and heal some of your body parts, others will follow along and heal too.


The Ball
You have elastics that run from the bottom of your feet, all the way up the back lines of your body, and terminating in your head. So rolling your foot on a ball as in the video below can help you to have fewer headaches!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhvDEKI69-M

When I was in a tensegrity workshop for yoga teachers put on by the Anatomy Trains folks, the leaders had some of us volunteers do a standing forward bend in front of the audience, and then do the same standing forward bend after rolling one foot on the ball for three minutes. The difference was deep and profound. The audience gasped at the difference in tightness between right and left sides. We could all clearly see that the ball had loosened one side of the body profoundly. So I was an instant convert.  (The instructors told all of us volunteers to sit down after the demonstration, but I had to stand up again and do the other foot. It felt way too unbalanced after I'd loosened up one side!)

Lacrosse balls are available for as little as $5. Invest in one today and roll your feet on the ball while you are at your desk, watching TV, or talking on the telephone. Don't take my word for it! Try it for yourself!

Emotional Therapy
Emotions are stored in our bodies. Someone who is protecting themselves from a bully, for example, will protect their heart by hunching their shoulders to snuggle their heart deeper into their rib cage. Over years, this leads to a variety of health problems.

Acknowledging the emotions that lead to such imbalanced postures, and working to address them (e.g., changing the situation to get away from feeling bullied, or various cognitive and social strategies to take charge  and stand up for oneself) can help to heal the body and problems caused by emotions.

Some health practitioners believe that the root to most (or all) disease is emotions, stored in our tissues. According to this theory, working to clear away our emotional reactions to past hurts can affect our physical health by loosening and freeing tissues that get blocked by negative emotional residues.

Check out the following link to learn more (thanks to them for the cover photo to this article, also).
https://www.anatomytrains.com/fascia/tensegrity/