Is your body cheating you?

Have you ever felt like your body was cheating you, or working against you? Like it had a hidden agenda to slow you down or give you pain?

The truth of the matter is, it might be fighting what you think you might want to be doing. Ultimately it does have your best interests at heart, even if you don’t think so. All sounding a bit mystical? Let me continue.

It has your best interests at heart

The body’s main objective is to keep you safe and moving. It has to throw in compensations to do this after past injuries, be it a twisted ankle, badly stubbed toe, broken wrist, concussion or any other injury you might have collected along the way.

It will keep you moving and pain free as long as it can until it can’t compensate anymore. Pain is often the last thing to show itself.

Sneaky Signs To Spot A Compensation:

• Clawing of the toes
• Holding your breath
• Locking up of a joint or joints in your body
• Whole body stiffness

These are all clever little tricks I see people’s bodies putting into place to keep them safe and moving. And they work for a time really well, but eventually there comes a point when the compensations fall apart and pain will often follow.

This is often the place when people take action to get things sorted and out of pain. But knowing some of these signs now, you can start asking questions to get to the root of the compensation.

Examples

Why … might I need to claw my toes into the ground? – To feel more stable.

What … is the purpose for me doing this? – To keep me safe, to stop me falling over.

What … makes me feel like I might fall over?

Exercise – Stand up, give a shake and feel where you feel the weight in your feet. Does one foot feel heavier than the other? Do the feet feel balanced or do you have more weight in the front, back or side to side of each foot? Ideally, we would want them to be even.

Where … is the weight in my feet? – Heels

Answer – Get your weight to become more balanced in your body. In this case more weight is needed in the front of the feet.

This way you will become more stable so you won’t need to claw the ground to feel safe.

Done, got rid of a compensation.

Start having a play with your compensations and why they might have come about. Become your own master detective, you’ll learn a lot about your body and what you subconsciously do to keep safe.

Until next time …

Knowledge is absolutely power but only when ACTION is taken

Ellie x