A lot of clinicians compare peoples bodies to cars when they are explaining why their patient is in pain. But that’s an awful comparison and can lead to you reacting the wrong way to your pain and overprotecting it. Your body is not like a car…at all.
If your transmission fails, if you get a flat tire, if your engine stops working…you need to go to a mechanic to fix that (or maybe you fix it yourself, I can’t even change a light bulb, so I leave it to the pros). No matter how long you drive, those don’t repair themselves. In fact, the longer you drive with your car parts not working properly, the worse you can make the situation as other parts of the car start getting messed up. On top of that, the harder you work your car, the more donuts you do in the parking lot, the more times you push the pedal to the metal, the smaller the life span of the car. And each part in the car is there for a particular reason and it has a job. If it doesn’t do that job, there is no other part of the car that can do that job. That job doesn’t get done.
This is VERY different than they way your body works. Your body is the product of millions of years of evolution. Your body is too important to rely on one particular part to fully function. It has a lot of redundancies. There are a lot of back ups to many important parts of your body.
You have multiple webs of blood vessels infusing the same areas since without blood flow tissues die. You have the ability to heal if your tissues are damaged or different tissues can take over the job of the damaged tissues if they are beyond repair. You have two kidneys and two lungs. You have multiple muscles that are able to perform the same or similar action on joints. You have multiple ligaments that are there as a back up to other ligaments to keep bones in place. You even have muscles in place that work as a back up to other ligaments. People can live a perfectly normal life with a tear in their biceps muscle in your elbow, with a rotator cuff tear in your shoulder or with an ACL tear in your knee (I’ll explain this in more detail soon). Your elbow, shoulder and knee can still function pretty well without these. You don’t completely stop functioning if ONE muscle or ONE ligament stops doing its job. You can still move around, get food and make babies (from an evolutionary perspective) and you can still enjoy a full, fun life.
Your body is very efficient and it doesn’t waste energy if it doesn’t need to. It uses the minimum amount of energy it needs to for you to do what you need to do. If all you need to do is sit down and watch TV all day, it will be really good at that. If all of a sudden you decide to go for a jog, you won’t be good at that and you won’t last long. Your body needs to be trained to do what it needs to do. If you need to start running, you start running for a few minutes. Next session, you run for a longer period of time and you keep progressing. You’ll gradually be able to run longer and longer. If you need to get stronger, you lift heavier and heavier weights. Now your body will start using its energy (the food you eat) to build bigger muscles, to make thicker bones, to develop thicker tendons and ligaments, and develop better nerve connections to your muscles in order to make them work better and lift more weight. The more you push your body, the more your body adapts to the physical stress you put on it. That means it works BETTER the more you physically stress it, unlike your car.
This is important to understand because if you physically stress your body, your tissues, your muscles, your ligaments, your bones, will all be able to tolerate more physical stress than if you didn’t. If they are able to tolerate more stress, that means your brain will not feel as threatened when it encounters an out of the ordinary stress. For example, if I train my body to be able to pick up 300 lbs from the floor while I’m at the gym (deadlifting), it is much less likely for me to “throw out my back” if I have to pick up a box that weighs 100 lbs from the floor. My body is trained to do that, so it’s much less likely that picking up that box will lead to my brain trying to protect me and make me experience pain (what is pain?), It’s POSSIBLE to feel pain since there are A LOT of reasons you can experience pain, but much less likely since I’ve built up my tolerance for physical stress.
Know Pain Physio 