How Stretching From the Inside Out™ Works
Where It Hurts May Not Be the Whole Story
Pain is important. It gets our attention.
But the place that hurts today may not tell us the whole story.
Think of pain as the tip of an iceberg. It is the part you feel.
When pain doesn’t resolve with conventional treatment – or returns after treatment – we need to look elsewhere for what is interfering with its resolution and affecting how your body moves and functions.
Underneath the tip of the iceberg may be old injuries, traumas, scar tissue and surgeries that continue to impact how your body functions even when there is no apparent pain connecting those earlier traumas with the pain you are experiencing now.
Those earlier injuries and traumas required the body to compensate so you could keep standing, moving and functioning.
Treat the Tip of the Iceberg and miss what’s underneath
The Body Compensates
When you are injured or experience trauma, the body responds to protect you and keep you functioning as effectively and efficiently as possible.
A Simple Example: A Sprained Ankle or Broken Leg
If you sprain your ankle or break your leg, you automatically hike your hip.
You take weight off the injured side.
Your pelvis and trunk adjust.
The hip is stabilized so you can stay upright and keep moving.
Eventually the injury heals.
You stop limping.
You look like you are walking normally again.
This becomes an unnoticed compensation. Your hip is still hiked.
This compensation generates abnormal forces through the injury site and potentially throughout the body.
Compensations don’t disappear when the ankle stops hurting.
Even though the injury occurred at the ankle – or where the leg broke – the effects involve the whole body, including the calf musculature, knee, hip and back for starters. Eventually they may even affect the head, neck and shoulders.
Sprained Ankle with Hip Hiked
Adaptations
To move and function more comfortably, you adapt to the compensations your body is carrying. Most of these changes happen without thinking about them.
You shift your weight so most of your standing or sitting weight is over one hip or the other.
You may slightly rotate your trunk, or one shoulder may sit farther forward or back.
You change the way you walk. You may take shorter steps or turn one foot out.
These adaptations help you move and function more comfortably.
But healing the injured area and resolving the compensations created around it are not necessarily the same thing.
Those shifts do not happen in isolated pieces. To understand why, we have to look at fascia.
What Does Fascia Have to Do With It?
Fascia is the body’s continuous internal scaffolding.
It surrounds, supports and protects the organs, muscles, blood vessels, nerves and other structures throughout the body, helping hold everything in place and giving the body its organization.
This fascial web is continuous from head to toe.
The different structures of the body do not exist as isolated pieces. They are embedded within this interconnected web.
Scar tissue and adhesions from injuries, surgeries and trauma become part of this fascial system.
Scars contract and pull.
That is why something that happens in one area does not necessarily stay there.
When the fascial system compensates for an injury or trauma, those changes become part of the organization of the whole body.
Fascial tissue with muscle fibers. Courtesy of Ron Thompson
And the body carrying those compensations is the same body that experiences the next injury.
Your Body Has a History
A new injury does not happen to a brand-new body.
The body you have today carries the history of what has happened to it – previous injuries, surgeries, scars and compensations are already part of the body when something new happens.
Over time, injuries, surgeries and other traumas add to what the body is already carrying.
Strain Patterns
Treating the Tip of the Iceberg – Strain patterns from various traumas connect to cause pain far from new pains.
Strain Patterns Reflect Residue from Previous Injuries & Traumas
Compensations and scars create pulls through the fascial system. Over time, those pulls become part of larger strain patterns.
We can think of the body as a dynamic bridge.
When something changes in one part of the bridge, forces are redistributed through the structure so the bridge can keep standing.
The fascial system redistributes forces and creates support where it is needed so the body can keep functioning.
Those strain patterns become part of how the body is organized.
The body can carry and adjust around these patterns for a long time.
Until the Body Reaches a Threshold
The body is remarkably good at compensating.
It may do it for years.
Even decades.
Until it reaches a point where it cannot comfortably accommodate any more.
Then something happens.
We might think:
- “I slept wrong.”
- “I bent over to pick something up.”
- “I reached into the back seat.”
- “I went for a walk.”
- “I didn’t do anything. I just woke up hurting.”
The most recent event gets the blame because that is when the pain appeared.
But it may only be the last straw.
Where you hurt now may be connected to something that happened long ago.
That is why the newest pain may not be the whole problem.
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Treating the Tip of the Iceberg
Most treatment begins where you hurt.
That makes sense. Pain is what brought you in.
But if an older injury, scar or strain pattern is affecting the area that hurts today, treating only the painful area may leave part of the larger problem unaddressed.
And changing one area without addressing the strain pattern connected to it may place additional strain somewhere else.
Pigeon Toed Back Release from Un-Exercise Booklet
The painful area matters. But it may not be the whole problem.
That brings us back to the iceberg.
Working only with the tip does not necessarily change what is happening underneath.
When that happens, the answer is not always to push harder.
When Treatment Becomes More Trauma
Most of us have been taught:
No pain, no gain.
We have been taught that when the body does not respond the way we want, the answer is to push harder.
Stretch farther.
Push harder.
Strengthen more.
Work through the discomfort.
Make the joint move.
And we do the same thing to ourselves because we do not know another way.
A body that is already compensating for injury and trauma does not need to be forced harder.
Forcing through pain and resistance can become another trauma.
The body tightens.
It braces.
It protects itself.
It compensates again.
Treatment intended to help can become another demand imposed on a body that has already been through enough.
No Pain Is Great Gain
Stretching From the Inside Out™ begins somewhere different.
Low Back Acupressure Point for reducing back pain from Un-Exercise Booklet
Less is more.
We work to the point of resistance – not through it.
We use less force.
We change direction.
We give the body time to respond.
LISTEN.
INVITE.
RESPECT THE BODY AS IT IS.
We acknowledge that the body has been working to help us move and function as effectively and efficiently as possible.
The body is invited to change rather than forced to change.
That is one of the fundamental differences in SFTIO.
How SFTIO Works
Stretching From the Inside Out™ grew out of more than 15 years of clinical work with people in pain.
SFTIO works with the whole body, rather than spending all of our time working on the place that hurts.
The un-exercises use gentle positioning, small movements, changes in direction, rotation, breathing, awareness and time.
The movements are modified to work with the person doing them as they are.
You begin noticing:
- where movement feels comfortable
- where it becomes restricted
- differences between the two sides
- where you are using more effort than you realized
- what happens to your breathing
- how one area affects another
- what changes when you make a very small adjustment
You are not simply repeating an exercise because someone told you it is good for you.
You are learning how to work with your body.
Your body is the essential part of the conversation.
The goal is not an endless collection of exercises.
It is a collection of useful possibilities – and knowing when and how to use them.
Releasing tension along the side of the leg and body from Un-Exercise Booklet
What This Means for You
You begin learning how to help yourself without fighting your body in the process.
The work is directed toward:
- less pain and stiffness
- easier movement
- greater mobility and flexibility
- better balance
- greater confidence in movement
- more effective self-care
- better function in the things you want to do
SFTIO gives you a different way to work with a body that has a history.
Not by forcing it.
Not by treating it as separate pieces.
By learning to recognize what it is doing and giving it different possibilities.
From “No Pain, No Gain” to “No Pain Is Great Gain.”
Stretching From the Inside Out™
A different way to listen to, explore and work with your body.
Ready to Experience a Different Way of Working With Your Body?
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Want to Go Deeper?
There is much more behind the whole-body relationships that shaped SFTIO – fascia, acupuncture correspondences, scar tissue, whole-body communication and the clinical observations behind this work.
If you want to understand more:
EXPLORE THE BODY’S DEEPER CONNECTIONS
And if you’ve read enough and are ready to experience our Introductory Un-Exercise Class :
